Dr. Firoz Mahboob Kamal
The pure evil of state-terrorism
The double standard has become the most established norm in world politics; one rule for the Muslims and another rule for the non-Muslims is now visible everywhere. If a terrorist attack takes place in a western city by a Muslim, the western governments, the European Union, the media outfits, even the UN Security Council, spare no time to condemn it. The US President Donald Trump quickly grabs it as an opportunity to express anger and hatred against Islam. Such condemnation by the western leaders is very selective -only to promote their anti-Muslim bias and animosity. Because of such hateful mindset, any act of terrorism even by a lone Muslim bomber –without any involvement of any Muslim state or institution, is labeled as Islamic terrorism. Thus, Islam –the religion of 1.6 billion Muslims gets vilified. But such condemnation doesn’t happen if the Muslims become the target of non-Muslim terrorists.
The Islamophobic media of both the eastern and the western world have been very successful to hide the truth that the worst and the most barbaric acts of terrorism is not taking place in any of the western cities or villages. Nor by any Muslim state, group or individual. Whereas, it is an everyday crime against the Muslims in villages and cities in Myanmar, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, Mindanao, Xinjiang, Chechnya, Mali and many other parts of the Muslim World. Moreover, the crimes are not committed by any sleeping cell terrorists; nor by any knife or home-made bomb. It is the work of massive military might of the occupying countries like US, Russia, Israel, India, and China. The deaths and destructions caused by the sleeping cell terrorists are indeed peanut in comparison to that caused by these state-run terrorists. Bombs, drones, barrel bombs, depleted uranium bombs, and missiles work as the effective killing machines in the hands of these state-owned killers.
The destruction of Grozny, Gaza, Kobani, Aleppo, Mosul, Ramadi, Kirkuk, Fallujah, Raqqa and many other Muslims cities and forceful eviction of the inhabitants of these cities are indeed the textbook examples of the state-run terrorism. They have been very successful in killing more than a million of Muslims and evicting many more millions from their homes. In Arakan, Myanmar Army is following the same roadmap. In the past, the forces of the same state-terrorism almost wholly cleansed the Red Indians from America, the Aborigines from Australia and Maoris from New Zealand. But the perpetrators of such pure evil on earth are not called Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist or Chinese terrorist. Even they are not called terrorist either. The word “terrorist” is reserved only for a Muslim. It is an obvious double standard.
Because of such anti-Islamic bias and hatred, one can’t find condemnation and anger against the brutal state terrorism that kills, rapes and blazes the Muslim men, women, and children in different parts of the world. The case of genocidal ethnic cleansing in the Rakhine state of Myanmar is indeed the recent example of the most brutal form of state terrorism. In less than three weeks, more than half a million people are evicted from their ancestral homes. More than three thousand Rohingya Muslim men, women and children are slaughtered. Thousands of the women are raped, and more than half of the Rohingya villages are burnt down to ashes and made entirely inhabitable. The perpetrators of the crimes are the Army, police, security apparatus, state administration, the Buddhist monks and the racist mobs. Although all the terrorist acts in Arakan are exclusively committed by the Buddhists, no body calls them the Buddhist terrorist. It shows how the corrosive propaganda shapes people’s political narratives.
The worst crime and the lie
Those who can kill, rape, torture and ethnically cleanse people without an iota of remorse, can also tell massive lies without any hesitation. The Myanmar Government -especially its Army, is a perfect example of that. Recently the Army claimed that its recent operation started only after the attack of Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on police posts. The Army also denies any ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims. But the report recently published by the UN human rights office (the Guardian, 11/10/2017) tells exactly the opposite. The investigators of the UN organization found proofs that the Army’s “clearance operations” began before the insurgent attacks on police posts on 25 August. The catalog of crimes included killings, torture, rape and even rape of children. The UN report also tells that the Myanmar security forces purposely destroyed the property of the Rohingyas. They scorched their dwellings in the northern Rakhine State -not only to drive the population out of the area, but also to prevent them from returning to their homes. The UN report mentions that landmines were planted along the border to stop the return.
The UN report also exposed some horrendous crimes committed by the Army against the young Rohingya people. For example, it quoted a 12-year-old girl from Rathedaung township of Arakan. The girl said: “The security forces surrounded our house and started shooting. It was a situation of panic. They shot my sister in front of me. She was only seven years old. She cried and told me to run. I tried to protect her and care for her, but we had no medical assistance on the hillside, and she was bleeding so much that after one day she died. I buried her myself.” The girl didn’t know what happened to her mother and four brothers, nor about her father who was jailed a month earlier. The UN report also gave a description how the security forces -often joined by the mob of armed Rakhine Buddhists, destroyed houses, fields, food stocks, crops and livestock of the Rohingya people. It is the deliberate destruction of properties and houses to make the prospect of Rohingya Muslims returning to normal lives “almost impossible.” The villages, houses, water sources, crops, shops, food sources and livestock of the Rohingya Muslims have been so severely devastated that if the Myanmar government is forced to take them back, they will have nowhere to go. They can only be jam-packed only in concentration camps -as happened to those who returned after the similar previous evictions.
Now, the architects of state-terrorism have started to manufacture new lies. While the Myanmar government’s genocidal crime of ethnic cleansing has been exposed worldwide, they are now trying to hide it in every possible way. Telling lies has been taken as the easiest way. Today (14/10/2017), while talking to the Al Jazeera reporter, the immigration minister of Myanmar claimed that the exodus of the Rohingya Muslims was pre-planned by themselves to present it like ethnic cleansing to others. This is indeed a desperate move of the government to hide its despicable crimes. This way they want to establish their innocence. As if, the Rohingya Muslims killed, raped and evicted their people themselves! Probably, sometimes they will say, the Army only tried to prevent it! While the Muslim villages were set on fire, they circulated similar lies. They claimed that Muslim communities are burnt by the Muslims themselves.
The UN’s moral failure
Allowing a malicious crime to take its toll is another crime. It is a crime of deliberate omission. Especially, if it is within the capacity of an organization like the UN to stop it. Myanmar is not a significant military power; the UN could easily and quickly stop this tool of the state-run terrorism if it had wished. Moreover, what else could be the most humanitarian service to the worst victims of an appalling crime than this? In fact, such a role of the UN is an indicator to tell whether the organization is still morally alive or not. But the UN failed on that count. Whereas, those who run the UN didn’t have any doubt about the gravity of the crime of Myanmar government. Even the UN Secretary-General, Mr. Antonio Guterres, had to say that Rohingya people are the “fastest growing refugees in history.” The UN Human Right Commission labeled it as the “textbook case of ethnic cleansing.” The international human rights organizations identified them as the “most persecuted minority” on earth. But the UN’s most powerful body called the Security Council didn’t show any intention to stop the crime. It is shameful as well as awful that the Security Council couldn’t find any time to discuss such a terrible act of evil even in three weeks’ time, let alone stop it. Instead, the state-run terrorism in Myanmar gained some added brutality because of visible appeasement by some veto-owning member countries like China and Russia. Therefore, the genocidal cleansing by the Myanmar government received more mileage to continue unfettered.
However, after a long lingering tactic, the members of the UN Security Council could afford to sit in a meeting on 28th of September, 20017. But in the meeting, they could only expose their moral death. A wolf can’t the see the homicidal crime of another wolf. Those who are running genocidal massacres in Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Xinjiang and turning cities into rubbles, how can they condemn the crime of Myanmar Army? Because of their moral death, they failed to perceive the ongoing crime against the Rohingya Muslims, let alone condemn it. Therefore, the UN session ended without a single word against the perpetrators of the crime in Myanmar. As if, they have seen nothing and have heard nothing.
In fact, such moral death is not new for the UN. Because of the moral death, the UN’s Security Council stayed only as a dead wood while the horrendous genocide took place in Bosnia in 1992, Rwanda in 1994 and Cambodia in 1975-79. In Srebrenica in Bosnia, the UN peacekeepers were even complicit in the massacre of seven thousand Bosnian Muslims. From the UN-run so-called safe haven, the UN’s Dutch peace-keepers handed over the Bosnian Muslims to the Serb killers only to be killed in the nearby killing field. This time too, the UN Security Council has switched off its role to save the Rohingya Muslims from the Burmese genocidal wolves.
Such collective failure of the UN Security Council indeed owes to the awful reality of the world’s current geopolitics. Not only the killing fields of Myanmar, the UN Security Council too, is embedded with the people who have an obvious love for the horrendous killers of other parts of the world. Hence, like the genocide in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda, the genocide in Arakan couldn’t be stopped either. For the same reason, the brutal occupation of Palestine and Kashmir continues with all of its cruelties. The UN itself is hostage to states that carry not only the legacy of genocidal World Wars but also celebrate the victory in hundreds of other colonial wars –many of them also led to genocidal ethnic cleansings. In such a state of global moral collapse, the state-run terrorism survives not only as the Burmese peculiarity. The US Army in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, the Chinese Army in Xinjiang, the Russian Air Force in Syria and the Indian Army in Kashmir are committing the same evil. The perpetrators of such state-run terrorism although differ in race, religion or language, but they are the true ideological cousins. Because of such ideological kinship, they couldn’t show an iota of moral ability to utter a single word of condemnation against the Burmese criminals.
The policy of appeasement
Whoever stands silently in front of a killer, can’t be a friend of the victim. Such silence or inaction indeed appease and encourage only the killer. In the Holy Qur’an, Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’ala labeled the Muslims as the best people on earth. They are bestowed with such a supreme status only for three reasons: 1). they do the good deeds, 2). eradicate the crimes and 3). they believe in Allah Sub’hana wa Ta’la. (Sura Al-Imran, verse 110). Hence, a Muslim can never be a friend or appeaser of a crime, let alone doing it. But in the case of Rohingya Muslims, the issue is not mere appeasement and encouragement of the crime; it is much worse than that. The countries like Russia, India, Japan, and China are not the silent appeasers, they have declared their solidarity with the brutality and ethnic cleansing policy of Myanmar government.
Only the people with proven moral death, show silence or inaction towards the terrible crimes. It is indeed a visible indicator of moral death. Mr. Norendra Modi showed such moral death while he was the Chief Minister of Gujrat in India. He presided over the slaughtering of more than two thousands Indian Muslims and rape of Muslim women in Gujrat. Being a terrorist with Muslims’ blood in his hand, Mr. Modi discovered anti-Muslim co-believers in the Burmese capital of Naypyidaw. Hence he rushed to Myanmar to say a bravo to his ideological cousins for the accomplished crime that he couldn’t carry out against the Indian Muslims. In wars, such moral death of civil and military elites gets easily pronounced –as seen in the genocidal World Wars and wars of occupation and ethnic cleansing in the past. Such people can take people gleefully to the gas chambers or slit throat of innocent men, women, and children. People’s life, liberty, chastity, and sanctity do not matter to these morally dead people. They are concerned only with their own political, racial and economic gains. Because of such moral death, 75 million people had to die in two World Wars. And the Red Indians in America and the Aborigines in Australia had to meet ethnic cleansing. Because of similar moral death, the cities are bombed to rubbles, and millions of people are killed in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Palestine. It is a stern reality that the Rohingya Muslims have been subject to similar morally dead people for almost seven decades.
Deaths, rapes and mass eviction of the Rohingya Muslims owe not only to the moral death of the ruling elite of Myanmar. Foreign actors –especially the elites of the UN and the rulers of countries like India, China, Russia, and Japan are also contributing to the crime for decades. On 5th of October 2017, London’s daily the Guardian published an alarming report. It exposed the UN’s ongoing severe internal problem. One of the UN’s own commissioned consultant submitted a report on Myanmar in May 2017 depicting the horrendous violation of human rights against these soft targets of racism. His research could find Myanmar Army’s huge preparation for a cleansing operation against the Rohingya Muslims within a very short time. He predicted a severe deterioration of the situation in Arakan within six months. But the UN bosses ignored his critical report and even suppressed its publication. The prediction proved to be hundred percent true in September in 2017. Thus the UN shows its severe paralysis to receive any important signals from its nerve centers. Because of similar sensory paralysis in the past, the UN remained disconnected from horrendous genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. The UN failed not only to discharge its duty but also kept the whole world in complete darkness about the ongoing horrendous crime on the planet.
Forgery of history and the blueprint of genocide
To justify the genocidal ethnic cleansing, the Burmese racists distorted Arakan’s actual history. They circulate a lie that the Rohingya Muslims are all illegal immigrants from Bengal. Whereas, the truth is otherwise. In most of the history, Arakan was not a part of Myanmar. It was an independent state till 1784 and was a seat of Muslim sultanate with majority Muslim population. Even the south-eastern part of Bangladesh with its most significant port city of Chittagong was a part of it. Since it lies on the bank of Bay of Bengal, it was easily accessible to the Arab traders who came to Arakan to preach Islam. As a result, hundreds of thousands of local people converted to Islam –as happened in Bangladesh, India, South-East Asia and many other parts of the world. Many of the Arab people also settled in this fertile piece of land. The independent state of Arakan was occupied by a Burmese invader in 1784. As result of this brutal foreign occupation, thousands of Arakan Muslims had to flee to the neighboring state of Bengal to escape persecution and death –as it is happening now.
Image source: Wikipedia
In 1824, Arakan was occupied by the British. Because of this shift in power, many of the displaced Muslims returned to their ancestral land. In 1948, after the departure of the British colonialists, Arakan again fell in the hands of Burmese nationalists. During the previous occupations, the original name of Arakan was never changed. But the new Burmese occupiers gave a new name and new narrative to justify the ethnic cleansing of its Muslim population. “Rakhine” –the name of a Burmese Buddhist tribe of Arakan was made the official name of historical Arakan. Now it stands as a fully occupied and colonized state of Myanmar.
As per strategy of ethnic cleansing, the Muslim population in Arakan is continuously decimated, and the number of Burmese Buddhist settlers has been increased by planned migration from other parts of Myanmar. Now the Burmese Buddhists make two-thirds of the total population of Arakan. Such demographic decline of the Rohingya Muslims gives enough testimony to the success of the ethnic cleansing strategy of Myanmar government. In 1952, the Rohingya Muslims were 1.2 million (Source: Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar, London’s Queen Mary University’s research study, published in 2015). Now it is 1.1 million. So there is 8% reduction in Rohingya population in last 65 years –which looks bizarre and unthinkable in comparison to huge population increase in Bangladesh and Pakistan. In the same period, the population in Bangladesh showed more than four times increase. In Pakistan, the increase was six folds. As per the census of 1951, in former East Pakistan, the population was 42 million; and in 2017 it is estimated to be 170 million. As per the same census, the population was 33.7 million in former West Pakistan in1951; and in 2017, it is 207 million. It shows how the population of the Rohingya Muslims is continuously annihilated as per a blueprint of ethnic cleansing. In fact, such cleansing only had some pauses in the past but never stopped. And now, the cleansing of Muslims from Arakan has been given a final and an accelerated speed.