Rohingyas Declare Their Crime as GENOCIDE: Join Them in Their Radical Act
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 20 Aug 2018
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service
16 Aug 2018 – One fundamentally misguided thinking regarding genocides and atrocity crimes is this: only the UN-supported judicial process and lawyers can determine what is and what is not genocide.
I for one reject any neo-colonial thinking that looks to powerful politicians and networks to call atrocity crimes by their names.
No power has ever intervened to end human sufferings, unless it advances its strategic, including symbolic, interests.
The allied governments, above all Britain in the 1930’s and 1940’s KNEW what the SS was doing to the Jews and other victims of the Nazi genocide. They did absolutely nothing.
In 1915 when Turkey was engaged in pogroms against the Armenians Britain was still the preeminent power. It was business as usual. The only western official who screamed foul over the Armenian Genocide was an American ambassador based in Istanbul.
Fast forward to the UN.
Beyond the shadow of a doubt, the United Nations is a categorical failure as the world’s largest body of nation-states. One year after mass killing and mass rape of Rohingyas, the best it could do is to deceive the world as Karen Pierce, the British Perm Rep in NYC has done when she spitted out the rubbish “the Security Council has consensus view on Myanmar Rohingya crisis.”
I for one, self-consciously take my marginal and radical position, rejecting the moral authority, intellectual integrity and respectability of these politicians, bureaucrats and networks, which have known, and have NOT acted, in accord with what they know.
Were I a victim or a survivor of genocide would I or should I allow these institutions and dishonest humans in positions of influence to determine what I and my fellow victims have been subjected to for the last 40 years?
Why let these institutions and officials add insult to the collective injury of the Rohingyas?
With that irreverent and uncompromising attitude, I support Rohingya brothers and sisters who dare to name the crime THEY – not the lawyers or UN officials or experts or human rights researchers – have experienced GENOCIDE.
Mairead Maguire’s Peace People network in Belfast is hosting half-day events to commemorate the Rohingya genocide at the City Hall, and is putting the billboard up at their office.
Amen!
Thadu Thadu Thadu or Well-done, well-done, well-done as we say in Bumese.
Writing from the ground of the Monument Valley and the canyon land where the European settlers, backed by the Catholic Church, carried out serial colonial genocides.
Maung Zarni
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A Buddhist humanist from Burma, Maung Zarni is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge, UK. His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal, forthcoming). He holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education) , National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015).
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 20 Aug 2018.
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