RugbyRebels

United Nations officials have joined Human Rights Watch in accusing Myanmar of ethnically cleansing its Rohingya Muslim population, carrying out massacres and driving many others across the border into Bangladesh. Men and children are being killed outright, while women are subjected to rape and houses are being looted and burnt down, they say, though media access to the region is being denied. The Rohingya number about one million but are widely regarded by the Buddhist majority as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh due to their religion. Citizenship is denied even to those who have lived in Myanmar for generations, which prevents them from voting and places restriction on marriage, employment, education and freedom of movement. In fact, the origins of the Rohingya people in Myanmar can be dated back as far as the 15th century. Bangladesh has reluctantly accepted thousands of refugees, while thousands more remain camped along the border. Nobel Peace Prizer winner and defacto leader of Myanmar Aung San Suu Kyi has come in for heavy criticism after failing to rein in the military, apparently fearing it could destabilize her government's delicate position. More likely she is concerned about upsetting the Buddhist majority, many of whom support the military's actions against the Rohingya. The latest round of violence began after nine police officers were killed in co-ordinated attacks in the region, leading government officials to blame Rohingya militants. Activists claim more than 100 people were killed and hundreds more arrested during the subsequent crackdown, while satellite images have shown that at least 1200 Rohingya homes had been razed during the past six weeks. In 2012 a similar wave of violence left many dead and up to 100,000 people displaced. Many are still living in camps as a result of that conflict. Last year elections were held in Myanmar for the first time in quarter of a century, with Suu Kyi winning by a landslide. A popular figure in the West, she had previously been under detention during the military dictatorship and remains barred from the presidency by a consitutional rule.

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/24/myanmars ... khine.html

Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak called for foreign intervention to stop the "genocide" of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar on Sunday, as he joined thousands of Rohingya protesters in Kuala Lumpur.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanm ... SKBN13T07I

UN Human Rights Report on this issue:

Shocking new report . . .

It’s a U.N. report U.N. officials themselves call revolting and unbearable. Myanmar’s security forces killed, gang-raped, and tortured hundreds of Rohingya Muslims in a wave of unprecedented violence, according to a new U.N. report released Friday. Victims included children and babies as young as eight months.

In recent months, Myanmar security forces stepped up their efforts to clear the ethnic group from the country’s borders — in a campaign of “area clearance operations” — to historic levels in terms of both scale and brutality.

“The ‘area clearance operations’ have likely resulted in hundreds of deaths and have led to an estimated 66,000 people fleeing into Bangladesh and 22,000 being internally displaced,” the new U.N. report said.

A U.N. human rights research team wrote the report after interviewing hundreds of Rohingya who Myanmar security forces drove to neighboring Bangladesh.

The U.N. human rights office called the accounts “revolting.” Of the 101 women interviewed, over half told the U.N. team they had been sexually assaulted, raped, or gang-raped. One gang-rape victim was 11 years old. Another was nine months pregnant. The U.N. also received reports of Myanmar security forces killing children aged six and younger with knives.

“The devastating cruelty to which these Rohingya children have been subjected is unbearable,” U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said in a statement. “What kind of ‘clearance operation’ is this? What national security goals could possibly be served by this?” he added. In December, John McKissick, head of the UN High Commission for Refugees, labeled the operations, which first started in October, “ethnic cleansing.”

The Rohingya, numbering 1.1 million people in the country’s western Rakhine state, are loathed by the rest of the population and live in apartheid conditions. They’ve been called “the most persecuted minority in the world.”

Despite its brutality, the military’s campaign against the Rohingya is widely popular in Myanmar. The military claims it is fighting a Rohingya rebel insurgency, which restored the military’s popularity in the public’s eye.

Continues here: https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/03/gr ... ign=buffer