Samina Faiz & I have been researching land grabs & development projects in Arakan state, Myanmar focusing on how that relates to the genocide against Rohingya. The country under the military dictatorship has a violent history with many of the 135 non-Burman ethnic groups & with non-Rohingya Muslims but are targeting Rohingya for ethnic cleansing. We’re trying to understand all that.

Both of us had the same reaction after several hours of reading this stuff: the history is very dark. We were both struck that the military which denies them citizenship & won’t call them Rohingya uses them for forced labor, typically one day a week of heavy work on military or government projects & a night of sentry duty.

Another article reminded me of something I had forgotten from the 2012 military offensive against Rohingya. The Thai junta would take flimsy boats of fleeing Rohingya back out to sea & abandon them. In 2015, they would not allow thousands in drifting boats to even land. It’s as horrific to read about now as it was then.

Those dark forces have to be answered with battalions of international solidarity. Aung San Suu Kyi & the military have to be exposed & they have to go. Along with the Thai junta.

Our fullest solidarity with the Rohingya.

One would think after writing about the Rohingya since 2012 the confusion over whether to call it Burma or Myanmar would have piqued some curiosity from me. Slow on the uptake, it took till today before I decided to clarify the matter.

It turns out the military junta that took over in 1962 & 1988 coup d’etats changed it to Myanmar from Burma in 1989. Human rights & democracy activists & groups don’t accept the legitimacy of an unelected regime, including in making a name change. But it’s reported they don’t make the name change a central issue in their campaigns.

Formally the junta transitioned to a civil government in 2011 but that’s baloney. They rule with the same iron-fist now behind the human rights face of Aung San Suu Kyi.

Khurram Parvez resumed his work as program coordinator of the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) after his release from prison on November 30th.

This is an article describing & recognizing him for his human rights work: http://withkashmir.com/…/khurram-parvez-tireless-human-rig…/

This is the link to the JKCCS website where you can pull down the Reports menu to read often gruesome, but extremely important documentation of human rights crimes under the military occupation.

http://www.jkccs.net/

Rohingya Blogger is a tough-minded, no-nonsense analyst always worth reading. He/she can be followed on Twitter, FB, or at the website.
Twitter:https://twitter.com/rohingyablogger
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RBNewsEnglish/?fref=ts
Website: http://www.rohingyablogger.com/

Facebook tells me I’ve been active since March 2009. I’ve piled up more enemies in those 8 years than in the entire rest of my life. I didn’t like a one of them. But then again I’ve met some of the best & best looking people in the world. 

The Rohingya Alan Kurdi: 16-month-old Mohammed Shohayet.
The little boy drowned along with his mother, uncle, & 3-year-old brother trying to escape to asylum in Bangladesh from genocide in Myanmar. His father Zafor Alam told CNN: “When I see the picture, I feel like I would rather die. There is no point in me living in this world.”

Zafor Alam’s narration of their harrowing run from village to village to escape the Myanmar military is overwhelming & must be used to actively support & build Rohingya solidarity around the world. It can be read in this link:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/03/asia/myanmar-alan-kurdi/

End the genocide in Myanmar. Full civil & human rights for Rohingya. Full refugee rights for those forced to flee for their lives.

You ought not post things on Facebook that you don’t want public. Word gets around those blocks. Three friends have told me about a campaign to get me unfriended & blocked as a fake antiwar activist & possibly something much more sinister like a Mossad, NATO, or Al-Qaeda agent.

Mata Hari doesn’t fit me. They can stick the imputation where the sun don’t shine. The charge is penny-ante compared to claiming civilians in Syria are head-chopping terrorists & need to be taken out by Syrian & Russian bombers.

Most of those denouncing me were bitter I’d bounced them for anti-Semitic crap, usually of the “Rothschild banksters” kind. Tough noogies on that one. I was glad to see my success rate of eliminating haters was so high.

There was one very disturbing comment they showed me by a woman I don’t know. She said I was an activist for the Rohingya who are “militarized with the same Wahhabi/Salafi brand of Sunni Islam” practiced by the Al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria & that I am “crying genocide” about people with a lot of Al-Qaeda affiliates fighting for regime change. Not a single person objected to that comment.

The Muslim-hating & its association with hating on Jews, the fetish about regime change that allows people who think they’re avant-garde to support Duterte death squads, genocide in Myanmar, & bombing civilians in Syria is of a piece & not incidental to Assadism.

These are civilians fleeing the fight between Iraqi & US-led forces against ISIS fighters in Mosul, Iraq. Imagine your child has to carry a white flag so neither of you get shot fleeing.

No to US wars. Arm the civilians of Mosul so they can defend themselves.

(Photo by Ammar Awad/Reuters)

If there’s one thing made crystal clear in Syria, Iraq, & Yemen by all the military forces involved, it is that war is conducted against civilians to bring them to their knees. They are not just displaced victims but the targets. The news blackouts on wars elsewhere, like Afghanistan & Somalia, make that harder to understand.

When they speak of proxy wars as US strategy, they must be asked “what is proxy about tens of thousands of US airstrikes in several countries over years”? When they speak of Russian airstrikes over cities as defensive weapons against terrorists, how is that not Orwellian double-speak?

This man & elderly woman are fleeing bombing in Mosul, Iraq last Tuesday. Since October, when the US-led offensive began by 109,000 ground forces & aerial bombardment against 5,000 ISIS fighters in Mosul, nearly 126,000 Iraqis have fled. According to the UN refugee agency at least 2,300 are now fleeing daily & they expect 1.5 million will be displaced in a very short period of time.

The only principled antiwar demands are the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all foreign military forces & operations: no military intervention of any kind by any country; stop the bombing.

(Photo byThaier Al-Sudani/Reuters)

An important article by Leila Al-Shami, co-author of “Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution & War” about Assad’s fascist supporters:

https://tahriricn.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/syria-who-are-assads-fascist-supporters/