Stop the ethnic cleansing of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims!
2017Marty Goodman 2017-10Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 4 →
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Capitalism has reached a new level of barbarism in Myanmar. So far, over 500,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees have been driven out of their homes in the Northern Rakhine State and into unsanitary, crowd ed camps in Bangladesh, without adequate food and water. Soldiers and Buddhist fascist-like gangs have torched thousands of Rohingya homes; they have beaten, stabbed, gang raped and killed hundreds of defenseless Rohingya.
Those fleeing violence, mostly women and children, face land mines planted on the Bangladesh border, re sulting in horrific injuries and death. Refugees tell of Rohingya being shot and thrown out of army helicop ters. Helicopter guns mow them down in their own fields.
In an Oct. 4 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, Ro hingya refugees described seeing children executed. Khotiaz, 28, recounted the savage excecution of her nephew by a local army officer named Baju: “When Baju entered the room, there was my nephew, Mo hammod Tofail. He was 10 years old. He was a student of class two. First Baju shot him in the head, his skull shattered into four pieces. Then he fell down. I saw there were brain and blood on the floor.”
In the report, Mustafa, 22, said: “There was a pit with [the bodies of] 10 to 15 children, all under 12 years old. They were all young children hacked to death. I recognized four of the bodies: Hakim Ali, 9; Naim, 8; one child from Pondu Para, who was about 10; and Chau Mong, who was 7.”
The HRW reported from Rakhine state that “in Maung Nu, several Burmese soldiers entered the com pound while others surrounded it. They took several dozen Rohingya men and boys into the courtyard and then shot or stabbed them to death. Others were killed as they tried to flee. The soldiers then loaded the bod ies—some witnesses said a hundred or more—into military trucks and took them away.”
La Myanmar press conference, her first since the recent wave of atrocities, that internation al reports of genocide were “fake news” and the “tip of a huge iceberg of misinformation.” All the while, Suu Kyi has refused to even use the word “Rohingya,” repeating the military’s blatant lie that “terrorism” is responsible for the calamity. Amnesty International has called her response “unconscionable.” In disgust, several Nobel winners challenged Suu Kyi to support human rights, including anti-apartheid leader Desmond Tutu. Capitalist “human rights” & Rohingya oppression Before the most recent exodus, many Rohingya were herded into what is often described as “concentration camps.” Deprived of voting rights, they couldn’t vote in the sham 2015 election, which elevated “democrat” Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) party to power. The NLD did not run any Muslim candidates.
The oppression of the one million Rohingya, who practice their own brand of Sunni Islam, is not new in this country of 53 million, which is 90% Buddhist and only 5% Muslim. Rohingya have lived in Burma for centuries, but are stateless like Palestinians.
Rakine has a poverty rate of nearly 80%, double the national average. They are usually of darker complex ion than most Burmese and subject to the lingering (continued on page 5, in “Trump: ‘We will totally destroy North Korea!’”)