Buddhists massacre Muslims in Myanmar, and the country is run by a Nobel Peace Prize winner. Is this true and how is it possible?

Myanmar was again in the spotlight of the world press: on July 1, a mob of Buddhists burned down a mosque in the village of Hpakant, Kachin State. The attackers were irritated by the fact that a Muslim prayer building was built too close to a Buddhist temple. A week earlier, a similar incident occurred in the province of Pegu (Bago). A mosque was also destroyed there, and a local resident, a Muslim, was also beaten.

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Such incidents are not uncommon in modern Myanmar. This state of Southeast Asia borders on China, Laos, Thailand, India and Bangladesh. From Bangladesh, with a population of 170 million, Muslims are illegally resettled in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, with a population of 55 million. Those who call themselves Rohingya have traveled this path many years ago. They settled in the state of Rakhine (Arakan), a historical land for the Myanmar people, the cradle of the Burmese nation. Settled but not assimilated.

Migrants with roots

“Traditional Muslims of Myanmar, such as Malabar Indians, Bengalis, Chinese Muslims, Burmese Muslims, live throughout Myanmar,” explains orientalist Pyotr Kozma, who lives in Myanmar and maintains a popular blog about the country, in an interview with RT. “With this traditional Muslim ummah, the Buddhists have had experience of coexistence for many decades, therefore, despite the excesses, it rarely came to large-scale conflicts.”

With the Rohingya Bengalis, it is a completely different story. Officially, it is believed that several generations ago they illegally entered the territory of Myanmar. “After the National League for Democracy, led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, came to power, the official wording was adjusted. They stopped saying “Bengalis”, they began to say “Muslims living in the Arakan region,” Ksenia Efremova, an associate professor at MGIMO and a specialist in Myanmar, tells RT. “But the problem is that these Muslims themselves consider themselves the people of Myanmar and claim citizenship, which they are not granted.”

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According to Piotr Kozma, for many years the Myanmar government did not know what to do with the Rohingya. They were not recognized as citizens, but it is incorrect to say that they did this because of religious or ethnic prejudice. “Among the Rohingya, there are many who defected from Bangladesh, including due to problems with the law,” says Piotr Kozma. “Just imagine the enclaves where radicals and criminals who escaped from a neighboring state rule the show.”

The expert notes that the Rohingya traditionally have a high birth rate - each family has 5-10 children. This led to the fact that in one generation the number of immigrants increased several times. “One day this lid was torn off. And here it doesn’t even matter who started it first, ”concludes the orientalist.

Escalation of the conflict

The process got out of hand in 2012. Then in June and October, more than a hundred people died in armed clashes in Rakhine between Buddhists and Muslims. According to the UN, approximately 5,300 houses and places of worship were destroyed.

A state of emergency was declared in the state, but the tumor of the conflict had already spread throughout Myanmar. By the spring of 2013, the pogroms had moved from the western part of the country to the center. At the end of March, riots began in the city of Meithila. On June 23, 2016, the conflict broke out in the province of Pegu, on July 1 - in Hpakant. What the traditional Myanmar ummah feared most seemed to have happened: Rohingya discontent was being extrapolated to Muslims in general.

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Intercommunal controversy

Muslims are one of the parties to the conflict, but it is incorrect to consider the unrest in Myanmar as inter-religious, says Dmitry Mosyakov, head of the department of regional studies at Moscow State University: “There is a significant increase in the number of refugees from Bangladesh who cross the sea and settle in the historical region of Arakan. The appearance of these people does not please the local population. And it doesn’t matter if they are Muslims or representatives of another religion.” According to Mosyakov, Myanmar is a complex conglomeration of nationalities, but all of them are united by a common Burmese history and statehood. Rohingya fall out of this system of communities, and this is the core of the conflict, as a result of which both Muslims and Buddhists die.

Black and white

“At this time, the world media hears the theme of exclusively affected Muslims and says nothing about Buddhists,” adds Piotr Kozma. “Such one-sided coverage of the conflict has given Myanmar Buddhists a sense of a besieged fortress, and this is a direct path to radicalism.”

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According to the blogger, the coverage of the unrest in Myanmar in the world's leading media can hardly be called objective, it is obvious that the publications are aimed at a large Islamic audience. “In the state of Rakhine, Muslims were not killed much more than Buddhists, and in terms of the number of destroyed and burned houses, the sides are approximately equal. That is, there was no massacre of "peaceful and defenseless Muslims", there was a conflict in which both sides distinguished themselves almost equally. But, unfortunately, the Buddhists do not have their own Al Jazeera and similar world-class rating television stations to report this,” says Piotr Kozma.

Experts say that the Myanmar authorities are interested in smoothing out the conflict, or at least maintaining the status quo. They are ready to make concessions - peace agreements have recently been reached with other national minorities. But in the case of the Rohingya, this will not work. “These people get into junks and sail along the Bay of Bengal to the Burmese coast. A new wave of refugees provokes new massacres of the local population. The situation can be compared to the migration crisis in Europe – no one really knows what to do with the flow of these foreigners,” concludes Dmitry Mosyakov, head of the department of regional studies at Moscow State University.

The persecution of Muslims in Myanmar has sparked outrage around the world. What happened and why they are sounding the alarm right now

The leading media these days are writing a lot about the tragedy of the Rohingya people and about the protest action, the participants of which demand an end to the persecution of the Muslim minority. The scale of international outrage is impressive.

International information wave

Actions in support of the Rohingyas took place in many Muslim countries. In India and Indonesia, demonstrators burned portraits of Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, while Pakistani and Turkish officials expressed outrage at her government's actions.

Protest in Kolkata, India. Photo: Reuters

It became even more interesting when Russia joined the actions. Actions in support of the Rohingyas took place in Grozny and Moscow. The leader of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, according to Russian media, for the first time spoke critically about the policies of the Kremlin. Like, he does nothing to prevent the genocide, which Kadyrov compared with the Holocaust.

Putin quickly corrected himself and on September 4, at the BRICS summit, condemned the violence of Myanmar, which earned Ramzan's public gratitude.

With a request to stop the violence, it was up to the leader of Myanmar, through his Twitter, Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai addressed. This event is interesting in that Aung San Suu Kyi is also a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, although now it is not uncommon to hear demands to take away her award.

Let's try to figure out who the Rohingyas are, why they are being persecuted by the Myanmar authorities and why right now there is so much information noise around them.

The most persecuted people in the world

The Buddhist-Muslim conflict in Myanmar has dragged on for years. Rohingya Muslims (or Rohingya) are a minority in a country where the majority of the population professes Buddhism. It is now believed that there are 1.1 million of them in Myanmar, and about a million more live as refugees in various neighboring countries. In 2013, the UN named them the most persecuted society in the world.

The events that are taking place now relate to the state of Arakan (aka Rakhine), in the west of Myanmar. The Rohingyas themselves claim that they moved there a long time ago. The official position of the Myanmar authorities is that these people are descendants of illegal migrants from Bengal. During the British rule in India, Muslims from East Bengal (now the country of Bangladesh) were massively resettled to Arakan, as cheap labor was required.

The Myanmar authorities do not even recognize the term "Rohingya" itself and by 2015 called them "Bengalis", and then began to call them "Muslims living in the Arakan territory."

Myanmar does not grant Rohingya citizenship based on a law passed back in 1982. It prohibits the granting of citizenship to migrants - British Indians - who moved into the country after 1873.

Thus, the Rohingyas are restricted in their right to free movement, do not have access to public education and the right to work in public institutions.

This whole story is complicated by the fact that the majority of the population of Arakan are Buddhists, who have a long history of confrontation with the government of Burma in the struggle for their independence. In fact, these are local separatists, with whom, nevertheless, they managed to make peace. However, now many people confuse the struggle of the Arakans for the creation of their own state and the terrorist acts of Rohingya Muslims into a single whole.

The latter have their own organization - the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army or ARSA. She intercepted the slogans of the struggle for the independence of local Buddhists and began to fight with the government, hiding in the local jungle.

The Myanmar military and Rakhine residents claim that the group appeared in the fall of 2016, and its stated goal is to create a democratic Muslim state for the Rohingyas. There are rumors that China is involved in Myanmar, and therefore it is beneficial for it from time to time to support local terrorists in order to have an instrument of influence on the government. But they have no confirmation.

Buddhist-Muslim conflict

In the 2000s, most cases of violence against Rohingyas were related to religious conflict. The authorities responded to this by introducing troops into the state, and the Rohingyas began to flee en masse - across the land border to Bangladesh, or by sea to neighboring Muslim countries - Malaysia, Indonesia. Some even tried to get to Australia.

The current wave of violence began on August 25, after ARSA attacks on a dozen police stations and a military base. According to the data provided by the Myanmar authorities, 12 law enforcement officers and 77 rebels were killed. ARSA has been declared a terrorist organization.

A military operation was launched, as a result of which, according to the authorities, 400 people were killed, most of them declared terrorists. However, it is impossible to independently confirm this figure, since journalists, human rights organizations and even UN investigators are not allowed into the state of Arakan.

The latter tried to enter the country this year after a preliminary outbreak of violence. It began with the murder of nine border guards by ARSA representatives. After a military operation was launched in response, about 75,000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh. Now the number of fugitives is already 125 thousand and the figure is growing.

Refugees tell horror stories about how the military rapes and kills women, shoots children and old people, and burns down their houses. The authorities of Myanmar forbid: the militants themselves burn their own houses, accusing the government of violence.

Terrible refugee situation

It is the situation with a huge uncontrolled flow of refugees that, by and large, has led the current wave of information from protests and indignation in the media. Thousands of Rohingya refugees are heading primarily to Bangladesh, arguably the world's poorest country. The one with which their ancestors once moved.

The majority of the population there are Muslims and, it would seem, they should be friendly to their brothers in misfortune. But in practice it doesn't look like that. At least, according to the Al Jazeera TV channel, the authorities are again planning to relocate all the Rohingyas to a camp on the island of Thengar Char, which was formed from sediments of silt and other rocks about 11 years ago and is completely covered with water during the rainy season.

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. Photo: Reuters

During previous mass resettlements, several thousand Rohingya refugees found refuge in Malaysia and Indonesia. But in the first they are kept imprisoned for months in refugee camps, and in the second they are forbidden to work, providing little social assistance.

But now the refugee flows in Malaysia and Indonesia have all but disappeared. This was largely due to the 2015 incident. The boats, which were stuffed to the brim with refugees by smugglers, were turned away from the event in Thailand and Indonesia. The latter gave them water and food and sent them home. After several days of drifting at sea, 800 refugees were taken in by Malaysia.

So did the attempts of smugglers to drive boats with refugees in Australia. Its government simply towed the boats back from its territorial waters, although it ran into criticism from human rights organizations for violating the refugee convention.

Therefore, it is not surprising that now, when a new wave of refugees has appeared, the authorities of neighboring countries are putting pressure on Myanmar, demanding an end to actions against the Rohingyas.

Controversial leader of Myanmar

Aung San Suu Kyi, mentioned above, was once a darling of the Western media: she was considered one of the world's leading human rights activists, the epitome of the fight for human rights. They sincerely sympathized with her: the military junta forced her to live 15 years under house arrest and refused even a meeting with her terminally ill husband. Her articles were happily printed by the Democratic press, such as The New York Times.

In 2015, the military junta loosened its grip and democratic elections were held in the country, in which Aung San Suu Kyi's party won. Local law forbade him to become president, so he came up with a new position - government adviser. In fact, it is she who is the leader of Myanmar at the present time.

Aung San Suu Kyi at peace talks. Photo: Reuters

Disappointment in Aung San Suu Kyi began precisely against the background of the conflict with the Rohingyas. The UN mission was about to investigate crimes against humanity, which the Rohingya refugees accused the Myanmar military and the local population, but the Myanmar government denied visas to its members. According to Aung San Suu Kyi, the UN mission is inappropriate, because it will only intensify the ethnic confrontation.

And now she has gone further and accused international humanitarian organizations of helping terrorists. The claim was supported by a photo of a cookie with the logo of the UN World Food Program, which the military allegedly found in one of the terrorists' hiding places.

The situation in Myanmar is further complicated by the fact that a lot of fakes have already appeared on both sides of the conflict. For example, the Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey accompanied his tweet with indignation at the "Rohigya massacre" with a photograph of corpses, but later it turned out that the picture was taken in 1994 in Rwanda. But while it was found out, his message was distributed by 1600 users.

Equally less credible are photographs of alleged terrorist training camps in Bangladesh, which are supposed to support the Myanmar government's position that they are dealing with a terrorist group.

The confrontation between government forces and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar has reached its peak. Thousands of Muslims have been killed recently. In addition to the massacres, military forces have carried out raids on the homes and households of Muslims who live in the western state of Rakhine. According to the stories of local residents, they take away their property and even their pets. According to international monitoring organizations, about 2,600 houses are currently known to have been burned in this state.

Although officially military operations are against Islamic militants are actually killing civilians, including children and the elderly. The atrocities prompted an exodus of civilians from the war zones.

People are killed, raped, burned alive, drowned just for belonging to the Rohingya nationality and their religion - Islam, representatives of international government organizations say.

Many media reported recently that Buddhists beat a Rohingya Muslim with bricks in the city of Sitwe in Rakhine State. A group of Rohingya refugees living in a displaced persons camp on the outskirts decided to go shopping in the city. The Muslims tried to buy the boat, but quarreled with the seller over the price. The heated argument attracted the attention of Buddhist passers-by, who took the side of the seller and began to throw bricks at the Rohingya. As a result, 55-year-old Munir Ahmad died, other Muslims were injured.

According to the latest data, more than fifty thousand people have already left the conflict zone in recent weeks. At the same time, according to the UN, only in the period from August 25 to August 31, inclusive, about 27 thousand people - mostly women and children - crossed the border with the state of Bangladesh, trying to escape from the "democratic regime."

Smoldering conflict

Myanmar is a state in Southeast Asia, bordering China, Laos, Thailand, India and Bangladesh. From Bangladesh, Muslims are illegally resettled in a predominantly Buddhist Myanmar with a population of 55 million people. Those who call themselves Rohingya have traveled this path many years ago. They settled in the state of Rakhine (Arakan).

The Myanmar authorities do not consider Rohingya citizens of the country. O it is officially believed that several generations ago they illegally entered the territory of Myanmar. For many years, the Myanmar government did not know what to do with the Rohingya. They were not recognized as citizens, but it is incorrect to say that they did this because of religious or ethnic prejudice.

One of the reasons for the aggravation of the situation is demographic problems. The Rohingya traditionally have a high birth rate, with 5–10 children per family. This led to the fact that in one generation the number of immigrants increased several times.

The authorities refer to the inhabitants of Rakhine as "Muslims living in the Arakan region." At the same time, these Muslims themselves consider themselves the people of Myanmar and apply for citizenship, which they are not granted. Here is the second problem, which largely provoked the latest clashes.

However, this conflict has been going on for several years. In June and October 2012, more than a hundred people were killed in armed clashes in Rakhine between Buddhists and Muslims. According to the UN, approximately 5,300 houses and places of worship were destroyed. A state of emergency has been declared in the state. By the spring of 2013, the pogroms had moved from the western part of the country to the center. At the end of March, riots began in the city of Meithila. On June 23, the conflict broke out in the province of Pegu, on July 1 - in Hpakant. The conflict increasingly began to acquire an inter-religious character, and local dissatisfaction with Rohingya began to spread to Muslims in general.

According to experts, Myanmar is a complex conglomeration of nationalities, but all of them are united by a common Burmese history and statehood. The Rohingya fall out of this system of communities, and this is the core of the conflict, as a result of which both Muslims and Buddhists die.

"Democracy with fists"

Now the country is actually headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, who for many years fought for democratization in a country where a military regime reigned. She is the daughter of General Aung San, the founder of Burma. In 1947, on the eve of independence from Britain, Aung San, then head of the transitional administration of the country, was killed in an attempted coup d'état when his daughter was two years old.

Aung was raised by her mother, who first worked in the government and then became a diplomat. Aung graduated from college in India, then received a bachelor's degree in political science and economics from Oxford, worked at the UN, moved to England, defended her doctorate, gave birth to two sons. When she went to Burma to visit her ailing mother in 1988, student unrest broke out in the country, which escalated into a real uprising against the junta. Aung joined the rebels, on August 26 she spoke at a rally for the first time in her life, and in September she became the founder and chairman of her own party, the National League for Democracy. Soon there was a new military coup, the communist general was replaced by a nationalist general, Aung San Suu Kyi was not allowed to the elections and was placed under house arrest for the first time.

Nevertheless, the new junta held elections (the first in 30 years), the League for Democracy won 59 percent of the vote and 80 percent of seats in parliament. Based on these results, Aoun was to become prime minister. The military did not give up power, the election results were canceled, Aung was again arrested. She was under house arrest in 1991 when her teenage sons accepted her Nobel Peace Prize. From 1995 to 2000, when she was at large, the military tried especially hard to get her out of the country. In 2002, she was released again, and a year later, after the assassination attempt on her, she was again arrested and secretly imprisoned - for four months nothing was known about her fate. Speaking at the first rally after her release, she called not for the overthrow of the anti-people regime, but for national reconciliation.

In the fall of 2015, the National League for Democracy, led by 70-year-old Aung San Suu Kyi, won a majority of votes in both houses of the Myanmar (Burma) parliament in the first free elections in the country's history. Now she is not the president or even the prime minister, but she holds the post of state adviser - this The post corresponding to the Prime Minister allows you to work in all areas of government. In fact, it affects all decisions in the country, and so far the Nobel laureate has not commented on the situation in Rakhine.

She has nothing else to do. Aung San Suu Kyi has to be tough. Locals, even Muslims, don't like Rohingya, experts say.

In fact, in defense Rohingya Muslims there is no one to say inside Myanmar, there is not a single political force that would come out in support of them. Deprived of civil rights, labor opportunities, living in the poorest state of the country, the Rohingya become even more radicalized and turn to terrorism, which spurs a new round of repression.

In the fall of 2016, when there was a similar attack on the border post and the authorities brought troops into the state, who behaved just as mercilessly towards the civilian population, in two months about 20,000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh. But the local authorities did not find a better solution than to settle the refugees on the island of Tengar Char, which during the rainy season is almost completely hidden under water.

The Myanmar authorities themselves deny the genocide of Muslims. To a UN report on torture, mass rape and killing by the military in this state, the Myanmar authorities responded that the facts are not true and are lies and slander.

But the pressure on them from the international community is unabated. For example, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar a genocide.

"There is a genocide going on there, and everyone is silent," the Turkish leader was indignant, speaking at a meeting of the ruling party in Istanbul. "Those who do not pay attention to this genocide, carried out under the guise of democracy, are also accomplices in the murder."