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A protest from a Rakhine historian against a press release on “Rohingya” |
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Sunday, 29 March 2009 |
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By Habib Siddiqui
Khin Maung Saw's thesis on trying to de-legitimatize the Rohingya history in Arakan is not new. For the last three years, as an obsessed, xenophobic Rakhine, much given to pen-pushing, and spread of hateful messages, he is known for trying his best to re-write history that would obliterate Rohingya's historicity in today's Arakan. His pseudo-history has been already refuted by others.
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Ben Rogers on Burma's problems and how to help |
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Tuesday, 16 December 2008 |
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CSW visits Bangladesh-Burma border, |
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Tuesday, 30 September 2008 |
Interviews Rohingya refugees, saffron revolution monks and SPDC defectors. 09/09/2008 Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) returned this week from a fact-finding visit to the Bangladesh-Burma border and is now calling on the international community to intensify pressure on Burma’s military regime.
During the five-day visit, CSW gained access to two camps for unregistered Rohingya refugees on the Bangladesh-Burma border in which people were living in dire conditions where malnutrition and disease were evident.
CSW received first-hand accounts of the oppression of Muslim Rohingya people in Burma, including the denial of full citizenship rights, severe restrictions on freedom of movement, marriage and religion, forced labour, rape, land confiscation, arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings and extortion on a daily basis. One Rohingya spokesman told CSW: “The regime is trying to take away our identity. We will not be there in the very near future. Our prime concern is that we must not be eliminated …We are a people on the brink of extinction.”
Three defectors from the SPDC’s border security force, the ‘Na Sa Ka’, confirmed reports of systematic persecution of the Rohingya. One defector told CSW: “Throughout my life in the Na Sa Ka, I was used to this system of arresting Muslims, asking for money, torturing them, every day. We only arrested Muslims, not Rakhines.”
CSW also interviewed Buddhist monks who participated in the ‘Saffron Revolution’ protests in September last year, and received reports of blatant vote rigging in Arakan State during the referendum on a new constitution held on 10 May this year.
Mervyn Thomas, CSW’s Chief Executive, said: “The evidence obtained during our visit to the Bangladesh-Burma border is entirely consistent with the evidence we have gathered over many years from other parts of Burma. The genocidal and illegal military regime is committing every possible human rights violation with impunity, including gross violations of religious freedom affecting Christians, Muslims and Buddhists, and has persistently ignored the will of the Burmese people and the international community for too long. It is time that the United Nations set out specific benchmarks for progress, such as the release of political prisoners and an end to the crimes against humanity perpetrated throughout the country. We also believe a case against Burma’s Generals should be referred to the International Criminal Court.” Notes to Editors: For the full report on CSW’s Bangladesh visit please click here. For CSW’s recent press releases and more information on Burma please click here. |
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Xenophobia: a brief analysis By Dr. Habib Siddiqui |
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Wednesday, 04 June 2008 |
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By Dr. Habib Siddiqui
Dissident Voice
8/12/07 The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Xenophobia as - fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign. As can be seen, for xenophobia there are two main objects of the phobia (fear). The first is a population group present within a society, which is not considered part of that society. Often they are recent immigrants, but xenophobia may be directed against a group which has been present for centuries. This form of xenophobia can draw out or facilitate hostile and violent reactions, such as mass expulsion of immigrants, or in the worst case, genocide. The second form of xenophobia is primarily cultural, and the objects of the phobia are cultural elements which are considered alien or foreign. |
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Xenophobic Burmese Literary Works – a Problem of Democratic Development in Burma |
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Wednesday, 04 June 2008 |
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‘One blood, one voice, one command’. You cannot build unity with such a slogan especially when 40% of your population is different.-Harn Yawnghwe Director of the Brussels-based Euro-Burma Office. This excerpt is from Abid Bahar’s book Burma’s Missing Dots-the Emerging Face of Genocide, Ch 2 For the past half a century, the uninterrupted military rule in Burma, characterized by xenophobia and oppression against minorities’ caused the eclipse of much of Burma’s people’s history. Minorities culturally and racially different from the dominating Burmans have been uprooted from their localities under the pretext of being “Kula,” ”Non natives,” or even outright "foreigners." Nowhere is it as serious as in the province of Arakan. Arakan's historic location between South Asia and South-East Asia makes it a “frontier culture” of two major ethnic groups, the Rakhines and the Rohingyas. Here the problem persists between these two major ethnic groups. A survey of the mainstream Burmese literature shows common features of hate and xenophobia. Some of these works are so well-crafted that they could mislead casual readers of Arakan as seemingly academic works. In this chapter, the report of the survey is presented and the research concludes that the growing chauvinistic literary works have the potential to breed intolerance and aggression in society – factors that could contribute to producing more refugees to its neighboring states. The survey also notes that these beliefs and attitudes among the xenophobic intelligentsia could also be the antecedents to the problems facing democratic development in Burma. |
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ROHINGYA LIBRARY