Sehän on ollut käynnissä 700-luvulta asti....
Uutisia Myanmarista
- Viestiketjun aloittaja hansai
- Aloitus PVM
Sehän on ollut käynnissä 700-luvulta asti....
Ei ole muistikuvia tuolta asti 
Hauska tämä "tosiasiallinen johtaja"-termi, kun hieman tutustuu asiaan...
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...-on-myanmars-new-government-a-hard-row-to-hoe
J0h1F
Ylipäällikkö
Ja kamalinta on siinä, että HS poisti kommenttiosiosta sen kommentin, jossa avattiin sitä, kuinka yksipuolisesti HS uutisoi asiasta ja jättää rohingakapinallisten teot ja koko konfliktin uudelleensyttymisen näiden tekojen takia täysin mainitsematta.
Ilmeisesti joillain asiasta kirjoittavilla toimittajilla on kova hinku rauhanuskonnon ja sen edustajien valkopesemiseen.
Pihatonttu
Respected Leader
Kiinalla on Myanmarin suhteen todella kovat intressit. Iso osa niistä liittyy voimakkaasti rannikkoseutuun ja merialueisiin.
Sotilashallinnon aikana Kiina kykeni toteuttamaan intressejään korruption yms. keinoin.
Demokratisoitumiskehitys pakottaa Kiinan joko etsimään uudet keinot tai pysäyttämään demokratisoitumiskehityksen. Jälkimmäinen mahdollistaa vanhoihin keinoihin palaamisen.
Nykyinen, aiempaa demokraattisempi hallinto syntyi lännen painostuksella ja tuella.
Jos tämä demokraattisempi hallinto vainoaa muslimeita niin se menettää läntisen arvolipilaariston tuen.
Syntyy ulkopoliittisen tuen tyhjiö, jonka Kiina varmaankin täyttää ihan hyvää hyvyyttään.
Sotilashallinnon aikana Kiina kykeni toteuttamaan intressejään korruption yms. keinoin.
Demokratisoitumiskehitys pakottaa Kiinan joko etsimään uudet keinot tai pysäyttämään demokratisoitumiskehityksen. Jälkimmäinen mahdollistaa vanhoihin keinoihin palaamisen.
Nykyinen, aiempaa demokraattisempi hallinto syntyi lännen painostuksella ja tuella.
Jos tämä demokraattisempi hallinto vainoaa muslimeita niin se menettää läntisen arvolipilaariston tuen.
Syntyy ulkopoliittisen tuen tyhjiö, jonka Kiina varmaankin täyttää ihan hyvää hyvyyttään.
Burman tie on edelleen strateginen, Kiina haluaisi ohjata Afrikan kauppaansa rautateillä Burman satamiin.
Samoin suunnitelmissa on laajat laivaston ja ilmavoimien tukikohdat Intian valtameren rannalle.
Yhdysvallat maksoi suuret lahjukset sotilasjuntalle jotta nämä suunnitelmat eivät toteutuisi, Aung San Suu Kyin valtaannousu kuului varmaan kauppaan myös.
Kiinahan aloitti rajaselkkaukset ja kapinoinnit välittömästi ja se varmasti pyrkii saamaan omat miehensä valtaan maassa jos sotilasjuntta ei muuta mieltään.
Pihatonttu
Respected Leader
Myanmarin viljelykapasiteetti on huikea. Sillä on hyvät alue- ja talousvedet. Jade on jo viety, mutta mineraaleja on vielä paljon. Se on Kiinan väestölle helppo laajenemissuunta mm. suuren kiinalaisvähemmistön vuoksi. Suuri
osa siitä on aikanaan ollut Kiinan vallan alla. Pääsy valtamerille "sulkurengas" (Japani, Korea, Taiwan jne) kokonaan ohittaen. Kiina voi ottaa Myanmarin kontrolliinsa joko investointien kautta (demokratisoitumisen jatkuessa) tai korruption ja poliittisen häikäilemättömyyden keinoin (demokratisoitumisen murentuessa).
Thaimaa tarjoaisi Kiinalle joitain samoja etuja, mutta maksaisi liikaa.
Yllytän palstalaisia peittämään Myanmarin karttapallostaan kiinanpunaisella lapulla ja miettimään mitä sellainen tilanne tarkottaisi globaalisti. Ja miettimään ihan tosissaan.
Myanmarin viljelykapasiteetti on huikea. Sillä on hyvät alue- ja talousvedet. Jade on jo viety, mutta mineraaleja on vielä paljon. Se on Kiinan väestölle helppo laajenemissuunta mm. suuren kiinalaisvähemmistön vuoksi. Suuri
Kiina voi ottaa Myanmarin kontrolliinsa joko investointien kautta (demokratisoitumisen jatkuessa) tai korruption ja poliittisen häikäilemättömyyden keinoin (demokratisoitumisen murentuessa).
Thaimaa tarjoaisi Kiinalle joitain samoja etuja, mutta maksaisi liikaa.
Yllytän palstalaisia peittämään Myanmarin karttapallostaan kiinanpunaisella lapulla ja miettimään mitä sellainen tilanne tarkottaisi globaalisti. Ja miettimään ihan tosissaan.
Ei Kiina päästä Burmasta irti se on jo selvä.
Ei se kyllä aio luopua saartorenkaan murtamisestakaan tärkeimpänä tavoitteenaan, PK ei yksin haastaisi Yhdysvaltoja näin pitkälle.
Kiina ja Venäjä tuntuvat koordinoivan vahvasti, molemmat näyttävät aikovan ottaa haluamansa etupiirit voimakeinoin tarvittaessa.
Kiinan intressit liittyy myös Myanmarin energiasektoriin, kaasuun ja vesivoimaan. Tosin Thaimaa on myös hyvin luonut "reservaattinsa" Myanmariin. Pitää myös muistaa, että Myanmarissa on jo läpi aikojen ollut isohko kiinalaisvähemmistö. Onhan Myanmar ihan maantieteellisestikin kiinnostavassa sijainnissa.
Sotilashallinto elää ja voi erittäin hyvin edelleen ja jatkokin on sementoitu perustuslakiin. Korruptio voi edelleen hyvin, tosin suunta on parempaan tavallisten kansalaisten kohdalla(enää ei välttämättä tarvita joka paikassa lahjuksia asioiden hoitoon). Toisaalta esim. asumisen hintakehitys on ollut jäätävää. Entisessä pääkaupungissa asuntojen hinnat ovat suomalaisin silmin aivan poskettomat jos suhteuttaa ne maan BKT:hen tai keskituloihin.
Olen demokratiakehityksen osalta hieman samaa mieltä kuin jotkut ovat arabikevään tapahtumista...tie eurooppalaiseen demokratiaan(mihin olemme täällä päässeet) on pitkä ja kivinen. En olisi ollenkaan varma että se edes olisi tavoitteena tai hyvä heille, vaan vapaammat elinolot ja paremmin toimivat perusasiat.
Taas ei paljon faktat paina...
https://www.karjalainen.fi/mielipit...-rauhan-nobelistista-veriseksi-diktaattoriksi
STI_Tactical9mm
Kenraali
https://creepingsharia.wordpress.co...-the-tip-of-a-huge-iceberg-of-misinformation/
Reporting on the Rohingya: “The Tip of a Huge Iceberg of Misinformation”
September 23, 2017 / creeping
Here’s the follow-up to a post earlier this week, Award-winning journalists call out pro-Muslim bias in AP, Reuters, BBC Myanmar coverage.
Source: Reporting on the Rohingya: “The Tip of a Huge Iceberg of Misinformation” > New English Review
…
Let’s refresh our memories of what has been going on in Myanmar this last month. All the news reports coming from Myanmar (Burma) tell the same story: tens of thousands of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority, have been fleeing into Bangladesh, to avoid the sudden upsurge in violence from both Burmese military and civilians. The Rohingya are presented as the innocent and long-suffering victims of “racist” Burmese Buddhists (Islam being, for propaganda purposes, a “race”). Only a handful of the reports mention, and only briefly, as if in passing, that the current violence began when, in mid-August, Rohingya fighters attacked 30 different police stations and an army base, as part of their campaign to stake their claim to Rakhine State, in western Myanmar, and showing themselves able “to strike terror in the hearts” of the Infidels to get it. The attacks left more than 70 dead, Muslims and Buddhists.
The Rohingyas unleashed still other attacks, and the Burmese army then retaliated, and the Rohingya continued to strike back during the last two weeks in August, and then there was more retaliation from the Buddhists. Many Rohingya have fled the retaliatory violence — a violence which they began — for Bangladesh, but it is their flight, and that retaliation by the Buddhists, which is getting almost all of the attention in the Western press, complete with photographs of victims of other conflicts who are presented as Rohingya (the “fake news” of which Aung San Suu Kyi complained), rather than what prompted it.
Seldom mentioned is that the August attack by the Rohingyas was preceded by a similar attack, last October, by the Rohingyas on the Burmese (Buddhist) police, and again, it was not their initial attack, but almost exclusively the retaliation by the Buddhist army, that was the focus of reports in the foreign press last fall. Reports of Rohingya villages being burnt down are reported uncritically. The Myanmar authorities have claimed that Islamic militants, having infiltrated Rohingya communities, have themselves been setting fire to houses in Muslim villages in order to get the world even more on their side. Instead of assuming these claims must be false, why not investigate them?
…
The Western media have uncritically repeated the Rohingya claim that they have inhabited Arakan for many centuries or “since time immemorial.” Others beg to differ, among them a well-known historian, and author of many works on Burma, Professor Andrew Selth of Griffith University in Australia. He has stated categorically that the name “Rohingya” was taken by “Bengali Muslims who live in Arakan State…most Rohingyas arrived with the British colonialists in the 19th and 20th centuries.” It is true that a handful of Bengali Muslims drifted down to Burma over the centuries, but Professor Selth makes the important point — unknown to Western reporters — that the vast majority of Rohingyas are recent arrivals, their great migration made possible by the fact that Burma was administratively part of British India until 1937, which meant there was no formal border to cross.
Particularly disappointing for many in the West (not to speak of the reactions of Pakistan, Al Jazeera, and Tariq Ramadan) has been what they regard as the unforgivable silence of Aung San Suu Kyi, currently the head of the Myanmar government. For Aung San Suu Kyi was formerly the leader of the nonviolent opposition to the Burmese military, placed under house arrest by the generals, then freed, and awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. For more than two decades she was, for her continued defiance of the generals, and willingness to endure that house arrest, a darling of the international media. Since the end of military rule, which she helped to bring about, she has held a number of important government posts, and is now the State Counsellor (equivalent to Prime Minister) in Myanmar.
But in her continuing refusal to condemn outright the attacks on the Rohingya, and in her insistence that in Myanmar there has been “violence on both sides” — for which there is ample evidence — Aung San Suu Kyi is now seen by many outside Myanmar in quite another light. Many have criticized Aung San Suu Kyi for her silence on the 2012 Rakhine State riots, when, after the rape and killing of a Buddhist woman by three Rohingyas, Buddhists retaliated, and then the violence escalated when hundreds of Rohingyas went on a rampage following Friday prayers at a mosque, throwing rocks and setting fire to houses and buildings. Four Buddhists, among them a doctor and an elderly man, died of multiple knife wounds. Recent accounts in the foreign media ignore all that. For the Western media, the narrative remains the same; the Rohingya are always the victims, and the Buddhist violence against them is always unwarranted.
If we examine the last 150 years of Burmese history, we may find that Madame Suu Kyi has more of a point than her foreign critics think. It is that history that is in the minds of, and explains the behavior today of, the Buddhists of Myanmar. In 1826, after the Anglo-Burmese War, the British annexed Arakan (Rakhine State), where almost all of the 1.1 million Rohingyas now in Myanmar still live, to British India. And they began to encourage Indians, mainly Muslims, to move into Arakan from Bengal as cheap farm labor. They continued to encourage this migration throughout the nineteenth-century. The numbers of Bengali Muslim migrants is impressive. In Akyab District, the capital of Arakan, according to the British censuses of 1872 and 1911, there was an increase in the Muslim population from 58,255 to 178,647, a tripling within forty years. At the beginning of the 20th century, migrants from Bengal were still arriving in Burma at the rate of a quarter million per year. In the peak year of 1927, 480,000 people arrived in Burma, with Rangoon in that year surpassing New York City as the greatest migration port in the world. And many of these migrants were Bengali Muslims who joined the Muslims already in Rakhine State, renaming themselves the Rohingyas. The Buddhists continued to call them, as they still do today, “Bengalis.” And the immigration of Bengali Muslims continued for decades. In a 1955 study published by Stanford University, the authors Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff concluded that “’the post-war (World War II) illegal immigration of Chittagonians [i.e., Bengali Muslims from Chittagong in East Pakistan] into that area [Arakan state] was on a vast scale, and in the Maungdaw and Buthidaung areas they replaced the [Buddhist] Arakanese.”
The Buddhist Burmese looked on helplessly at the arrival of these hundreds of thousands of Muslims, but there was nothing they could do against the policy of their British colonial masters. During World War II, the British retreat in the face of the Japanese led to a power vacuum, and simmering inter-communal tensions erupted, with the Arakanese Massacres of 1942, when 50,000 Buddhist Rakhines were killed by the Rohingyas in Rakhine (Arakan) state. In retaliation, the Buddhists then killed as many as 40,000 Rohingyas. (In another account, with much lower figures, the Rohingyas killed 20,000 of the Buddhists, who then killed 5,000 of the Rohingyas.) The origins of the mass killing instigated by the Rohingya Muslims in 1942 have a simple explanation: they had been left weapons by the retreating British, who had been assured that the Rohingyas would use the weapons against the Japanese. Instead, as soon as they acquired these arms, the Rohingyas attacked the Buddhists, mainly Arakanese, in Rakhine State, And after World War II, illegal immigration by Bengali Muslims “was on a vast scale.” For the Western media, none of this matters. History doesn’t count. For the Buddhists of Burma, this history matters a great deal.
And what the Rohingya did next also matters. In May, 1946 Rohingya leaders met with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Muslim leader who founded modern Pakistan, and asked that the northern part of Rakhine state be annexed by East Pakistan. Then, when Jinnah refused to interfere in Burmese affairs, they founded the Mujahid Party in northern Arakan in 1947. The aim of the Mujahid Party was initially to create an autonomous Muslim state in Arakan. The local mujahideen – that’s what the Rohingya warriors proudly called themselves — fought government forces in an attempt to have the mostly Rohingya-populated Mayu peninsula in northern Rakhine State secede from Myanmar (then Burma), and after that secession, the Rohingyas hoped that territory would be annexed by East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). Fighting between the Rohingya and the Burmese state, then, is not a new thing; it has been going on intermittently since 1947, and it was started by the Rohingya. The Rohingya revolt eventually lost momentum in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and many of the Rohingyas surrendered to government forces.
The Muslim insurrection by the Rohingya did not end, but was revived in the 1970s, which in turn led to the Burmese government mounting, in 1978, a huge military operation (Operation King Dragon) that inflicted great damage on the mujahideen, and bought a decade of relative calm. But again the Rohingya rose up against the Burmese state, and in the 1990s the “Rohingya Solidarity Organisation” attacked Burmese authorities near the border with Bangladesh. In other words, this war on the Buddhist Burmese conducted by the Muslim Rohingya has been going on – waxing and waning – ever since that massacre of Buddhist Rakhins in 1942. It is by keeping in mind that history,, and the memory, too, of how the Rohingya tried on several occasions to secede from Burma and become part of East Pakistan, that Buddhist fears of a Muslim takeover of northern Myanmar should be taken seriously, and viewed sympathetically. The Burmese monks who have recently been whipping up anti-Rohingya sentiment are not behaving out of motiveless malignity; they are keenly aware of all this history. The current reports by journalists are singularly one-sided, and lacking in any historical context. Not a single Western reporter has mentioned that 1942 massacre of the Buddhists by the Rohingya; not a single Western reporter has mentioned the attempts by the Rohingya to join Arakan state to East Pakistan. Not a single Western reporter has noted the Rohingya insurrections of the 1970s and 1990s. Not a single Western reporter has provided the data that shows just how many Bengali Muslims poured into Burma in the late 19th and early 20th century, that certainly calls into question their claim that “Rohingya have been living in Arakan from time immemorial.” Not a single Western reporter has noted, either, that the Hui Panthays — a Muslim Chinese people — live in perfect security, free to practice Islam, in Myanmar, perhaps because that doesn’t fit the narrative of anti-Muslim mad monks that has been so successfully peddled in the West. Unlike the Rohingya, the Hui Panthay have not attacked and displaced Buddhists, as the Rohingya, Bengali Muslims, attacked and displaced the Buddhist Rakhine people in parts of Rakhine state.
…
For the Burmese — and not just a handful of monks — the Rohingyas are not a true indigenous people of Myanmar, but the descendants of the Muslims who began arriving from East Bengal in the 19th century. Today’s Rohingyas, for the Buddhists in present-day Myanmar who are leading the anti-Rohingya campaign, are the same people who attacked Buddhists in Rakhine State in 1942, who tried to secede and join Pakistan in 1946, who, as self-described Jihadist warriors (“mujahideen”) conducted a violent insurrection against Burmese authorities that began in 1948 and lasted to the 1950s, in order to make Rakhine an autonomous state under Muslim control, and then, in a second attempt, to possibly have it annexed by Pakistan. These are the same Jihad warriors who conducted an insurrection against the Buddhist government in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. For the Buddhist monks of Myanmar, the Rohingyas are Bengali Muslims– the Buddhists have never called them “Rohingyas” but, rather, “Bengalis” — who migrated south to Burma, and are the local branch of the world-wide Muslim umma that has been in continuous warfare against Buddhists and Buddhism for centuries, and is again becoming more aggressive and violent all over the world.
…
Should the history of Muslim-Buddhist relations in Myanmar be better known, with journalists taking it upon themselves to learn about, and then to transmit, this history, it is possible that the “international community” would address the current violence differently. Imagine the effect on Myanmar’s anxious Buddhists if those now lecturing them so unsympathetically instead demonstrated by their statements that they were well aware of the flood into Myanmar of Muslim migrants over a half-century, recognized that the inter-communal violence in 1942 had started with massacres by the Muslim side against unsuspecting Buddhists, conceded that the Rohingyas had tried for many years, as self-described mujahideen, to seize part of Myanmar, and to make it an autonomous Muslim state, and that it is this past, as well as the actions over many centuries of Muslims against Buddhists (and Hindus) in south Asia, that has deeply affected how the Burmese Buddhists view their own situation.
That might help calm the Burmese Buddhists, make them feel less anxious, now that their fears were not being cavalierly dismissed, but given a sympathetic hearing. And they, in turn, might ratchet down their own violence if they no longer feel quite so alone. It should be possible for the West to come to its senses about the Rohingyas and the Buddhists of Myanmar. What is needed is for the Western media to study the history of the Rohingyas in Myanmar, when they arrived, and from where, and what has been the nature of their interactions with the Buddhists. And the Western journalists on whom we rely will learn that beginning in the 1940s it was the Rohingyas who struck first against the Buddhists, militarily with the massacre of 50,000 in 1942, and diplomatically with the appeal to Pakistan’s president in 1947 to make Arakan (Rakhine State) part of Pakistan, and continued to strike against the Buddhist authorities in Myanmar intermittently, over several decades of conflict. That history can’t be restated often enough.
Reporting on the Rohingya: “The Tip of a Huge Iceberg of Misinformation”
September 23, 2017 / creeping
Here’s the follow-up to a post earlier this week, Award-winning journalists call out pro-Muslim bias in AP, Reuters, BBC Myanmar coverage.
Source: Reporting on the Rohingya: “The Tip of a Huge Iceberg of Misinformation” > New English Review
…
Let’s refresh our memories of what has been going on in Myanmar this last month. All the news reports coming from Myanmar (Burma) tell the same story: tens of thousands of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority, have been fleeing into Bangladesh, to avoid the sudden upsurge in violence from both Burmese military and civilians. The Rohingya are presented as the innocent and long-suffering victims of “racist” Burmese Buddhists (Islam being, for propaganda purposes, a “race”). Only a handful of the reports mention, and only briefly, as if in passing, that the current violence began when, in mid-August, Rohingya fighters attacked 30 different police stations and an army base, as part of their campaign to stake their claim to Rakhine State, in western Myanmar, and showing themselves able “to strike terror in the hearts” of the Infidels to get it. The attacks left more than 70 dead, Muslims and Buddhists.
The Rohingyas unleashed still other attacks, and the Burmese army then retaliated, and the Rohingya continued to strike back during the last two weeks in August, and then there was more retaliation from the Buddhists. Many Rohingya have fled the retaliatory violence — a violence which they began — for Bangladesh, but it is their flight, and that retaliation by the Buddhists, which is getting almost all of the attention in the Western press, complete with photographs of victims of other conflicts who are presented as Rohingya (the “fake news” of which Aung San Suu Kyi complained), rather than what prompted it.
Seldom mentioned is that the August attack by the Rohingyas was preceded by a similar attack, last October, by the Rohingyas on the Burmese (Buddhist) police, and again, it was not their initial attack, but almost exclusively the retaliation by the Buddhist army, that was the focus of reports in the foreign press last fall. Reports of Rohingya villages being burnt down are reported uncritically. The Myanmar authorities have claimed that Islamic militants, having infiltrated Rohingya communities, have themselves been setting fire to houses in Muslim villages in order to get the world even more on their side. Instead of assuming these claims must be false, why not investigate them?
…
The Western media have uncritically repeated the Rohingya claim that they have inhabited Arakan for many centuries or “since time immemorial.” Others beg to differ, among them a well-known historian, and author of many works on Burma, Professor Andrew Selth of Griffith University in Australia. He has stated categorically that the name “Rohingya” was taken by “Bengali Muslims who live in Arakan State…most Rohingyas arrived with the British colonialists in the 19th and 20th centuries.” It is true that a handful of Bengali Muslims drifted down to Burma over the centuries, but Professor Selth makes the important point — unknown to Western reporters — that the vast majority of Rohingyas are recent arrivals, their great migration made possible by the fact that Burma was administratively part of British India until 1937, which meant there was no formal border to cross.
Particularly disappointing for many in the West (not to speak of the reactions of Pakistan, Al Jazeera, and Tariq Ramadan) has been what they regard as the unforgivable silence of Aung San Suu Kyi, currently the head of the Myanmar government. For Aung San Suu Kyi was formerly the leader of the nonviolent opposition to the Burmese military, placed under house arrest by the generals, then freed, and awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. For more than two decades she was, for her continued defiance of the generals, and willingness to endure that house arrest, a darling of the international media. Since the end of military rule, which she helped to bring about, she has held a number of important government posts, and is now the State Counsellor (equivalent to Prime Minister) in Myanmar.
But in her continuing refusal to condemn outright the attacks on the Rohingya, and in her insistence that in Myanmar there has been “violence on both sides” — for which there is ample evidence — Aung San Suu Kyi is now seen by many outside Myanmar in quite another light. Many have criticized Aung San Suu Kyi for her silence on the 2012 Rakhine State riots, when, after the rape and killing of a Buddhist woman by three Rohingyas, Buddhists retaliated, and then the violence escalated when hundreds of Rohingyas went on a rampage following Friday prayers at a mosque, throwing rocks and setting fire to houses and buildings. Four Buddhists, among them a doctor and an elderly man, died of multiple knife wounds. Recent accounts in the foreign media ignore all that. For the Western media, the narrative remains the same; the Rohingya are always the victims, and the Buddhist violence against them is always unwarranted.
If we examine the last 150 years of Burmese history, we may find that Madame Suu Kyi has more of a point than her foreign critics think. It is that history that is in the minds of, and explains the behavior today of, the Buddhists of Myanmar. In 1826, after the Anglo-Burmese War, the British annexed Arakan (Rakhine State), where almost all of the 1.1 million Rohingyas now in Myanmar still live, to British India. And they began to encourage Indians, mainly Muslims, to move into Arakan from Bengal as cheap farm labor. They continued to encourage this migration throughout the nineteenth-century. The numbers of Bengali Muslim migrants is impressive. In Akyab District, the capital of Arakan, according to the British censuses of 1872 and 1911, there was an increase in the Muslim population from 58,255 to 178,647, a tripling within forty years. At the beginning of the 20th century, migrants from Bengal were still arriving in Burma at the rate of a quarter million per year. In the peak year of 1927, 480,000 people arrived in Burma, with Rangoon in that year surpassing New York City as the greatest migration port in the world. And many of these migrants were Bengali Muslims who joined the Muslims already in Rakhine State, renaming themselves the Rohingyas. The Buddhists continued to call them, as they still do today, “Bengalis.” And the immigration of Bengali Muslims continued for decades. In a 1955 study published by Stanford University, the authors Virginia Thompson and Richard Adloff concluded that “’the post-war (World War II) illegal immigration of Chittagonians [i.e., Bengali Muslims from Chittagong in East Pakistan] into that area [Arakan state] was on a vast scale, and in the Maungdaw and Buthidaung areas they replaced the [Buddhist] Arakanese.”
The Buddhist Burmese looked on helplessly at the arrival of these hundreds of thousands of Muslims, but there was nothing they could do against the policy of their British colonial masters. During World War II, the British retreat in the face of the Japanese led to a power vacuum, and simmering inter-communal tensions erupted, with the Arakanese Massacres of 1942, when 50,000 Buddhist Rakhines were killed by the Rohingyas in Rakhine (Arakan) state. In retaliation, the Buddhists then killed as many as 40,000 Rohingyas. (In another account, with much lower figures, the Rohingyas killed 20,000 of the Buddhists, who then killed 5,000 of the Rohingyas.) The origins of the mass killing instigated by the Rohingya Muslims in 1942 have a simple explanation: they had been left weapons by the retreating British, who had been assured that the Rohingyas would use the weapons against the Japanese. Instead, as soon as they acquired these arms, the Rohingyas attacked the Buddhists, mainly Arakanese, in Rakhine State, And after World War II, illegal immigration by Bengali Muslims “was on a vast scale.” For the Western media, none of this matters. History doesn’t count. For the Buddhists of Burma, this history matters a great deal.
And what the Rohingya did next also matters. In May, 1946 Rohingya leaders met with Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Muslim leader who founded modern Pakistan, and asked that the northern part of Rakhine state be annexed by East Pakistan. Then, when Jinnah refused to interfere in Burmese affairs, they founded the Mujahid Party in northern Arakan in 1947. The aim of the Mujahid Party was initially to create an autonomous Muslim state in Arakan. The local mujahideen – that’s what the Rohingya warriors proudly called themselves — fought government forces in an attempt to have the mostly Rohingya-populated Mayu peninsula in northern Rakhine State secede from Myanmar (then Burma), and after that secession, the Rohingyas hoped that territory would be annexed by East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). Fighting between the Rohingya and the Burmese state, then, is not a new thing; it has been going on intermittently since 1947, and it was started by the Rohingya. The Rohingya revolt eventually lost momentum in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and many of the Rohingyas surrendered to government forces.
The Muslim insurrection by the Rohingya did not end, but was revived in the 1970s, which in turn led to the Burmese government mounting, in 1978, a huge military operation (Operation King Dragon) that inflicted great damage on the mujahideen, and bought a decade of relative calm. But again the Rohingya rose up against the Burmese state, and in the 1990s the “Rohingya Solidarity Organisation” attacked Burmese authorities near the border with Bangladesh. In other words, this war on the Buddhist Burmese conducted by the Muslim Rohingya has been going on – waxing and waning – ever since that massacre of Buddhist Rakhins in 1942. It is by keeping in mind that history,, and the memory, too, of how the Rohingya tried on several occasions to secede from Burma and become part of East Pakistan, that Buddhist fears of a Muslim takeover of northern Myanmar should be taken seriously, and viewed sympathetically. The Burmese monks who have recently been whipping up anti-Rohingya sentiment are not behaving out of motiveless malignity; they are keenly aware of all this history. The current reports by journalists are singularly one-sided, and lacking in any historical context. Not a single Western reporter has mentioned that 1942 massacre of the Buddhists by the Rohingya; not a single Western reporter has mentioned the attempts by the Rohingya to join Arakan state to East Pakistan. Not a single Western reporter has noted the Rohingya insurrections of the 1970s and 1990s. Not a single Western reporter has provided the data that shows just how many Bengali Muslims poured into Burma in the late 19th and early 20th century, that certainly calls into question their claim that “Rohingya have been living in Arakan from time immemorial.” Not a single Western reporter has noted, either, that the Hui Panthays — a Muslim Chinese people — live in perfect security, free to practice Islam, in Myanmar, perhaps because that doesn’t fit the narrative of anti-Muslim mad monks that has been so successfully peddled in the West. Unlike the Rohingya, the Hui Panthay have not attacked and displaced Buddhists, as the Rohingya, Bengali Muslims, attacked and displaced the Buddhist Rakhine people in parts of Rakhine state.
…
For the Burmese — and not just a handful of monks — the Rohingyas are not a true indigenous people of Myanmar, but the descendants of the Muslims who began arriving from East Bengal in the 19th century. Today’s Rohingyas, for the Buddhists in present-day Myanmar who are leading the anti-Rohingya campaign, are the same people who attacked Buddhists in Rakhine State in 1942, who tried to secede and join Pakistan in 1946, who, as self-described Jihadist warriors (“mujahideen”) conducted a violent insurrection against Burmese authorities that began in 1948 and lasted to the 1950s, in order to make Rakhine an autonomous state under Muslim control, and then, in a second attempt, to possibly have it annexed by Pakistan. These are the same Jihad warriors who conducted an insurrection against the Buddhist government in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. For the Buddhist monks of Myanmar, the Rohingyas are Bengali Muslims– the Buddhists have never called them “Rohingyas” but, rather, “Bengalis” — who migrated south to Burma, and are the local branch of the world-wide Muslim umma that has been in continuous warfare against Buddhists and Buddhism for centuries, and is again becoming more aggressive and violent all over the world.
…
Should the history of Muslim-Buddhist relations in Myanmar be better known, with journalists taking it upon themselves to learn about, and then to transmit, this history, it is possible that the “international community” would address the current violence differently. Imagine the effect on Myanmar’s anxious Buddhists if those now lecturing them so unsympathetically instead demonstrated by their statements that they were well aware of the flood into Myanmar of Muslim migrants over a half-century, recognized that the inter-communal violence in 1942 had started with massacres by the Muslim side against unsuspecting Buddhists, conceded that the Rohingyas had tried for many years, as self-described mujahideen, to seize part of Myanmar, and to make it an autonomous Muslim state, and that it is this past, as well as the actions over many centuries of Muslims against Buddhists (and Hindus) in south Asia, that has deeply affected how the Burmese Buddhists view their own situation.
That might help calm the Burmese Buddhists, make them feel less anxious, now that their fears were not being cavalierly dismissed, but given a sympathetic hearing. And they, in turn, might ratchet down their own violence if they no longer feel quite so alone. It should be possible for the West to come to its senses about the Rohingyas and the Buddhists of Myanmar. What is needed is for the Western media to study the history of the Rohingyas in Myanmar, when they arrived, and from where, and what has been the nature of their interactions with the Buddhists. And the Western journalists on whom we rely will learn that beginning in the 1940s it was the Rohingyas who struck first against the Buddhists, militarily with the massacre of 50,000 in 1942, and diplomatically with the appeal to Pakistan’s president in 1947 to make Arakan (Rakhine State) part of Pakistan, and continued to strike against the Buddhist authorities in Myanmar intermittently, over several decades of conflict. That history can’t be restated often enough.
VMP!
https://www.is.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000005384735.html?ref=rss
Rauhannobelistin toiminta herättää rajua kritiikkiä – Miksi Aung San Suu Kyi vaikenee Myanmarin etnisestä puhdistuksesta?
Mielenosoittajat polttivat Aung San Suu Kyin kuvia Karachissa Pakistanissa. Useissa muslimienemmistöisissä maissa on protestoitu voimakkaasti Myanmarin armeijan raakoja otteita rohingya-vähemmistöä kohtaan. (KUVA: SHAHZAIB AKBER / AOP)
Aung San Suu Kyi oli ihmisoikeusaktivistien pyhimys ja rakastettu demokratian ja tasa-arvon sanansaattaja. Nyt rauhannobelisti kieltää kotimaassaan Myanmarissa tapahtuvan etnisen puhdistuksen. Mitä ihmettä hänen päässään oikein liikkuu?
Aung San Suu Kyi asteli tiistaina 19. syyskuuta televisiokameroiden eteen antamaan kauan odotettua lausuntoa etnisestä puhdistuksesta, josta hänen johtamaansa maata Myanmaria syytetään.
Suu Kyi on yksi maailman tunnetuimmista ihmisoikeusaktivisteista ja rauhan Nobel-palkinnon voittaja. Hänen toivottiin viimein tuomitsevan selkein sanoin Myanmarin kansanmurha.
Suu Kyi esiintyi hillittynä, hiuksissaan tuttu kukka. Hänen suustaan tuli selkeällä englannilla kuitenkin aivan muuta kuin oli toivottu. Mikrofonin takana ei enää ollut kotiarestissa virunut, ihailtu demokratia-aktivisti, vaan ehta poliitikko, Myanmarin valtapuolueen johtaja.
Hän ilmoitti uhmakkaasti, ettei Myanmar pelkää kansainvälisen yhteisön kritiikkiä. Hän sanoi, että hallituksen yrityksiä ratkaista konflikti on haitattu ”syytöksillä ja vastasyytöksillä”. Jo aiemmin Suu Kyi on puhunut ”terroristien” levittämistä vääristä tiedoista, joita on ”ison jäävuoren verran”.
– Meidän täytyy kuunnella heitä kaikkia. Meidän täytyy varmistua, että väitteet perustuvat vankkoihin todisteisiin ennen kuin toimimme. Me haluamme selvittää, mistä tämä pako johtuu. Haluaisimme puhua niille jotka ovat lähteneet ja niille jotka ovat jääneet, Suu Kyi muotoili.
Aung San Suu Kyi puhui uhmakkaasti eikä maininnut rohingya-vähemmistöä kertaakaan.(KUVA: Zuma / MvPhotos)
Ne jotka ovat lähteneet tarkoittaa maan rohingya-vähemmistöön kuuluvia ihmisiä. Heitä on paennut viime vuoden lopulla yltyneiden väkivaltaisuuksien jälkeen naapurimaihin jo yhteensä satojatuhansia. Useiden satojen arvioidaan kuolleen yhteenotoissa.
Myanmarin virallisen kannan mukaan armeija taistelee terroristeja vastaan. YK:n mukaan kyseessä on pitkään valmisteltu etninen puhdistus, jossa ihmisiä ajetaan kodeistaan, kyliä poltetaan ja siviilejä raiskataan.
Suu Kyi ei puheessaan maininnut rohingya-vähemmistön nimeä kertaakaan. Tämä heijastelee sitä, miten maassa suhtaudutaan kansaan.
– Hän käyttää rohingya-sanaa ainoastaan viitatessaan terroristiryhmään, mikä tarkoittaa, että se on ainoa identiteetti, mihin hän mielessään yhdistää rohingyat ja miten hän toivoo myös kansainvälisen yhteisön ajattelevan, konfliktia tutkinut professoriPenny Green kommentoi CNN:lle.
Vuoden 1991 Nobelin rauhanpalkinnon voittaja Aung San Suu Kyi kuvattiin kotiarestissa elokuussa 1994.(KUVA: AOP)
SUU KYI on tähän asti ollut ihmisoikeusaktivistien sankari, lähes pyhänä pidetty tasa-arvon ja demokratian ikoni, joka on ollut valmis valtaviin henkilökohtaisiin uhrauksiin, jotta ihmisoikeudet toteutuisivat. Mitä ihmettä hänelle on tapahtunut?
Osaltaan kyse lienee puhtaasta poliittisesta taktikoinnista. Asiantuntijat ovat arvioineet Suu Kyin laskelmoivan käytöksensä tarkkaan, sillä rohingyoille annettu tuki voisi syödä hänen poliittista suosiotaan. Tähän puuttui jo aiemmin toinen Nobel-voittaja, arkkipiispaDesmond Tutu, joka osoitti avoimen kirjeen ”rakkaalle pikkusisarelleen”.
– Jos hiljaisuus on se poliittinen hinta, jonka maksat noususta Myanmarin korkeimpaan virkaan, se on liian korkea, Tutu kirjoitti.
Vuoden 2006 nobelisti Mohammed Yunus oli suorempi kommenteissaan New York Timesille.
– Hänen ei olisi pitänyt saada Nobel-palkintoa, jos hän on valmis sanomaan: ”pahoittelen, olen poliitikko eivätkä demokratian pelisäännöt miellytä minua”. Koko maailma oli hänen puolellaan vuosikymmeniä, mutta nyt hänestä on tullut entisen Aung San Suu Kyin irvikuva, joka tuhoaa ihmisoikeuksia ja kieltää kansalaisuuden rohingyoilta.
Samalla kun kansainvälinen reaktio puheeseen oli pettymys, Myanmarissa puhetta kiitettiin. Rohingya-ennakkoluulot ja suoranainen viha ovat yleisiä Myanmarin buddhalaisten keskuudessa.
Nuori nainen kertoi kantansa poskitarralla mielenosoituksessa Rangoonissa. (KUVA: LYNN BO BO / AOP)
VIHAN taustalla on pitkä ja monimutkainen historia. Viime vuosina maassa ovat päässeet vapaasti ääneen monet vaikutusvaltaiset ääribuddhalaiset munkit, jotka ovat levittäneet muslimivastaisuutta. Onkin vaikea tietää, kuinka pitkälle välinpitämättömyys konfliktiin heijastelee Suu Kyin henkilökohtaisia näkemyksiä.
Aung San Suu Kyin isä oli juhlittu itsenäisyyssankari Aung San, joka johti maan armeijaa. Suu Kyi kuuluu syntyperältään maan eliittiin ja korkeimpaan buddhalaisluokkaan.
Kaksi Suu Kyin elämäkertaa kirjoittanut Pete Popham kirjoittaa Independent-lehdessä, ettei pidä häntä buddhistikiihkoilijana. Ulkomailla opiskellut, monien muslimien kanssa ystävystynyt ja aktivistivuosinaan työskennellyt Suu Kyi on aina vaikuttanut liberaalilta.
Näyttäisi siis siltä, että tilanne on sisäpoliittisen tasapainoilun tulosta. Puheen retoriikka muistutti erehdyttävästi samaa kieltä, jota käyttivät Suu Kyin kotiarestiin 15 vuodeksi lukinneet kenraalit.
Kun Suu Kyi vapautui kotiarestistaan vuonna 2010, hän ilmoitti – nyttemmin katsottuna ehkä pahaenteisesti – että hän haluaa tulla ”nähdyksi poliitikkona, ei ihmisoikeusikonina”.
Heistä kriisissä on kyse: YK:n edustaja on kuvannut rohingyoja kansaksi, jolla on todennäköisesti vähiten ystäviä maailmassa. Pakolaiset jonottivat ruokaa Ukhiyan pakolaisleirillä Bangladeshissa. (KUVA: AOP)
Popham muistuttaa, että tuossa yhteydessä Suu Kyi myi ihanteensa ja hyväksyi armeijan sorvaaman uuden perustuslain vallanjaon. Siinä armeijalle taattiin muun muassa valtava edustus parlamenttiin ja sen haltuun annettiin sisä-, puolustus- sekä rajavalvontaministeriöt.
– Se oli traaginen virhe. Hän on maan vaikutusvaltaisin siviili hallituksessa, mutta ilman oikeutta vastustaa tai hallita päätöksiä. Sen sijaan, että hän haastaisi armeijan, hän on nyt sen sylikoira ja syntipukki. Kenraali Ming Aung Hlaing, joka johtaa operaatiota rohingya-vähemmistöä vastaan, pääsee pälkähästä, Popham kirjoittaa.
– Armeija vahtii kaikkia hänen sanojaan. Yksikin harha-askel muslimikysymyksessä ja he voivat hankkiutua hänestä eroon, Suu Kyin NLD-puolueen edustaja ja entinen kenraali U Win Htein totesi New York Timesin mukaan.
Vaikka Suu Kyi jollakin keinolla puuttuisikin tilanteeseen, on hänen uskottavuutensa kyseenalainen. Rohingya-kriisin sekä muiden maan sisällä käytyjen etnisten konfliktien aikana Suu Kyi on viime vuosina asettunut armeijan puolelle.
– Hän on uskollisempi omalle väelleen kuin vähemmistöille. Veri on sakeampaa kuin lupaus kansallisesta sovinnosta, Kachin-vähemmistön johtaja Hkapra Hkun Awng totesi New York Timesille.
Rohingya-pakolainen Thenkhalin leirillä Bangladeshissa. (KUVA: Zuma / MvPhotos)
Elina Koivisto
Kuka auttaisi kansaa vailla ystäviä?
YK:n edustaja kuvasi vuonna 2009 rohingyoja kansaksi, jolla on todennäköisesti vähiten ystäviä maailmassa. Myanmar ei tunnusta heitä kansalaisikseen eivätkä naapurivaltiot halua heitä.
Islaminuskoiset rohingyat pitävät itseään arabikauppiaiden jälkeläisinä ja tutkijoiden mukaan he ovat asuneet alueella vuosisatoja. Buddhalaisenemmistöinen Myanmar ei kuitenkaan pidä heitä alkuperäiskansana eikä edes kansalaisina, vaan laittomina siirtolaisina Bangladeshista.
1970-luvun sotilasjunttahallinnosta asti rohingyat ovat kohdanneet monenlaista syrjintää ja vainoa. Heidän liikkumistaan ja matkustamistaan on rajoitettu ja heidän maitaan on takavarikoitu. Aiemmin heidän lapsilukuaan pyrittiin myös rajaamaan. Rohingyojen asuttama maan luoteisosa on maan köyhintä aluetta.
Mitä tilanteelle sitten voidaan? YK:n pääsihteeri Antonio Guterres on kasannut vastuuta Aung San Suu Kyille.
– Jos hän ei käännä tilannetta nyt toiseen suuntaan, tästä tragediasta tulee aivan hirvittävä enkä näe miten tämän voi enää korjata tulevaisuudessa, Guterres totesiBBC:lle viikonloppuna ennen Suu Kyin puhetta.
YK on peräänkuuluttanut myös alueellista yhteistyötä, mutta kymmenjäsenisen Etelä-Aasian maiden Asean-yhteistyöjärjestön yritykset ovat olleet vaisuja. ThaimaalaislehtiThe Nation on syyttänyt järjestöä kovasanaisesti “avunannosta murhiin ja sekasortoon”.
Rohingyat vaikuttavat nimittäin olevan kaikkien hylkiöitä. Syyskuun puoliväliin mennessä arvioidaan, että yli 400 000 rohingyaa – kolmasosa koko kansasta – on vuosien mittaan paennut Myanmarista naapurimaihin, ennen kaikkea Bangladeshiin, jossa tilanne on tukala. Syyskuussa Nepal ilmoitti kiristävänsä rajavalvontaa pakolaisten varalta ja hieman aiemmin Intia kertoi karkottavansa arviolta 40 000 rohingyaa. Thaimaa on valmis päästämään rohingyoja maahan, mutta aikoo palauttaa heidät heti kun mahdollista.
Monet pelkäävät toisintoa vuoden 2012 tapahtumista, jolloin 140 000 lähti pakoon ja pari sataa kuoli Rakhinen osavaltiossa alkaneissa yhteenotoissa. Vuoden 2015 pakolaiskriisissä ihmissalakuljettajat kuljettivat haurailla veneillä tuhansia rohingyoja naapurimaihin ja väitteiden mukaan osa hylättiin kuolemaan merelle.
Rohingyoja puolustavat aktivistit ovat verranneet tämänhetkistä tilannetta jopa vuoden 1995 Srebrenican verilöylyyn, jossa yli 8 000 Bosnian muslimia surmattiin Jugoslavian sodassa huolimatta YK:n oletetusta suojelusta.
Brookings-instituutti-ajatushautomon tutkija Lex Rieffel maalaa tilanteesta synkän kuvan: jos Suu Kyi päättäisi erota virastaan, mitä jotkut ovat vaatineet, vaikeutuisi rohingyojen asema entisestään. Voimakas tuomitseminen kääntäisi maan vahvat kenraalit häntä vastaan ja veisi loputkin vaikutusmahdollisuudet.
– Maailmalla ei ole tehokkaita mekanismeja tällaisten ongelmien ratkaisuun. Parasta lienee tarjota tarpeeksi humanitääristä apua näiden konfliktien viattomille uhreille, alueella useita kertoja vieraillut Rieffel kirjoittaa.
The Economist -lehden mukaan ainoastaan talouspakotteet voisivat olla tehokas keino tilanteen ratkaisemiseksi.
– Maan armeijaan ei pysty helposti vaikuttamaan, mutta näyttää siltä, että taloudellinen ja diplomaattinen eristäminen vaikuttivat kenraalien haluun luovuttaa valtaa aiemmin, lehti kirjoittaa viitaten vuoden 2008 perustuslakiuudistukseen, joka lopetti sotilasjuntan.
https://www.is.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000005384735.html?ref=rss
YK: Myanmarin sotilaat joukkoraiskasivat järjestelmällisesti rohingya-vähemmistön naisia
https://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000005446725.html
Myanmarin armeijan kenraali siirrettiin syrjään joukkoraiskaussyytösten jälkeen
https://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000005447379.html
https://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000005446725.html
Myanmarin armeijan kenraali siirrettiin syrjään joukkoraiskaussyytösten jälkeen
https://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000005447379.html
Hesari ei vakuuta tällä kirjoituksellaan. Taisin mainita tästä herrasta jo aikaisemmin. Buddhalainen haluaa rauhaa ja sen ylläpitäminen vaatii sen että rauhanrikkojat poistetaan ympäriltä.
https://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000005499058.html
https://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000005499058.html