Can’t apologize for posting so much about the Rohingya struggle. I consider it a mandate to stand with them whilst they are under siege & to report on their struggle. It’s an elementary of solidarity.

Narendra Modi arrived in Burma today for a two-day visit. Why let a genocide deter him when he has several matters to discuss with the junta, including his plan to deport 40,000 Rohinga refugees from India. His primary concerns will be mutual security issues & the $484 million Kaladan multi-modal transport projects connecting Burma to India. One project will connect the Indian seaport of Kolkata with Sittwe seaport in Arakan state, Burma; another will link Sittwe seaport via river & road routes to Mizoram, a state in northeast India.

The connections between genocide & neoliberal scorched earth economics begin to emerge in greater clarity & ignominy.

Photo is Modi arriving in Burma today.

(Photo from PTI)

Media continues to report that the latest genocidal campaign against the Rohingya came after the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked police posts & an army base in Arakan state. That’s what the Burmese government claims. No one knows if such a group really exists, if it does how big it is, who arms them, if they do anything other than issue videos to YouTube, & how many agents provocateurs are involved. Their oldest video is only a few months old.

But it doesn’t matter because the Burmese military was preparing itself for this onslaught by deploying extra troops in Arakan & training & arming Buddhist nationalists as civilian death squads. The military junta initiated this genocidal campaign & would have done so whether ARSA existed or not. In fact, if ARSA didn’t exist, they would have to invent it.

The Rohingya people have a right to defend themselves by any means necessary. The jury remains out on ARSA as part of that. But to go along with media & the Burmese junta that they were provoked into genocide by ARSA is a detestable mockery of the Rohingya people.

Photo is Rohingya refugees near the Kutupalong refugee camp near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.

(Photo from CNN)

The UN is reporting that between 73,000 to nearly 90,000 Rohingya have fled Burma into Bangladesh since August 25th with thousands more expected. Another 30,000 Rohingya may be trapped in the mountains of Arakan without food, water, or medicine in an attempt to avoid slaughter by the military & armed civilian death squads.

Those who have crossed the border arrive with bullet wounds, broken bones, life-threatening injuries, respiratory diseases, infections, malnutrition, & are physically exhausted having traveled for days in flight for their lives. All of them are traumatized & terrorized by seeing entire villages torched, family members, friends, & neighbors raped & executed.

Photo is a Rohingya man carrying his mother as they cross into Bangladesh. Consider the enormity of their suffering. Stop the genocide of the Rohingya people. Full solidarity with their struggle for human, democratic, civil, & refugee rights.

(Photo from CNN)

Occupied East Jerusalem which the pro-Israel Guardian-UK identified as Jerusalem, Israel:

Police officers are here evicting a Palestinian family from their home to make way for Jewish tenants. Such evictions & dispossessions in occupied territory violates umpteen international laws & is the primary source of conflict between unarmed Palestinians & the occupying army.

Stand with Palestinians against colonialism by honoring & building the cultural & economic boycott of Israel. Buy nothing with barcode beginning 729.

(Photo by Mahmoud Illean/AP)

Believe it or not, many Assad supporters are openly supporting the Burmese government in its genocide against the Rohingya. In an article titled “The Rohingya Of Myanmar: Pawns In An Anglo-Chinese Proxy War Fought By Saudi Jihadists” the Assadist blog Moon of Alabama claims that ethnic conflict in Arakan “morphed” into a jihadist guerrilla war now financed & led from Saudi Arabia. What is at issue, according to the article, is oil & natural gas pipelines from Burma’s offshore fields off the coast of Arakan state to China. It’s a remarkable non sequitur to go from oil pipelines to jihadi guerrillas but such is the intellectual bankruptcy of Assadism.

The Shwe pipeline is a joint project between China & the Burmese military which controls the economy & is part of Burma’s neoliberal economics program. China has billions invested in joint pipeline & mining projects with the Burmese junta, as do consortiums of Indian & South Korean corporations invested in the Shwe fields. These have entailed land grabs from farmers, environmental & cultural ruin, militarization of the states where the projects are & where the pipelines pass through, & human rights abuses including forced relocation of villagers, forced labor, torture, rape, extrajudicial killings. It sounds very much like neoliberal projects in Latin American which indigenous tribes have been battling, most notably in Brazil & Peru & now in Venezuela.

There have been many protests & popular movements against the projects. The extreme violence & repression of the military against protesters is because analysts expect the Shwe oil fields to become the government’s largest single source of foreign income. This does not mean that the genocide of the Rohingya is solely motivated by neoliberal scorched earth policies but of course it is a powerful factor in the accelerated pace of the genocide. There is no association between the Rohingya & Saudi Arabian jihadis; there is no proxy war, just as there isn’t one in Syria.

Men & women of good will stand with the Rohingya people in their struggle for full human, democratic, civil, & refugee rights. And they stand with the Syrian revolution against Assad’s dictatorship.

(Photo of fleeing Rohingya from Remember Qana on Twitter)

Moon of Alabama article in all its rancid ignominy: http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/09/the-rohingya-of-myanmar-pawns-in-an-anglo-chinese-proxy-war-fought-by-saudi-jihadists.html#more

We have to face the facts about the role of Buddhist nationalists in the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. Most of us don’t know the denominations within Buddhism but it doesn’t really matter because the conflict is not rooted in religious differences so much as the manipulations of ethnic groups under British colonialism & the failure of Burma to address self-determination for its many ethnic groups when it gained independence. It remains a prison house of nations with Burmese Buddhists running roughshod in the manner of all supremacists.

The treacherous role of Buddhists in Arakan state is not an indictment of all of Buddhism. Buddhists have always played a role in the antiwar movement going back to the Vietnam War & of course within Vietnam itself. What’s going on in Arakan state is an aberration, not the norm among Buddhists.

Israel, India, & China don’t make any bones about selling arms to Burma. They’re in no position to act squeamish or go all high & mighty over genocide when all three countries are engaged in the same unspeakable crimes. What rankles is that the European Union & US try to do the righteous strut for refusing to sell arms to Burma. Righteous my ass. They have billions & billions of dollars invested in Burma’s neoliberal economic program & if they want can bring that genocide to a halt by crippling the economy. But they don’t want because scorched earth policies are the very nature of neoliberalism, the barbaric phase of capitalism. Burma is getting away with genocide because other nations don’t have an issue with it whether they’re selling them arms or not. Which doesn’t mean for one moment that Israel, India, & China aren’t criminally contemptible for doing so.

In 2009, a UN guy called the Rohingya “probably the most friendless people in the world” & today the Washington Post said they are “quite simply one of the most helpless & forsaken peoples of the world.” Enough with the pity-mongering. Rohingya activists, like Kashmiri & Palestinian activists, are making brilliant use of social media & the internet to educate about their struggle. They are still isolated & in grave danger but they are now being heard & are no longer friendless or forsaken. If we work with them & commit to them, together we can build a movement with rallies, speak-outs, teach-ins to put powerful public pressure on the Burmese government. For the first time since they became subject to genocide, the Rohingya finally have thousands of supporters & allies. They no longer stand alone. This is not the final stage of genocide but the first stage of international solidarity.

Photo is Rohingya refugees disembarking in Bangladesh.

(Photo by Bernat Armangue/AP)

Erdogan is receiving undue praise as a champion of the Rohingya people. He’s a shameless grandstander because outside of blowing smoke for media attention he has done nothing for them. In May 2015, when an estimated 25,000 Rohingya were fleeing Burma in rickety boats, they became stranded in the Andaman Sea without food or water because Thailand refused them landing & Indonesia & Malaysia allowed only a few thousand to land. Erdogan talked about sending Turkish navy ships to rescue the thousands left adrift but never gave the order. That not a single country lifted a finger to rescue them is a monstrous crime for which there needs to be an accounting someday. For Erdogan to pretend he’s above such criminality makes him not just a grandstander but a dirtball. He’s no more an advocate of human rights for the Rohingya than he is for Turks.

The BBC is concerned that fake photos claiming to be scenes of genocide in Arakan state will “enflame tension” between Buddhists & Rohingya Muslims in what the BBC considers communal violence. The BBC should be more concerned that the Burmese government has shut down Arakan tighter than a drum so that journalists & human rights monitors are unable to enter the state to document genocide.

Fake photos are a pain in the ass but the truth is nobody knows which are fake & which are real. The BBC has no forensic squad checking that stuff out. Misreporting what’s going on in Arakan as communal violence rather than genocide is a far more consequential issue than whether the photo is from this carnage or another.