Rohingya Vision, one of the most reliable sources of information about the Rohingya people & the genocide against them, reports:
– More than 7,500 people in Arakan state have been executed & the bodies of many were burned or hidden.
– 70% of Muslim villages have been destroyed by fire & demolition, their contents looted & lands seized.
– Hundreds of women, girls & minors have been raped & murdered.
– More than 500,000 people were forced to flee to Bangladesh to escape the army & Buddhist nationalist death squads working with the army.
– All possessions of jewelry, money & cattle were confiscated from fleeing refugees.
– More than 35,000 children are without their parents & without guardians.

(Photo from Rohingya Vision)

“Make no mistake: the braid-chopping incidents & rumours are designed mainly to develop a culture of lynching in Kashmir. Just think about whom this may benefit the most in the current state of the political conflict, & you will know who is most likely to have hatched the conspiracy.”

–Satyadeep Satya

https://www.facebook.com/elenarashid/videos/10214565695714979/

Video of me promoting McAllen Rohingya solidarity rally

(Just so there is no confusion, this is what Hindustan Times reported & Mir is ridiculing.)

There are several initiatives to get countries, cities & organizations to pull their humanitarian awards to Suu Kyi. She has a mountain of the damn things. In & of themselves, these honorifics don’t amount to much but for several years those phony human rights laudations drowned out the voices of the Rohingya people denouncing genocide against them. These initiatives aren’t some schadenfreude gloating thing, as know-nothings claim. They’re part of exposing the genocidal military junta which Suu Kyi sits in council with & which is hiding behind her elegant skirts. Right along with these initiatives to pull the human rights awards we need initiatives to demand our governments pull their investments, renew sanctions against Burma, provide asylum with full rights to Rohingya, & provide immediate emergency humanitarian aid to refugees.

Photo is Mohammed Rafique, a Rohingya refugee since 1991, who lived as “a virtual prisoner” in a Bangladeshi refugee camp until acquiring asylum in Ireland. He’s part of the campaign to get Dublin to pull their award from Suu Kyi.

(Photo by Tom Farrell/Dublin Inquirer via The Stateless, an Irish Rohingya solidarity group)

Onu Bala, a Hindu refugee in Bangladesh spoke about the masked vigilantes dressed in black who torch villages & murder unarmed people in Arakan state who Burmese officials claim are Rohingya death squads against Hindus. She said:

“I don’t know who they were; the only thing I could see were their eyes … It didn’t matter if we were Hindu or Muslim … they were burning down everything.”

Another Hindu refugee said Rohingya farmers & Hindu laborers lived side by side in harmony for years until the genocidal onslaught by the Burmese army & nationalist death squads that began August 25th.

Photo is Onu Bala with her three kids who all fled when the masked vigilantes invaded their village & began torching.

(Photo by Roger Arnold/UNHCR)

You gotta hand it to Bangladeshi prime minister Sheikh Hasina. She knows how to work a crowd. She’s another adept at public relations–almost as good as Aung San Suu Kyi & Ahmad Hassoun, the hangman mufti of Syria. So while she’s tugging at our heart strings & talking sweet nothings about going without meals to feed Rohingya refugees, Bangladeshi border guards are still aggressively turning back refugees fleeing for their lives. In one area, border guards are assaulting refugees as they disembark from boats, claiming they found drugs in the boats, & paying locals to smash the boats to smithereens with sledgehammers & machetes.

As if that isn’t pernicious enough, the governments of Burma & Bangladesh just announced the formation of a working group to develop repatriation plans for the 500,000 refugees who just fled military & nationalist death squads. If that fails, Bangladesh still hasn’t trashed that monstrous plan to deport Rohingya refugees to an uninhabitable island which is flooded out most of the year.

You can’t trust a government which has created dozens of new millionaires & billionaires off the backs of sweatshop workers & child labor. The political measure of Sheikh Hasina was taken a long time ago by her government’s do-nothing response to the countless fires at sweatshops & particularly the collapse of Rana Plaza in 2013 where workers who lost family or sustained disabling injuries have still not been compensated. It’s beyond dispute that 500,000 refugees in need of food, water, port-au-potties, emergency healthcare, social services would tax the resources of any government. But if Bangladesh is so damn poor, why did Sheikh Hasina offer military troops & assistance to Burma to defeat Rohingya “terrorists” in Arakan state? If she has the resources to deploy an army, she can provide food, shelter, & field hospitals or at least toilets so cholera does not become a health crisis. She has options which do not include deporting refugees back to a death trap or trying to prevent them from asylum. Her government can demand action from the UN & all other countries in providing emergency humanitarian aid. But she’s on the wrong side & no ally to the Rohingya refugees.

Standing with the Rohingya against genocide means not falling for lies & sweet talk in place of action.

Photo is a Bangladeshi border guard bullying a Rohingya child.

(Photo by Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters)

Five Israeli soldiers armed to the teeth ganging up on a Palestinian boy “armed” with a flag. Because he was a threat to civil order? No, just because they can.

Stand with the Palestinians. Honor & build the economic & cultural boycott of Israel. Buy nothing, nada, zip, zilch with a barcode beginning 729. Mind the kiosks at the mall & check every label since Israel sells a considerable number of products all over the world, including shoes, cosmetics & other beauty products, food stuffs

Since Twitter allied with the Indian government to censor Kashmiri activists, there is almost no news from Kashmir via Twitter. We can’t just start a new social media venue because it takes big resources but mostly because we don’t want to isolate ourselves from those we’re trying to reach & make advocates for justice. We have to figure this one out because getting out the truth & building international solidarity depends on that.

Eventually I did get that selfie video of myself done & it was a disaster. Its purpose was to promote the Rohingya solidarity rally tomorrow in McAllen, Texas so there could be no blunders. The video was so bad I was making plans to pull up stakes & move across country to avoid embarrassment when my wonderful friend Elena Ledesma Rashid phoned & asked how it was going. She has played a significant role in getting the rally pulled together. She offered late evening to meet me at the mosque to make the video to help me & because she wanted it done right to build the rally. She & her young daughter met me at 8:00 at night & got it done. I just want to thank her publicly for being a kind friend & a champion of the Rohingya. The last time I talked about her was when she & her husband went to Orlando after the shoot-up at the club to stand in solidarity with the victims. That’s the kind of person she is.