Whenever a Muslim is involved in a crime against humanity, regardless if she or he is religious or not, the mainstream media and many of the people who rely on it for an objective source of news, straight away demonize all Muslims as being collectively guilty of the crime. Calls for a public apology on behalf of the entire Muslim community are issued, along with declarations that all Muslims should be killed, deported, surveyed, or otherwise contained until they “prove” their loyalty – which can never be done, because the bar is intentionally set higher and higher whenever a Muslim does manage to fulfill all of their ridiculous criteria. But what about “huggable” Buddhism? The true “Religion of Peace”?

While Islam is seen through blood colored glasses in the West, Buddhism receives the rose colored platinum treatment. When barely covered news reports of Buddhist on Muslim violence in Myanmar began to surface, the few people who paid attention were absolutely shocked. Buddhists killing Muslims? “What did the Muslims do to them first?”, I am sure many people asked silently. This is how propaganda and stereotypes work. The mere thought of a Buddhist violently attacking a person of another faith simply makes no sense. Whereas the thought of a Muslim violently attacking a person of another faith makes perfect sense. Danios wrote an article a few months ago about the history of “Buddhist violence.” The intention of the article was not to claim that Buddhism is “inherently violent”, but simply to point out that every religion, even “huggable” Buddhism, can be used to justify religiously inspired violence.

Cue Wirathu, the “Burmese Bin Laden.”

“Burmese Bin Laden” Creating Division in Myanmar

Every religion has extremists. Buddhism isn’t an exception, as a 45-year-old Burmese Monk dubbed as the “Buddhist Bin Laden” is flaming social tensions between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar by advocating for violence against Rohingyas. In doing so, Wirathu is invoking the call for a Burmese Buddhist national identity while gaining popularity in the country to help his own rise as a significant influence in Myanmar’s politics.

Wirathu is a 45-year-old Buddhist monk who has used social media channels to convey his hate-filled messages. The West’s conventional image of Buddhist followers is one of a religion of peace, yet many are shocked that in a region that has often been called one of the most peaceful in the world, there is an emergence of such hate induced actions caused by his speech.

Wirathu was born near Mandalay, and in 2001, created a national campaign to boycott Muslim businesses in 2001. He was soon jailed 25 years for his actions. He was released in 2010 through a general amnesty.

Wirathu has been on the stump since his release, and has been associated with violence in Rakhine and in Mandalay. In Rakhine, more than 200 people were killed and 100,000 in 2012. His message of hate and violence against Muslims also led to recent violence in Meiktila, where a dispute at a gold shop led to 40 deaths, and the destruction of a Muslim community in the city.

Muslims comprise of 5% Myanmar’s 60 million people. Wirathu’s rants and tirades against Muslims in Myanmar have also culminated in the nationalist “969” campaign using the number 969 to demarcate homes so that they can identify themselves as clearly Buddhists and create remnants of a state divided not by sectionalism, but rather through religion. This has led to hate-filled speeches where he has described Muslims as both “cruel and savage” and has attacked many Muslim practices from the killing of cattle to convincing many Buddhists in Myanmar that the population boom among Muslim communities in these countries will lead to a takeover of the country.

Read the rest here: http://www.policymic.com/articles/37001/burmese-bin-laden-creating-division-in-myanmar

These titles bear an uncanny resemblance to the work and anxieties of Islamophobes in the West.

Sex, Women and Racism in Myanmar: How Irrational They are

Htoo December

April 11, 2013

Recently, a friend forwarded me a link to a web blog. The link points to a 400-page document, titled “Islam Virus”, which is a collection of misinformation about Islam – how cruel, inhumane and scary Muslims are. The owner of the blog mentions that everyone must read the document because what is happening in Myanmar today is very dangerous and scary. That is, Islam is threatening the existence of Myanmar. Pointing to distorted information about gross cruelty, the document urges the people of Myanmar to protect Myanmar race and Buddhism by opposing Islam and Muslims.

On the left column of the blog site, there are icons (with links) to two books. One book is about the colonial-time conflict between Muslims and Buddhists, and the other is a well-known anti-Muslim book titled “fearful of the extinction of Burmese and Buddhism”.

On the top of the column was a feature section, labeled National Traitors, under which people accused of supporting ethnic Rohingyas are listed. They include Dr. Maung Zarni, Harn Yawnghwe of Euro-Burma Office, Aung Zaw of The Irrawaddy magazine, Than Win Htut of Democratic Voice of Burma, and Burmese section directors of the Voice of America and BBC. There are anti-Rohingya posts here and there throughout the site.

What I want to say only starts here. Those involved in anti-Muslim campaigns consistently claim that Kalars (derogatory term for Muslims and South Asians) are taking over Buddhist women and converting them to Islam. They also accuse Muslims to be spoiling Burmese woman to destroy or swallow Burmese culture.

Only when I browse through the internet blog, I realize how irrational people are.

First, the blog urging people to protect Burmese culture and women turns out to a very popular Myanmar porn web blog.

Second, and more importantly, it is an abusive and disrespectful blog for women. Why? Because it features nude photos of Burmese women and leaked videos of Burmese couples. The blog also features photos and videos of Burmese women/couples shared by blog visitors.Of course, the attention is on ‘women’, especially their ‘passivity’ and ‘suffering’ during sexual intercourse.

They found the materials somewhere on the internet, or filmed by themselves. Some women, possibly sex workers, allowed the men to film on the basis that the films and photos won’t be published on the internet. Regardless of the promise, these nude photos and videos made their ways to the blog, which is a hard core pornographic blog accessible to everyone for free. I will not enclose the blog address here to avoid further publicizing of it and its contents, especially the women whose privacy the blog has abused.

As soon as I realized the type of the blog, I immediately saw the contradiction: calling for protecting Burmese women from ‘kalar’ on the one hand, and abusing women by i) publicizing pirated photos and videos, and ii) allowing blog visitors to write sexually abusive comments on the other. These comments can be read as verbal rapes. Then, I asked to myself, how possibly can these men, shamelessly writing sexually abusive comments, protect the nation and the women?

They said they want to protect the women in order to protect the nation, but they are verbally raping the women whose photos and videos were pirated. I am amazed how self-proclaimed nationalists claiming to protect Burmese women (by means of controlling their sexuality and sex-related life) can easily abuse these women. They do not seem to think that distributing the women’s nude images for the consumption of the men they do not have any inter-personal relations is a plain abuse.

If they stay true to what they say about protecting the nation, they should have opposed to the blog for the sake of the women’s privacy and dignity. Far from it, they are the ones disgracing the women; they are the one fulfilling their sexual fantasies on a free porn website. How cheap they are!

This is an important indication that nationalists uttering to protect the nation is not a safe refuge for women. These nationalists are in fact the enemies of women. They abuse women by dictating personal decision over relationship and reproduction. They abuse women by exploiting sexuality and body.

To continue with my main point, the blog owner posted the 400-page document on August 23, 2012. I thought he changed his attitude. I thought he realized he needed to start protecting women and stop abusing their private matters. But, the next day, he posted another nude photos of a Burmese lady. What is even more surprising is, he highlighted the logo of a Burmese channel “Sky net” on the TV in the background to confirm that she is truly a Burmese.

There are many other photos and videos with exact names and locations such as cities and countries where the videos were taken. Some materials were taken secretly and make available on the internet.

The blog also links to another porn website. I am not too sure if that belongs to the same person. On the second website, the most popular post, as I visited in August 2012, was a nude photo of a Burmese medical doctor in Thailand.

I expected that the woman’s privacy be protected – or at least respected – by Burmese nationalists who have been upset and/or worried about Kalars taking advantage of Burmese women’s sexuality. To my amazement, supposedly the nation-loving and culture-loving blog owner only publicized the photos of the doctor. The visitors left more than a hundred comments that said they wanted to have intimate relations with her (note: of course, their languages were sexually explicit, not even some decent comments about woman’s body or the sort, but abusive hard core comments). There is no single comment that said the woman’s privacy should be respected. The point I want to make is, there is no such thing as respect for the woman. It was a plain abuse and disrespect.

Read the rest…

Deadly clashes in Burma between Buddhists and Muslims

(Guardian)

Burma‘s president has declared a state of emergency after two days of sectarian violence in a central town that has killed at least 20 people.

The the town of Meikhtila remains tense and dangerous and residents are too scared to walk the streets, said Win Htein, a politician from the opposition National League for Democracy.

Fires set to Muslim homes continued to burn as angry Buddhist residents and monks prevented authorities from putting out the blazes, he said.

At least five mosques were set on fire during the violence that started on Wednesday, reportedly triggered by an argument between a Muslim gold shop owner and his Buddhist customers.

A Buddhist monk was among the first killed, inflaming tensions that led a Buddhist mob to rampage through a Muslim neighbourhood.

Meikhtila is about 340 miles (550km) north of the main city of Rangoon with a population of about 100,000 people, of whom about a third are Muslims, according to Win.

He said that before this week’s violence the community had 17 mosques.

It was difficult to determine the extent of destruction in the town because residents were too afraid to walk the streets and were sheltering in monasteries or other locations away from the violence.

“We don’t feel safe and we have now moved inside a monastery,” said Sein Shwe, a shop owner. “The situation is unpredictable and dangerous.”

The UN’s Special Rapporteur for Human rights in Myanmar, Tomas Ojea Quintana, visited this camp for displaced Rohingyas in Myebon in Rakhine State. (PHOTO: UNIC)

As a recent TIME article by Jason Motlagh highlights, more and more stateless Rohingya are fleeing persecution in Burma through perilous boat journeys,

A large chunk of Abdul Rahman’s home is gone, and so is his oldest son, Shakur. The ethnic Rohingya farmer tore down nearly half his home for scrap needed to secure his son’s passage on a boat bound for Malaysia. In the wake of bloody sectarian violence last year that left hundreds dead and forced tens of thousands of minority Muslim Rohingya into camps outside the coastal city of Sittwe, Rahman, 52, insists his people are being “strangled” by a Burmese government that does not want them. While foreign donors have supplied basic food rations, checkpoints manned by armed guards prevent the displaced from returning to the paddies and markets their livelihoods depend on. “Even animals can move more freely,” says Rahman.

These days, more and more Rohingya are betting what little they still have on a dangerous journey at sea. Community leaders and boatmen involved in the exodus say the volume of passengers is unprecedented because of enduring tensions and a total lack of mobility inside Burma, also known as Myanmar, where the Rohingya have faced decades of discrimination and neglect. The growing sense of despair is borne out by the roughly 1,800 refugees who washed up in Thailand in January. And they keep arriving, on overloaded boats without navigational equipment, despite a voyage that can take up to two weeks. If they’re lucky: of the 13,000 mostly Rohingya Muslims who fled Myanmar and Bangladesh last year, the U.N. says at least 485 were known to have drowned.

It is clear that many are fleeing not only violence and persecution but also prison-like conditions in “camps” that the Myanmar government has set up for internally displaced Rohingya,

Speaking at a press conference at Yangon International Airport before leaving the country on Saturday, Quintana said nearly 120,000 people are now living in camps in Rakhine State with a lack of adequate healthcare, and noted that conditions were worse in camps sheltering Rohingyas and other Muslims.

The UN official said harassment of medical staff by Buddhist extremists in Rakhine State was one of the reasons behind the poor healthcare.

The government needs to address the problem of freedom of movement in the camps, Quintana stated, adding that one of the camps “felt more like a prison than a camp.”

Disturbing reports also allege that the extent of violence against Rohingya includes torture and sexual exploitation of minors,

New data obtained by DVB shows that torture and violence, including the sexual exploitation of minors, is widespread throughout prisons in Burma’s northern Arakan state – also known as Rakhine – where at least 966 Rohingya have been detained since November last year. At least 10 women and 72 children, aged between 10 and 15 years old, are understood to be among the prisoners. Sixty-two deaths were recorded in Buthidaung jail alone, where prisoners also reported being forced to shower naked in public and were routinely subjected to torture and sexual humiliation.

The gruesome situation in Myanmar is not getting better. An AlJazeera documentary goes in-depth into the history of the persecution of the Rohingya, as well as the events that spurred this years terrible violence.

“Professor William Schabas, the former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, says: “When you see measures preventing births, trying to deny the identity of the people, hoping to see that they really are eventually, that they no longer exist; denying their history, denying the legitimacy of their right to live where they live, these are all warning signs that mean it’s not frivolous to envisage the use of the term genocide.” (via. Frank)

Heart wrenching and extremely disturbing. Witnesses tell of organized killings of Muslims in Myanmar. (h/t: Islam West):

By Jason Szep and Andrew R.C. Marshall (Reuters) -

On a hot Sunday night in a remote Myanmar village, Tun Naing punched his wife and unleashed hell.

She wanted rice for their three children. He said they couldn’t afford it. Apartheid-like restrictions had prevented Muslims like Tun Naing from working for Buddhists here in Rakhine State along Myanmar’s western border, costing the 38-year-old metalworker his job.

The couple screamed at each other. Tun Naing threw another punch. Neighbors joined in the row.

The commotion stirred up ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in the next village, who began shouting anti-Muslim slurs. Relations between the two communities were already so tense that six soldiers were stationed nearby. Tun Naing’s village was soon besieged by hundreds of Rakhines. And Myanmar was plunged into a week of sectarian violence that by official count claimed 89 lives, its worst in decades.

The unrest exposes the dark side of Myanmar’s historic opening: an unleashing of ethnic hatred that was suppressed during 49 years of military rule.

It is a crucial test for an 18-month-old reformist government in one of Asia’s most ethnically diverse countries. Jailed dissidents have been released, a free election held and censorship lifted in a democratic transition so seamless that U.S. President Barack Obama is scheduled to make a congratulatory visit on November 19.

State media have largely absolved authorities of any role in the October unrest, depicting it mostly as spontaneous eruptions of violence that often ended with Muslims burning their own homes.

But a Reuters investigation paints a more troubling picture: The wave of attacks was organized, central-government military sources told Reuters. They were led by Rakhine nationalists tied to a powerful political party in the state, incited by Buddhist monks, and, some witnesses said, abetted at times by local security forces.

A leader in the regional party, the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, denied it had a role in organizing the assaults but conceded the possible involvement of grass-roots supporters. “When the mob rises with very hot ethnic nationalism, it is very difficult to stop them,” Oo Hla Saw told Reuters in an interview.

Two townships – Pauktaw and Kyaukphyu – saw the near-total expulsion of long-established Muslim populations, in what could amount to ethnic cleansing. One village saw a massacre of dozens of Muslims, among them 21 women.

Interviews with government officials, military and police, political leaders and dozens of Buddhists and Muslims across a vast conflict zone suggest Myanmar is entering a more violent phase of persecution of its 800,000 mostly stateless Rohingya, a Muslim minority in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country.

CALLED “BENGALIS”

Rohingya have lived for generations in Rakhine State, where postcard-perfect valleys sweep down to a mangrove-fringed coastline. But Rakhines and other Burmese view them as illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh who deserve neither rights nor sympathy. Rakhines reject the term “Rohingya” as a modern invention, referring to them instead as “Bengali” or “kalar” – a pejorative Burmese word for Muslims or people of South Asian descent.

October’s attacks marked an acceleration of violence against the Rohingya. An earlier wave of unrest in June killed at least 80 people. Afterwards, the Rakhine State government imposed a policy of segregating Muslim communities from Buddhists across an area roughly the size of Switzerland.

More than 97 percent of the 36,394 people who have fled the latest violence are Muslims, according to official statistics. Many now live in camps, joining 75,000 mostly Rohingya displaced in June. Others have set sail for Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia on rickety boats, two of which have reportedly capsized, with as many as 150 people believed drowned.

There is no evidence to suggest the Buddhist-dominated national government endorsed the violence. But it appears to have anticipated trouble, stationing troops between Muslim and Buddhist villages a month ago, following rumors of attacks.

“This is racism,” said Shwe Hle Maung, 43, chief of Paik Thay, where impoverished Muslim families cram into thatched homes without electricity. “The government can resolve this if it wants to in five minutes. But they are doing nothing.”

The Rakhine violence is also a test for Nobel Peace Prize-winner Aung San Suu Kyi, now opposition leader in parliament, whose studied neutrality has failed to defuse tensions and risks undermining her image as a unifying moral force. Suu Kyi, a devout Buddhist, says she refuses to take sides.

At stake is the stability of one of Myanmar’s most commercially strategic regions and the gold-rush of foreign investment that has come with an easing of Western economic sanctions. The United States and the European Union have suspended, not lifted, sanctions, and have made resolving ethnic conflicts a precondition for further rewards.

In Rakhine State, however, the conflict has spread, most recently to areas where Muslims have long lived peacefully with Buddhists, according to a reconstruction of the violence from October 21 through October 25.

In Paik Thay, the Buddhist Rakhine mobs hurled Molotov cocktails at wooden huts, while Tun Naing and his neighbors fled. Muhammad Amin, 62, said he was beaten with a metal pipe until his skull cracked. The initial violence ended after soldiers fired their guns into the air and police arrested a Rakhine.

The bloodshed was only beginning.

“WE HAD NO PROBLEMS BEFORE”

The next morning, Monday, October 22, hundreds of Rakhine men gathered on the southern outskirts of Mrauk-U, an ancient capital studded with Buddhist temples about 15 miles north of Paik Thay. Then they marched to Tha Yet Oak, a Muslim fishing village of about 1,100 people, and set alight its flimsy bamboo homes.

The Muslim villagers fled by boat to nearby Pa Rein village. The Rakhine mob followed, swelling to nearly 1,000, according to Kyin Sein Aung, 66, a Rakhine farmer from a neighboring Buddhist village.

He didn’t recognize the mob; he described them as “outsiders” and said he suspected they came from Mrauk-U. Hundreds now poured across a stream separating the villages. Others came by boat. By noon, there were about 4,000 Rakhines, according to both Buddhist and Muslim villagers.

Suu Kyi in parliament

We have been reporting on the violence being perpetrated against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, as well as the long history of persecution the minority group has faced in their land of origin since the recent conflagration in June.

In a blow to “moral leadership,” famed democracy activist Suu Kyi has essentially thrown the Rohingya under the bus. This comes at a time when reports are showing that the “crises is deepening” with many Rohingya now attempting even more perilous boat voyages to flee to safety in Bangladesh and Thailand, only to be turned away.

Suu Kyi makes a false equivalency between the perpetrators and the victims, as though the Rohingya are too be blamed for the violence and statelessness wrought upon them.

Shame on you Suu Kyi.

Suu Kyi ‘says she cannot back Myanmar’s Rohingya

AP

YANGON — Aung San Suu Kyi has declined to speak out on behalf of Rohingya Muslims and insisted she will not use “moral leadership” to back either side in deadly communal unrest in west Myanmar, reports said.

The Nobel laureate, who has caused disappointment among international supporters for her muted response to violence that has swept Rakhine state, said both Buddhist and Muslim communities were “displeased” that she had not taken their side.

More than 100,000 people have been displaced since June in two major outbreaks of violence in the state, where renewed clashes last month uprooted about 30,000 people.

Dozens have been killed on both sides and thousands of homes torched.

“I am urging tolerance but I do not think one should use one’s moral leadership, if you want to call it that, to promote a particular cause without really looking at the sources of the problems,” Suu Kyi told the BBC on Saturday.

Speaking in the capital Naypyidaw after talks with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, who has said the EU is “deeply concerned” about the violence and its consequences for Myanmar’s reforms, Suu Kyi said she could not speak out in favour of the stateless Rohingya.

“I know that people want me to take one side or the other, so both sides are displeased because I will not take a stand with them,” she said.

The democracy champion, who is now a member of parliament after dramatic changes overseen by a quasi-civilian regime that took power last year, said the rule of law should be established as a first step before looking into other problems.

“Because if people are killing one another and setting fire to one another’s houses, how are we going to come to any kind of reasonable settlement?” she said.

Myanmar’s 800,000 Rohingya are seen by the government and many in the country as illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh. They face severe discrimination that activists say has led to a deepening alienation.

The Rohingya, who make up the vast majority of those displaced in the fighting, are described by the UN as among the world’s most persecuted minorities.

Vicious attacks are not limited to Rohingya Muslims now but other ethnic Muslim groups are also being targeted in escalating violence in Myanmar. This comes at a time when the Obama administration is easing import sanctions and engaging in joint military exercises with the Myanmar government.

The BBC also reports that the Burmese government has at least acknowledged the mass burnings that have taken place, though they are underestimating the numbers of those affected.

Fears for thousands after ‘near total destruction’ of Myanmar city’s Muslim quarter

(Reuters via. NBC)

SITTWE, Myanmar – A human rights group expressed concern for the safety of thousands of Muslims on Saturday after revealing satellite images of a once-thriving coastal community reduced to ashes during a week of violence in western Myanmar.

The images released by the New York-based Human Rights Watch show “near total destruction” of a predominantly Rohingya Muslim part of Kyaukpyu, one of several areas in Rakhine state where battles between Rohingyas and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists threaten to derail the former Burma’s fragile democratic transition.

More than 811 buildings and houseboats were razed in Kyaukpyu on Oct. 24, forcing many Rohingya to flee north by sea toward the state capital Sittwe, Human Rights Watch said.

“Burma’s [Myanmar’s] government urgently needs to provide security for the Rohingya in Arakan (Rakhine) State, who are under vicious attack,” Phil Robertson, the group’s deputy Asia director, said.

There were widespread unconfirmed reports of boatloads of Rohingyas trying to cross the sea border to neighboring Bangladesh, which has denied them refugee status since 1992.

No food, no water
Rohingyas in dozens of packed boats with no food or water that have fled Kyaukpyu — an industrial zone important to China — and other recent hotspots were seeking access on Friday to overcrowded refugee camps around the state capital Sittwe, according to four Rohingya refugee sources.

Some boats were blocked by security forces from reaching the shore and few Rohingyas managed to reach the camps, the sources said by telephone.

Wan-lark foundation, an organization that has been assisting Rakhine Buddhist refugees, said no clashes in the state had been reported to them since Friday night, but dead bodies of Rakhines had been found.

“Around 6pm last night in Kyawtyaw, the bodies of 16 Rakhines were found in the sea. They had died during the attacks on Thursday. We’re looking for more bodies,” representative Tun Mein Thein said on Saturday.

The chaos suggests the reformist government is struggling to contain historic ethnic and religious tensions suppressed during nearly a half century of military rule that ended last year.

Myanmar government ends direct media censorship

A Rakhine government spokesman put the death toll at 112 as of Friday. But within hours state media revised it to 67 killed from Oct. 21 to 25, with 95 wounded and nearly 3,000 houses destroyed.

The death toll could be far higher, said Human Rights Watch, citing “allegations from witnesses fleeing scenes of carnage and the government’s well-documented history of underestimating figures that might lead to criticism of the state.”

The clashes come just five months after communal unrest killed more than 80 people and displaced at least 75,000 in the same region.

‘Ethnic cleansing’
A boat carrying 120 Muslims from Kyaukpyu was intercepted by Rakhines, who killed the men and raped the women, the advocacy group Burmese Rohingya Organisation U.K. claimed in a statement. This report could not be verified, Reuters said.

“Ethnic cleansing is happening under the noses of the international community and they are doing nothing,” said Tun Khin, the group’s president. “We have confirmed reports that hundreds of people have been killed and the government must be aware of that.”

Ease sanctions on Myanmar, Democracy leader Suu Kyi says on US tour

Kyaukpyu is crucial to China’s most strategic investment in Myanmar: Twin pipelines that will carry oil and natural gas through the town on the Bay of Bengal to China’s energy-hungry western provinces.

The United Nations has warned that Myanmar’s fledgling democracy could be “irreparably damaged” by the violence.

Rohingyas are officially stateless. Buddhist-majority Myanmar’s government regards the estimated 800,000 Rohingyas in the country as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, and not as one of the country’s 135 official ethnic groups, and denies them citizenship.

But many of those expelled from Kyaukpyu are not Rohingya but Muslims from the officially recognized Kaman minority, said Chris Lewa, director of the Rohingya advocacy group, Arakan Project. “It’s not just anti-Rohingya violence anymore, it’s anti-Muslim,” she said.

It was unclear what set off the latest arson and killing that started on Sunday. In June, tension flared after the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman that was blamed on Muslims, but there was no obvious spark this time.

Rights groups such as Amnesty International have called on Myanmar to amend or repeal a 1982 citizenship law to end the Rohingyas’ stateless condition.

The central mosque in Sittwe was torched by anti-Rohingya rioters.

President Barack Obama’s administration has moved to further ease sanctions on the Burmese government, easing a ban on imports,

Washington’s decision to ease a ban on imports from Myanmar won praise Thursday in the emerging Southeast Asian democracy, with a government official giving credit to both the country’s reformist president and opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

This comes at a time when the Rohingya Muslims, considered one of the most oppressed peoples in the world are continuing to face daily violence.

Anti-Rohingya protests have been continuous in Western Burma, with the past several weeks seeing a wave of fresh protests and violence. Most significantly there are conflicting reports about which mosque was burnt down in Sittwe on Sunday, some reports say it was the 800 year old “Sawduro Bor Masjid” that was torched and burned to the ground while other sources are reporting that it was the 150 year old main mosque known as Jame-Mosque. The West-Burma-Bangladesh region is becoming increasingly unstable, as we are also now witnessing for the first time reprisal attacks in Bangladesh against Buddhists, fostering a dangerous climate that has the potential to become an unspeakable nightmarish zone of violence,

YANGON: Hundreds of Buddhist women protested on Wednesday in western Myanmar against the presence of stateless Rohingya Muslims in the violence-hit region, an organiser said.

The demonstrators urged the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to stop its assistance to Rohingya in Rakhine state, where tensions have been running high since deadly Buddhist-Muslim clashes broke out in June.

“We protested against the OIC and also Bengalis as we don’t want them on our soil,” organiser Nyo Aye told AFP by telephone from the state capital Sittwe.

Myanmar’s estimated 800,000 Rohingya are viewed as illegal immigrants by the government and by many Burmese, who refer to them as Bengalis.

The rally came a day after hundreds of monks took to the streets of Sittwe to protest against local Muslims and the OIC’s activities.

The tensions in Rakhine have spread to neighbouring Bangladesh, where police said last week they had arrested nearly 300 people in connection with a wave of violence targeting Buddhist homes and temples. afp

The Obama administration’s easing of sanctions on the Burmese government also comes at a time in which Human Rights researchers and activists are warning about the “permanent segregation of Rohingyas,” who are being herded into “temporary” refugee camps,

Following sectarian violence in the western Myanmar state of Rakhine in June, human rights researchers are now warning that the government appears to be attempting to permanently house parts of the stateless Muslim-minority Rohingya in “temporary” refugee camps, segregating them from the rest of the population.

“There has been no acknowledgement that people have to go home eventually – the solution appears to be that the Rohingya can simply live where they have come to be,” John Sifton, with Human Rights Watch (which released a related report in August), said in Washington on Tuesday. “Segregation has become the status quo.”

Aung Aung Oo, a Burmese national who has been reporting on the Rohingya crises since June for Salem-News discusses what it will take to restore communal harmony between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, a harmony that existed for centuries,

To maintain communal harmony between these two ethnic groups, the restoration of the Rohingya’s rights is essential. Without it, the very idea of a peaceful community might be a legend.

The restoration of Rohingyan rights, i.e. citizenship is a fact which US deputy assistant secretary of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration has echoed as well in a speech to the Open Society Foundation and Refugree International, essentially saying that, ‘the lack of citizenship must be addressed for any long-term solution to the distress in the Rohingya community to dissipate.’

Related Articles:

- BBC: Muslims Homes Razed in Burma’s Rakhine State

-An Open Letter from the Buddhist Community on Islamophobia

-Warrior Monks: The Untold Story of Buddhist Violence (I)

-Burmese Buddhists Attack Muslim Pilgrims, Killing 9

Salem News has been one of the only Western news sources covering this conflict in-depth and from a deeper angle for some time now. Publishing photos and videos of massacres and burnings.

As the world silently watches on, it seems the BBC has confirmed what news sources such as Salem-News have been reporting for weeks:

Muslim homes razed in Burma’s Rakhine state – report

(BBC)

A team from the UK’s Channel 4 News gained access to Sittwe, which has been off limits to reporters for months.

They filmed an area once home to 10,000 that had been reduced to rubble.

Days of violence in Rakhine state began in late May when a Buddhist woman was raped and murdered by three Muslims [has this been confirmed? I have heard reports that this is untrue and in fact the trouble started when a Muslim man was dating a Rakhine Buddhist--Ed.]. A mob later killed 10 Muslims.

Sectarian clashes spread across the state, with houses of both Buddhists and Muslims being burnt down.

Most Rohingya Muslims have been moved out of Sittwe into temporary camps.

The Burmese government declared a state of emergency following the outbreak of violence and has since prevented foreign media from visiting the region.

However, the Channel 4 News team filmed the area of Sittwe known as Narzi, which it reported was once home to an estimated 10,000.

Local Rakhine Buddhists were picking through the debris of the houses, which had once been the Rohingya area of the city.

One man told reporters that the Muslims had set fire to their own homes in an attempt to burn down the whole community.

The UNHCR has said that about 80,000 people have been displaced in and around the Sittwe and Maungdaw by the violence.

UN human rights chief Navi Pillay has said that forces sent to quash the unrest were reported to be targeting Muslims.

She has called for an independent investigation.

There is long-standing tension between Rakhine people, who are Buddhist and make up the majority of the state’s population, and Muslims.

Most of these Muslims identify themselves as Rohingya, a group that originated in part of Bengal, now called Bangladesh.