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Aung San Suu Kyi: Myanmar’s New “Democratic Dictator”
Last edited Mon Nov 30, 2015, 01:19 PM - Edit history (1)
By Tony Cartalucci, Land Destroyer Report
Global Research
Tuesday, Nov 24, 2015
Suu Kyi disenfranchised a million voters before elections, and has declared herself above the constitution afterwards. What about that seems “democratic?”
The Western media is portraying Myanmar’s recent elections as historic. One commentator described Myanmar as an “exuberant nation prepared for a new era of democracy and political freedom.” But one wonders what sort of democracy and political freedom can be borne of elections in which nearly a million voters were banned from casting their ballots and with the apparent victor already declaring herself above the law.
The Western media is portraying Myanmar’s recent elections as historic. One commentator described Myanmar as an “exuberant nation prepared for a new era of democracy and political freedom.” But one wonders what sort of democracy and political freedom can be borne of elections in which nearly a million voters were banned from casting their ballots and with the apparent victor already declaring herself above the law.
This is in part due to the fact that Suu Kyi herself, along with the NLD she leads and a vast network of supporting “civil society” nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have all been created and sustained annually by billions of dollars worth of backing from the United States and United Kingdom for years. In exchange for this support, Suu Kyi’s long-standing proclivity toward “foreign investment” will lead to the wholesale feeding of Myanmar’s nationalized resources, industry, and infrastructure into the maw of the Wall Street corporations and institutions that have long underwritten Suu Kyi’s rise to power.
“Democracy,” But Only When Convenient
In reality, Suu Kyi and her NLD’s supporters helped disenfranchise nearly a million Rohingya from voting even before the elections took place. Through widespread protests and threats of violence if their demands that the Rohingya remain stripped of their voting rights were not met, the ruling military-led government backed down from a scheme to grant the Rohingya minority long-sought after rights, including the ability to vote.
In reality, Suu Kyi and her NLD’s supporters helped disenfranchise nearly a million Rohingya from voting even before the elections took place. Through widespread protests and threats of violence if their demands that the Rohingya remain stripped of their voting rights were not met, the ruling military-led government backed down from a scheme to grant the Rohingya minority long-sought after rights, including the ability to vote.
More than one million Rohingya live in Myanmar, but they are not regarded as citizens by the government.
Myanmar may believe it has shed dictatorship in recent elections, but it is clear they have only replaced one of local and very limited means, with one backed by immense foreign interests bringing with them centuries of experience in emptying out the wealth of other nations – including at one point in the past, Myanmar itself.
Full article: http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_72254.shtml
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016136465
Bumping this d/t the Myanmar election results .......
hoping they will finally be recognized and afforded legal protection. (edit: it looks like nothing has changed).
The Boat Of Starving Rohingya Refugees That No Country Will Take In
The emaciated faces of hundreds of refugees found adrift in Thai waters on Thursday spoke volumes about the scale of the humanitarian crisis unfolding in South Asia.
Reporters on Thursday found about 400 refugees from Myanmar's Muslim Rohingya minority crammed aboard a wooden fishing boat in the Andaman Sea, desperate for food and water.
The refugees said they had been at sea for almost three months and had fled persecution in their home country. They had hoped to reach Malaysia but were turned away by Malay authorities. Six days ago, smugglers abandoned their ship, and ten people had already perished onboard, refugees said.
Christophe Archambault, a photographer for Agence France Presse, captured the harrowing scenes onboard the ship, and the desperate scramble for supplies that were eventually dropped by the Thai military.
?2
Rohingya refugees are pictured on a boat off the southern Thai island of Koh Lipe in the Andaman Sea on May 14, 2015.
Aid groups say at least 6,000 refugees -- and perhaps many times that number -- have been drifting for days and months in the waters between Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia. They were abandoned with little food and water by human traffickers after a regional crackdown on smuggling networks. Most are Rohingya Muslims who are stateless in Myanmar and Bangladeshis trying to escape poverty.
?2
Rohingya migrants sit on a boat drifting in Thai waters off the southern island of Koh Lipe, May 14, 2015.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/14/boat-people-photos_n_7283178.html?ir=WorldPost
The Rohingya - Adrift on a Sea of Sorrows
By Eric Margolis
May 31, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - When is genocide not really genocide? When the victims are small, impoverished brown people no wants or cares about – Burma’s Rohingya.
Their plight has finally commanded some media attention because of the suffering of Rohingya boat people, 7,000 of whom continue to drift in the waters of the Andaman Sea without food, water or shelter from the intense sun. At least 2,500 lucky refugees are in camps in Indonesia.
Mass graves of Rohingya are being discovered in Thailand and Burma (Myanmar). Large numbers of Rohingya are fleeing for their lives from their homeland, Burma, while the world does nothing. Burma is believed to have some 800,000 Rohingya citizens.
This week, the Dalai Lama and other Nobel Peace Prize winners call on Burma and its much ballyhooed ‘democratic leader,’ Aung San Suu Kyi, to halt persecution of the Rohingya. They did nothing.
Full article: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article42008.htm
?itok=MwUi9KOJ
More than 100,000 Rohingyas tried to escape Burma on boats in the last year. (Photo/endgenocide.org)
Thailand wants no Rohyingas; Indonesia says only a few thousand on a temporary basis. Australia, which is not overly fond of non-whites, say no. Bangladesh can’t even feed its own wretched people. So the poor Rohyingas are a persecuted people without a country, adrift on a sea of sorrows.
What of the Muslim world? What of that self-proclaimed “Defender of the Faith. Saudi Arabia?” The Saudis are just buying $109 billion worth of US arms which they can’t use, but they don’t have even a few pennies for their desperate co-religionists in the Andaman Sea. The Holy Koran enjoins Muslims to aid their brethren wherever they are persecuted – this is the true essence of jihadism.
But the Saudis are too busy plotting against Iran, bombing Yemen, and supporting rebels in Iraq and Syria, or getting ready for their summer vacations in Spain and France, to think about fellow Muslims dying of thirst. Pakistan, which could help, has not, other than offering moral support. Neither has India, one of the world’s leading Muslim nations.
In the end, it may be up to the United States to rescue the Rohyinga, just as it rescued Bosnia and Kosovo. That’s fine with me. I don’t want the US to be the world’s policeman; I want it to be the world’s rescuer, its SOS force, its liberator.
We should tell Burma to halt its genocide today, or face isolation and sanctions from the outside world.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/05/30/rohingya-adrift-sea-sorrows
Mass graves of Rohingya Muslim migrants found in abandoned jungle camps in Malaysia
AGENCY Sunday 24 May 2015
Malaysian police have discovered mass graves in more than a dozen abandoned camps used by human traffickers on the border with Thailand, where Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar have been held.
"These graves are believed to be a part of human trafficking activities involving migrants," Home Minister Zahid Hamidi told reporters.
He did not say how many bodies have been recovered.
The Malaysian newspaper The Star has reported that as many as 100 bodies were found at one camp.
Similar camps and dozens of remains were recovered in jungle camps across the border in Thailand earlier this month, where Rohingya fleeing persecution in Myanmar had been held by traffickers until their families could pay for their freedom.
"These graves are believed to be a part of human trafficking activities involving migrants," Home Minister Zahid Hamidi told reporters.
He did not say how many bodies have been recovered.
The Malaysian newspaper The Star has reported that as many as 100 bodies were found at one camp.
Similar camps and dozens of remains were recovered in jungle camps across the border in Thailand earlier this month, where Rohingya fleeing persecution in Myanmar had been held by traffickers until their families could pay for their freedom.
Full article: http://world.einnews.com/article/267110665/j47hG4-1JDja11R7
Thousands of Rohingya Migrants Remain Stranded at Sea
Published 16 May 2015
“What we have now is a game of maritime Ping-Pong,” says the IOM, as several countries have now denied entry to thousands of migrants.
Hundreds of Rohingya migrants fleeing violence in Myanmar remain stranded at sea on rickety fishing boats as neighboring countries refuse to allow them onto their territory, in what the UN has labelled “maritime Ping-Pong with human life.”
Thailand is the latest country to refuse entry to the migrants. After Thai officials offered a boat load of people food and water Friday, they then assisted the boat's departure farther out to sea.
The migrants have been at sea for weeks, and facing an increasingly desperate situation since they are believed to have very little food or water and are living in cramped and unsanitary conditions. Anywhere from 6,000 to 20,000 migrants are thought to be stranded on various boats, with hundreds piled into each vessel.
A wooden, green and red fishing boat carrying several hundred people was spotted Thursday adrift between Thailand and Malaysia.
Full article: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Thousands-of-Rohingya-Migrants-Remain-Stranded-at-Sea-20150516-0011.html
"The Rohingya people - often described as one of the most persecuted people on earth"
Rohingya and the Burmese Generals
How to Forge a Democracy and Get Away with It
by Ramzy Baroud / November 18th, 2015
The Rohingya population of Arakan, estimated at nearly 800,000, subsist between the nightmare of having no legal status (as they are still denied citizenship), little or no rights and the occasional ethnic purges carried out by their neighbors. While Buddhists also paid a price for the clashes, the stateless Rohingya, being isolated and defenseless, were the ones to carry the heaviest death toll and destruction.
One of these nationalist groups is the Arakan National Party (ANP), which has incited and enacted violent pogroms against the Rohingya for years. In fact, ethnically cleansing the Rohingya is a main rally cry for a group which now has a democratically elected 29 national level representatives in Rakhine, and is also in “decisive control of the state’s regional assembly,” according to Reuters.
The sad fact is that much of the reporting on the Burmese elections stoked false hope that a democracy has finally prevailed in that country, and either brushed over or completely ignored the plight of the Rohingya altogether.
The sad fact is that much of the reporting on the Burmese elections stoked false hope that a democracy has finally prevailed in that country, and either brushed over or completely ignored the plight of the Rohingya altogether.
With Burma climbing to the world top five countries in terms of proven oil and gas reserves, terms such as genocides, military juntas and human rights are abruptly and largely omitted from the new discourse.
Indeed, a whole new narrative is being conveniently drafted, written jointly by the Burmese army, nationalist parties, Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD, western investors and anyone else who stands to benefit from the treasures of one of the world’s worst human rights violators.
Indeed, a whole new narrative is being conveniently drafted, written jointly by the Burmese army, nationalist parties, Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD, western investors and anyone else who stands to benefit from the treasures of one of the world’s worst human rights violators.
http://dissidentvoice.org/2015/11/rohingya-and-the-burmese-generals/#more-60522
Well, so much for hoping for change with the recent election.
Can democracy and genocide co-exist in Burma?
By Murtaza Shaikh
Source: open democracy
November 30, 2015
We have witnessed a momentous and historic event in Burma (Myanmar); the first real glimpses of democracy with the military dictatorship making way for the landslide victory of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi after over two decades of political exile at an immeasurable personal cost.
However, there is a story behind the headlines and jubilation, to a large extent sidelined and omitted, perhaps because it inconveniently complicates and even undermines the simplistic narrative of democratic triumph over dictatorship, of absolute good overcoming absolute evil. That barely visible story, rather than a minor detail, demands our full attention, especially if the purpose behind the electoral exercise was a future democratic Burma, where human rights and its diverse ethnic and religious plurality is accommodated, respected and reflected politically.
And it is this: the Rohingya Muslim minority numbering around 1 million were denied the right to vote or stand for office, following a recent census, which excluded all Rohingya. Couple this with recent in-depth reports from Queen Mary University and Fortify Rights and the Yale Law School finding that the process of genocide is under way against the Rohingya. The QMU report concludes
The report is endorsed by Tomás Ojea Quintana, former Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar (2008-14). Earlier in 2013, a Human Rights Watch Report titled: ‘All You Can Do is Pray’ had concluded, with the help of detailed satellite imagery, the treatment of Rohingya met the legal definition of ethnic cleansing.
However, there is a story behind the headlines and jubilation, to a large extent sidelined and omitted, perhaps because it inconveniently complicates and even undermines the simplistic narrative of democratic triumph over dictatorship, of absolute good overcoming absolute evil. That barely visible story, rather than a minor detail, demands our full attention, especially if the purpose behind the electoral exercise was a future democratic Burma, where human rights and its diverse ethnic and religious plurality is accommodated, respected and reflected politically.
And it is this: the Rohingya Muslim minority numbering around 1 million were denied the right to vote or stand for office, following a recent census, which excluded all Rohingya. Couple this with recent in-depth reports from Queen Mary University and Fortify Rights and the Yale Law School finding that the process of genocide is under way against the Rohingya. The QMU report concludes
“the Rohingya have suffered the first four of the six stages of genocide. They have been, and continue to be, stigmatized, dehumanised and discriminated against. They have been harassed, terrorized and slaughtered. They have been isolated and segregated into detention camps and securitised villages and ghettos. They have been systematically weakened through hunger, illness, denial of civil rights and loss of livelihood.” This puts them at serious risk of stage five which is “mass annihilation”.
The report is endorsed by Tomás Ojea Quintana, former Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar (2008-14). Earlier in 2013, a Human Rights Watch Report titled: ‘All You Can Do is Pray’ had concluded, with the help of detailed satellite imagery, the treatment of Rohingya met the legal definition of ethnic cleansing.
Full article: https://zcomm.org/znetarticle/can-democracy-and-genocide-co-exist-in-burma/
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