Why Won't #Obama Speak Out for the #Rohingya?

Published on Monday, November 19, 2012 by Common Dreams
Why Won't Obama Speak Out for the Rohingya?
by Tom Andrews
U.S. President Barack Obama, left, meets with Myanmar's President Thein Sein at the Yangon Parliament building in Yangon, Myanmar, Monday, Nov. 19, 2012. (AP/Carolyn Kaster)
Why is President Obama meeting with leaders in Burma who are systematically fomenting hatred and violence that has already claimed innocent lives, destroyed entire villages and displaced tens of thousands?

U.S. President Barack Obama, left, meets with Myanmar's President Thein Sein at the Yangon Parliament building in Yangon, Myanmar, Monday, Nov. 19, 2012. (AP/Carolyn Kaster)
President Obama traveled to Burma to recognize progress that one of the most brutal regimes on the planet has made toward democracy. Now that modest improvements have been made or pledged by the regime, and Aung San Suu Kyi is free, the U.S. government has decided to lift the economic and diplomatic pressure that made reform in Burma possible.
That is bad news if you are part of an ethnic minority in Burma. And it is life threatening if you are a member of the Rohingya Muslim minority.
Systematic hate speech and entreaties for the local population to isolate and attack the Rohingya Muslim minority is pervasive in western Burma. The Burmese military stand aside or actively participate in attacks against innocent men, women and children. More than one hundred people have already lost their lives, tens of thousands have lost their homes, and over one hundred thousand have been displaced.
What is the U.S. government doing about it? Sunday, President Obama became the first President to visit Burma. He is there to recognize and congratulate the military dominated government for making modest reforms toward democracy. As hundreds of thousands of Rohingya continue to live in fear, President Obama is congratulating a government that wants to ethnically cleanse every one of them from Burma.
Burma's President, Thein Sein-who Obama will be sitting down to dine with-has been actively fomenting hatred against the Rohingya community. He has gone so far to ask the United Nations to help him ethnically cleanse Burma by forcing 800,000 Rohingya people out of their home villages and into refugee camps or out of the country altogether!
I saw what violence and persecution looks like first hand in Burma when I snuck into Kachin State last May. I saw entire villages abandoned, its population driven into makeshift camps filled with desperate people without adequate food, shelter of medical care. I spoke with families whose loved ones had been tortured, raped, incarcerated or killed by Burmese troops. Without international pressure on the regime, I know what the Rohingya are experiencing will only continue to get worse.
An entire people are under attack not because of what they have done but because of who they are. Instead of traveling to Burma, President Obama should be leading the call for a United Nations observer mission to investigate the violence in Rakhine State, deter the escalation of the violence and hold the perpetrators accountable. The leading role that the Obama administration played in scaling back sanctions on Burma obligates the U.S. government to act urgently to hold the Burmese government to its responsibilities to protect its ethnic populations.
We've seen these warning signs before. The hateful rhetoric of Rakhine monks is reminiscent of the hateful propaganda directed at the Tutsi population and their sympathizers leading up to, and during the Rwandan genocide. While renewing calls for their expulsion from Burma, several Rakhine monks have urged the local population to sever all relations with the Rohingya, including trade and the provision of humanitarian aid and have called on Rakhines to expose Rohingya sympathizers as national traitors, potentially exposing them to violent attacks.
There is no word to describe the response from the United States and the international community other than inadequate. The conditions that led to two major outbreaks of mass killings in the last few months are worsening daily. Greater loss of life and displacement are a certainty without a change of course.
In a day and age in which technology affords us the ability to connect with people across the world, we can no longer claim ignorance to the fact that the Rohingya people are being slaughtered, displaced, and terrorized. When we look back on the books of history, will this be another example of when we failed to show up or showed up too late?

Source

Tom Andrews, a former Member of Congress from the first Congressional District of Maine, is President and Chief Executive Officer of United to End Genocide. Tom most recently served as National Director of Win Without War, a coalition of forty-two national membership organizations including the National Council of Churches, the NAACP, the National Organization of Women, the Sierra Club, and MoveOn.  He is also co-founder of New Security Action.

#SuuKyi, #Clinton Discuss Refugees

The Burmese opposition leader begins her US visit with a meeting with the top American diplomat.

RFA

Aung San Suu Kyi (l) speaks with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (r) at the State Department in Washington, Sept. 18, 2012.

Burma's opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi opened her visit to the United States with talks Tuesday with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the welfare of Burmese refugees in America.

The 67-year-old Nobel laureate, who arrived on Monday for a nearly three-week visit, met with Clinton at her office in the State Department.

The top U.S. diplomat briefly spoke to Aung San Suu Kyi on the resettlement of Burmese refugees in the United States and the visitor's trip next week to Fort Wayne in Indiana state, home to a large number of Burmese.

There is "so much excitement and enthusiasm about the fact that you can actually come," Clinton told Aung San Suu Kyi, according to journalists and photographers who were allowed a couple of minutes to witness their meeting before they went into closed talks.

Aung San Suu Kyi said she had heard about Fort Wayne while tracking Burmese news when she was under house arrest for nearly two decades during the rule of the previous military junta.

Since 2006, about 55,000 Burmese refugees, most whom were living in Thailand, have been resettled in the United States. Many of them had fled nearly five decades of harsh military rule and fighting between government military troops and armed ethnic groups. 

Aung San Suu Kyi will take part later Tuesday in a Washington forum organized by the Asia Society on the ongoing transition in Burma and the challenges facing the country. Clinton will make introductory remarks at the event.

Landmark trip

Clinton made a landmark trip to Burma nine months ago in the first visit by a U.S. secretary of state in more than 50 years to begin reconciliation with the nominally civilian government of President Thein Sein who took over in March last year.

The two countries then named ambassadors to each other's capitals, formalizing diplomatic relations for the first time since Washington withdrew its ambassador in 1990.

The United States also eased investment and financial restrictions to reciprocate nascent reforms in Burma but said it will maintain an import ban amid continuing human rights and ethnic conflict concerns.

The Obama administration is believed to be considering easing a ban on imports from Burma into the U.S., one of the main remaining sanctions imposed on the country. The U.S. Congress last month renewed the ban for another year.
Aung San Suu Kyi may also meet President Barack Obama during her trip, which is her first to the U.S. in 40 years.

The White House has yet to announce whether she will meet Obama but sources say he could hold talks with her despite his hectic re-election campaign.

Just before Aung san Suu Kyi landed at the Dulles airport in Washington Monday, Thein Sein ordered the release of another 514 prisoners, including dozens of political detainees, in an apparent bid to pave the way for the U.S. to further ease sanctions ahead of his trip to attend the U.N. meeting.

Aung San Suu Kyi is also scheduled to attend a high-level meeting organized by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, a day before Thein Sein addresses the General Assembly, reports have said.

Reported by RFA's Burmese service. Written in English by Chris Billing and Parameswaran Ponnudurai.

Copyright © 1998-2011 Radio Free Asia. All rights reserved.

Burma Lets the Rohingya Burn

Associated Press//Khin Maung Win
Police walk toward burning buildings in Sittwe on June 12.

By MATTHEW F. SMITH

Bangkok

The West's faith in Burma isn't being repaid. When U.S. President Barack Obama lifted restrictions on investments by American companies in the country last month, state security forces were still committing killings, rape and mass arrests against Rohingya Muslims in Arakan state. These abuses came after the authorities failed to protect both Rohingya and Arakan Buddhists during sectarian violence that erupted in early June and which continues today.

The Rohingya, largely scorned by Burmese society, are treated as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Because they were stripped of citizenship in 1982, even in the best of times they are subjected to forced labor, arbitrary detentions, beatings and restrictions on movement.

But they've had it worse since June. We can trace the immediate causes of the violence to the rape and murder of a young Buddhist woman, allegedly by three Muslim men, which was followed on June 3 by the retaliatory massacre of 10 Burmese Muslim travelers in the town of Toungop. Thousands of Rohingya Muslims in northern Arakan soon rioted, and then violence quickly spread to the state capital Sittwe and beyond.

Despite the large Burmese military presence in the state, local Arakan and Rohingya residents described how the authorities failed to protect them through the days of grisly violence. A displaced Arakan mother of five told me how she witnessed a mob of Rohingya kill and nearly behead her husband, chopping off his arm. A displaced Rohingya woman explained how an Arakan mob beat her and her family in their home, killing her brother-in-law when he attempted to flee.

While the army eventually contained the violence in Sittwe, local security forces still opened fire on Rohingya as they attempted to extinguish fires set by groups of Arakan. A 36-year-old Rohingya man from the largest Muslim neighborhood in Sittwe told me that an Arakan mob set fire to his family's home in the presence of security forces. "When the people tried to put out the fires," he said, "the paramilitary shot at us."

Scores of witnesses to the violence say the same thing. "The government could have stopped this," a young Arakan man told us in Sittwe. Just days later an ethnic Rohingya elder used the exact same words: "The government could have stopped this."

Testimonials such as this should make observers doubt the government's word. The government claims 78 people died in the violence. Human Rights Watch fears the number is significantly higher.

In the predominantly Muslim townships of northern Arakan, state security forces have killed and rounded up fleeing Rohingya in violent mass arrests, holding detainees incommunicado and subjecting them to beatings and torture. Over 100,000 people have been displaced and the government has restricted humanitarian access to the Rohingya community, leaving many in dire need of food, shelter and medical care.

Successive Burmese governments have long abused both the Rohingya and Arakan populations—the Arakan because of their fierce ethnic nationalism, and the Rohingya because of a wholesale denial the group has any place in Burma, a view shared by much of Burma's population. The abuses we're seeing now are simply an extension of decades of state policies of persecution.

These human-rights abuses are worrying because they raise doubts about President Thein Sein's political-reform program. To his credit, he has instituted important changes in Burma since taking office in March 2011. Hundreds of political prisoners have been released, freedoms of assembly have been respected, and the democratic opposition now holds several seats in parliament. This is surely cause for hope.

Nevertheless, because these changes were carefully planned, it appears the government is now willfully ignoring the Rohingya stain on its human-rights record. Leave aside for a moment the fact that Burma's discriminatory citizenship law denies 800,000 to one million Rohingya their rights. Now, President Thein Sein proposes to address the crisis in Arakan by expelling them from the country. This would be the "only solution," he told the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Before Westerners treat the Rohingya story as a remote incident, consider that Arakan state is home to tens of billions of dollars worth of verified natural gas deposits. U.S. firms hope to compete in this area with Chinese, Korean, and Indian oil companies that have been there for years, but now it's in a state of emergency. If the government is violating human rights, businesses can't depend on the maintenance of law and order. Aung San Suu Kyi argued as much a few months ago.

Transition from authoritarian rule will not come without setbacks. But no one is served when the state fails to address the gravity of such abuses. Rather than generate undue optimism for the country's investment prospects, world leaders need to let Burma's rulers know they will not be rewarded for continuing these atrocities.

Mr. Smith is a researcher with Human Rights Watch and an author of the new report, "The Government Could Have Stopped This: Sectarian Violence and Ensuing Abuses in Burma's Arakan State," published last week.