Myanmar governments alarming tactics
Myanmar
government
is trying to stonewall the press, as it has also tried to avoid launching an independent probe, hoping that its latest actions will
be forgotten
Dr Habib Siddiqui
Last week the Myanmar Police Force announced a plan to recruit and arm ethnic Rakhine and other non-Muslim civilians in restive Maungdaw Township, a predominantly Muslim township in Buddhist-majority Rakhine State. The township has recently witnessed widespread abuse of human rights against the minority Rohingya and other Muslims by the police and military forces. Weeks earlier, military moved into the territory to flush out the attackers reportedly Rohingyas who had raided 3 police posts.
Rakhine State Police Chief Colonel Sein Lwin told Reuters that the new regional police would include non-Muslim residents who would not otherwise meet educational or physical requirements to join the Myanmar Police Force, adding that recruits would serve in their own villages. More than 100 recruits between the ages of 18 and 35 are to receive a 16-week accelerated training program, beginning in the state capital of Sittwe on November 7. The police intend to provide the recruits with weapons and other equipment as well as compensation.
It is worth noting here that the creation of such a force violates international law, as articulated by the United Nations Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials and the U.N. Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials. According to the Principles, internal political instability or any other public emergency may not be invoked to justify any departure from these basic principles.
Arming civilians based on their ethnic and religious identity in this racially-charged context is profoundly irresponsible and could turn deadly, said Matthew Smith of Fortify Rights. We fully expect the government to put a stop to this plan and to immediately provide aid groups with free and unfettered access to all in need. The best way to prevent violent extremism is to promote and protect human rights, not equip people to potentially commit abuses.
Fortify Rights has called on the Government of Myanmar to immediately scrap the plan.
Nor should we fail to see a sinister link. Truly, Rakhine police chiefs fascist plan is like a page taken out of Hitlers Mein Kampf. Our readers may recall that Schutzstaffel (SS, literally Protection Squadron) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP; Nazi Party) in Nazi Germany. Under Heinrich Himmler (192945), SS grew from a small paramilitary formation to one of the most powerful organizations in Nazi Germany. From 1929 until the regimes collapse in 1945, the SS was the foremost agency of surveillance and terror within Germany and German-occupied Europe. [Note: Sturmabteilung (or SA, literally Storm Detachment), which functioned as the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party (NSDAP), was a precursor to the SS. The SA played a significant role in Adolf Hitlers rise to power in the 1920s and 1930s. Their primary purposes were providing protection for Nazi rallies and assemblies, disrupting the meetings of opposing parties, fighting against the paramilitary units of the opposing parties, especially the Red Front Fighters League (Rotfrontkmpferbund) of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), and intimidating Slavic and Romani citizens, unionists, and Jews for instance, during the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses. The SA have been known in contemporary times as Brown Shirts (Braunhemden) from the color of their uniform shirts, similar to Benito Mussolinis Black Shirts.
The Rakhine Buddhists have long been fighting, unsuccessfully, for liberating Arakan (Rakhine) state from the clutches of the Myanmar government. They have their own militias fighting government forces. So, one cannot but question the real intent behind the creation of another SS-type para-military fascist force under the pretext of protecting the Rakhine lives.
The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) is equally concerned about the development. According to the ICJ, if a new security authority is contemplated, it must be a professional police force, whose members are recruited and trained in accordance with principles of non-discrimination and respect for human rights. In a country where the regular police and military are notorious for grave human rights violations, said Sam Zarifi, ICJs Asia Director, establishing an armed, untrained, unaccountable force drawn from only one community in the midst of serious ethnic tensions and violence is a recipe for disaster.
Since 2012, we have already witnessed a series of genocidal pogroms directed against the Rohingya and other Muslims, who are ethnically, racially and religiously different, by the Rakhine and other Buddhist fascists that came from all walks of life, including the government security forces and the Buddhist monks. Some 150,000 Rohingyas continue to live in IDP concentration camps as a result of such ethnic cleansing drives against them.
The border security force NaSaKa in Arakan terrorized the Rohingya population for many years by following the footsteps of the SA before it was unilaterally disbanded in 2013 by Myanmar President Thein Sein. Everyone welcomed the move hoping that Myanmar would not revisit its troubled fascist past. Obviously, in Suu Kyis Myanmar such lessons from the past have lost their meanings.
As a result of the latest ethnic cleansing drives by the Tatmadaw (Myanmar military) some 15,000 Rohingya men, women, and children and a number of aid workers remain displaced and isolated in Maungdaw Township.
It is important to highlight the fact that outside the propaganda fed from the government and a new Rohingya group (Faith Movement) that claimed to strive for the rights of all the minorities in Myanmar, including the Rohingya, we dont know how serious was the threat posed by this group. What we know for fact is that the apartheid government in Myanmar has long been trying to bring about a final solution to the Rohingya problem one way or another. However, unlike the other minorities, insurrecting against the central government, the worst persecuted Rohingyas have long been a very peaceful, unarmed civilian population. Thus, a highly sinister ploy had to be devised by the government.
Unless the Rohingya group could be presented as a real threat a thorn with hundreds of militant recruits, with affiliations of as you guessed it known terrorist outfits like the ISIS (Daesh), such an evil ploy to carry out the final solution (i.e., elimination) against their entire community was deemed highly risky or damaging to Myanmars international image, esp. with a new civilian government whose de facto leader is a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Thus, from the very beginning without any evidence the small local band of alleged attackers who were armed with knives were presented as a large group of 400 Jihadists who had planned launching attacks on six locations simultaneously. It was all part of a very sinister plan to use the alleged raid by the Rohingya militants as an excuse to finish the unfinished eliminationist task. The war crimes perpetrated by the Tatmadaw since October 9 once again underscore that criminal blueprint.
It was no accident that the government rhetoric surrounding the situation in Rakhine State was increasingly alarming. On October 31, Rakhine State Member of Parliament Aung Win declared, All Bengali villages are like military strongholds. On November 1, state-run media appeared to refer to Rohingya as a thorn that has to be removed as it pierces, and on November 3, state-run media alleged that international media intentionally fabricated allegations of human rights violations in collusion with terrorist groups.
Fortify Rights received eyewitness reports of extrajudicial killings of unarmed Rohingya men in Maungdaw Township by Myanmar Army soldiers on October 10. Numerous reports subsequently alleged that Myanmar Army soldiers and security forces raped women and girls, killed unarmed civilians, and carried out arbitrary arrests and detentions. Several Rohingya Muslim villages were razed. On October 24, five U.N. Special Rapporteurs issued a joint statement urging the Government of Myanmar to address the growing reports of human rights violations in northern Rakhine State.
The Office of the President of Myanmar repeatedly denied all allegations of abuses or wrongdoing, dismissing allegations as false propaganda. It has retained an old guard Zaw Htay who acts as Goebbels serving the President. As he has always done in the past, e.g., with Thein Sein government, he rejected the allegations of rape, saying, Theres no logical way of committing rape in the middle of a big village of 800 homes, where insurgents are hiding.
One wonders if there is no truth to such allegations, why would Myanmar authorities block journalists and human rights monitors from accessing areas of northern Rakhine State.
Eurasia Review
