The 4 Freedoms Library

It takes a nation to protect the nation

This article from the New York Times barely touches on the reasons for the squeeze put on the Muslim population of Rohingya, Myanmar (Burma), only mentioning ‘the higher Muslim birthrate.’ As if that in itself is the cause of concern and has prompted these drastic measures. The NYT does not ask why the Muslim population is not welcome in Rohingya and why the local population is unhappy with them. Maybe they see what is happening across the border in Thailand or anywhere else in the world where Muslims gain confidence and start to act out their political manifesto.

So they are, with exceptions, being asked to leave and find another place to live. Is this harsh? Yes. Is it profiling? Yes? Is it at all understandable? Yes.

http://4freedoms.com/group/buddhists/forum/topics/burma-looted-bang...

http://4freedoms.com/group/buddhists/forum/topics/stop-killing-the-...

http://4freedoms.com/group/buddhists/forum/topics/stop-killing-the-...

http://4freedoms.com/group/buddhists/forum/topics/over-3900-people-...
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Myanmar Policy’s Message to Muslims: Get Out
As Myanmar Advances Resettlement Plan, Rohingya Flee
6-11-14
NYT

Slide Show | Bleak Existence for Myanmar’s Rohingya Minority More than 100,000 Rohingya have fled the country and a similar number are confined in camps amid violence by the Buddhist majority, which accuses them of being foreign interlopers.
By JANE PERLEZ
Last Updated: 2:38 PM GMT
SITTWE, Myanmar — The Myanmar government has given the estimated one million Rohingya people in this coastal region of the country a dispiriting choice: Prove your family has lived here for more than 60 years and qualify for second-class citizenship, or be placed in camps and face deportation.

The policy, accompanied by a wave of decrees and legislation, has made life for the Rohingya, a long-persecuted Muslim minority, ever more desperate, spurring the biggest flow of Rohingya refugees since a major exodus two years ago.

In the last three weeks alone, 14,500 Rohingya have sailed from the beaches of Rakhine State to Thailand, with the ultimate goal of reaching Malaysia, according to the Arakan Project, a group that monitors Rohingya refugees.

The crisis has become an embarrassment to the White House ahead of a scheduled visit by President Obama to Myanmar next week. The administration considers Myanmar a foreign-policy success story in Asia, but is worried that renewed conflict between Buddhist extremists, who are given a free hand by the government, and the Rohingya could derail the already rocky transition from military rule to democratic reform.


A Rohingya girl in a hut in a displaced persons camp on the outskirts of Sittwe, in Rakhine State.
Tomas Munita for The New York Times
Mr. Obama called President Thein Sein of Myanmar last week, urging him to address the “tensions and humanitarian situation in Rakhine State,” the White House said.

In his most public appeal to the government yet, Mr. Obama asked the Myanmar leader to revise the anti-Rohingya policies, specifically the resettlement plan. Myanmar must “support the civil and political rights of the Rohingya population,” he said.

The Rohingya have faced discrimination for decades. They have been denied citizenship, evicted from their homes, had their land confiscated and been attacked by the military. After one such attack in 1978, some 200,000 fled to Bangladesh.

The latest flare-up began with an outbreak of sectarian rioting in 2012, in which hundreds of Rohingya were killed and dozens of their villages burned to the ground by radical Buddhists. Since then, close to 100,000 have fled the country, and more than 100,000 have been confined to squalid camps, forbidden to leave.


A Rohingya woman at a camp in Sittwe called her brother in Malaysia to ask for money after the burial of their mother.
Tomas Munita for The New York Times
As conditions in the camps have deteriorated, international pressure has mounted on the government to find a humane solution. Instead, the government appears to be accelerating a strategy that human rights groups have described as ethnic cleansing.

For many Rohingya, the new policy, called the Rakhine Action Plan, represents a kind of final humiliation, said Mohamed Saeed, a community organizer in a camp on the edge of Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State.

“People really fear this plan,” he said. “Our community is getting less and less. This is where they want us — out.

Many Rohingya came to Myanmar in the 19th century when the British ruled all of what is now India, Bangladesh and Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. But the government’s demand for proof of residence since 1948 is too onerous for many, who either do not have the paperwork or fall short of the six-decade requirement, human rights advocates say.

Those who can prove their residence qualify only for naturalized citizenship, which carries fewer rights than full citizenship and can be revoked. Moreover, they would be classified as “Bengali,” rather than Rohingya, suggesting that they are immigrants from Bangladesh and leaving open the possibility of deportation.

Under the plan, those Rohingya who cannot meet the standards for naturalized citizenship or refuse to accept the Bengali designation would be placed in camps before being deported.

Human Rights Watch described the plan as “nothing less than a blueprint for permanent segregation and statelessness.”

The government asked the United Nations refugee agency to participate in the resettlement, but the agency refused, a spokesman said.

The Rakhine Action Plan is but one element of a host of policies and tactics aimed at marginalizing the Rohingya. This year, in line with the government’s position that they are foreigners, the Rohingya were prevented from participating in the national census.

Legislation introduced in Parliament two months ago, and expected to pass, would ban Rohingya from voting in next year’s election. Parliament is also considering a bill that would ban interfaith marriage, a measure human rights advocates say is designed to stoke anti-Muslim sentiment.

The policies come on top of an increasingly dire situation in Rohingya camps and villages. In the camps around Sittwe, where about 140,000 Rohingya live, health services are virtually nonexistent.

The main medical provider, Doctors without Borders, was chased out six months ago and has not been able to return.

In the villages around Maungdaw, a Rohingya-dominated town near the border of Bangladesh, there has been a sudden increase in the arrests of young Rohingya men and boys, United Nations officials and human rights advocates said.

The Border Guard Police arrested more than 100 Rohingya on charges of holding illegal gatherings and over refusals to participate in the action plan. Chris Lewa, the director of the Arakan Project, said the arrests were part of a campaign to force the men to leave the country.

For many, the high-risk boat trips to Thailand en route to Malaysia, a Muslim country that quietly tolerates the refugees, begin at a gray sandy beach at Ohn Taw Shi, a fishing village fringed by coconut trees on the outskirts of a camp for the displaced.

On a recent day, a froth of waves lapped the shore, a few open wooden boats lay untended, waiting for use at night. The police slept in the afternoon heat in a wooden shack about 500 yards away.

A smuggler, Chan Thet Maung, a cellphone hooked to his pants and earplugs dangling from his neck, said that when the wooden boats were filled with Rohingya, they sailed north for about five hours to connect with larger vessels. There, in waters off the Myanmar-Bangladesh border, multidecked boats sometimes idle for days or weeks, manned by armed and often brutal crews, waiting for a full complement of passengers bound for Thailand, the United Nations refugee agency said in an internal report.

The annual smuggling season, which begins in early October when the monsoon season ends, got off to a fast start, the smuggler said. The police wanted $2,000 — $100 for each of the 20 passengers — on a recent boat trip, but the smugglers had offered slightly less, he said.

The trip was aborted, but another attempt would be made soon, he said.

Local officials abet the smuggling trips, according to Matthew Smith, the director of Fortify Rights, an organization that studies ethnic groups in Myanmar.

“The regional trafficking and smuggling begins with the complicity of Myanmar authorities,” he said. “We’ve documented Myanmar police and armed forces taking payments as high as 7 million kyat in return for a boat’s passage to sea.” Seven million kyat is approximately $7,000.

Most Rohingya who want to leave the camps or the villages in northern Rakhine pay brokers $200 just to board a boat. Once in Thailand, the refugees must pay smugglers an additional $2,000 for the second leg to Malaysia.

Some, like Nor Rankis, 25, who said she wanted to join her estranged husband and brother in Malaysia, do not pay anything, an almost certain sign she will be sold into servitude by traffickers in Thailand.

“I don’t want to live here; I cannot survive,” she said one evening as she waited for a smuggler to take her away. She had packed a few things in a pink plastic basket: a bottle of perfume, a new sarong and a box of vitamins — though nothing to protect her against the equatorial sun that would beat down on her across the Bay of Bengal.

For better-off Rohingya in Sittwe, brokers can arrange documents for a ticket on the daily 90-minute flight to Yangon for $4,000. Regular passengers pay $88.

A 20-year-old Rohingya student, whose family pooled savings for the $4,000, said his broker gave more than 75 percent of the cost to immigration officials. Like all Rohingya students, he was expelled from the university in 2012.

The student, who declined to be identified for fear of retaliation, said the broker escorted him with officials of the Department of Immigration and Population in a government car from the camp to Sittwe airport.

“I was shaking with nerves,” he said. “But the broker gave me heart, and I was waved through the departure gate.”

In Yangon, the nation’s commercial capital, Rohingya say they have an easier existence. Long-established Rohingya families run businesses there, and documents are not scrutinized as carefully as in Rakhine, where segregation has become entrenched.

A spokesman for Rakhine State insisted the Rohingya did not belong in Myanmar and defended the Rakhine Action Plan as necessary because the higher Muslim birthrate threatened the Buddhist majority.

“There are no Rohingya under the law,” said the spokesman, U Win Myaing, assistant director of the Ministry of Information. “They are illegal immigrants. If they need labor in the United Arab Emirates, why don’t they ask people to go there?”

Some government officials have described the Rakhine Action Plan as a draft proposal, rather than official policy. But the government has already begun to carry out the plan in at least one camp, Myebon, 60 miles south of Sittwe.

In a gesture in advance of Mr. Obama’s visit, the government released 15 political prisoners in early October, including three Rohingya. Among them was U Kyaw Hla Aung, 75, a prominent lawyer, who was jailed after the violence in Sittwe in 2012.

One of the few Rohingya trained as a lawyer — Rohingya have since been barred from studying law or medicine — Mr. Kyaw Hla Aung said that it was illogical for the government to insist that Rohingya were not citizens.

“My father was head clerk of the courts in Sittwe for 40 years,” he said in his bamboo house in one of the camps. “I was a stenographer for 24 years in the courts and then a lawyer. How can they say we are not full citizens?”

After a few nights of waiting for a smuggler, Ms. Nor Rankis waded into the inky Bay of Bengal to a small wooden boat, jammed with a score of others, headed, she hoped, for Malaysia.

“I’m depending on God,” she said. “That’s why I dare to go.”

Wai Moe contributed reporting.

Tags: Burma, Kinana, Myanmar, Rohingya

Views: 388

Replies to This Discussion

https://swarajyamag.com/world/whats-the-truth-about-the-rohingya-cr...

What’s The Truth About The Rohingya Crisis?
Sanjeevani Rao
- Sep 07, 2017, 10:31 am

What is it that is not sounding quite right about the Rohingya refugee crisis? That thing we’re not quite able to put our finger on?

Ah! There it is. The reason for it!

Why on earth has the Myanmar army led by Nobel peace prize hero, Aung San Suu Kyi, suddenly begun picking on this innocent folk called the Rohingya, who have just been going about their business all these decades?

Perhaps it’s because they haven’t merely been going about their business.

A violent Islamist group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) is forcing all Rohingya males – even very young boys – to attack Rakhine Buddhists and other civilians and to provoke the Myanmar army into violence. This group has been getting its funding and weapons from Islamic countries like Pakistan and Malaysia and its training from al-Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan.

(Note: Western liberals, the mainstream media and the Saudi-backed United Nations (UN) have not bothered to call out the human rights violations perpetrated by ARSA against the Rakhine civilians, as well as against the Rohingya who were being forced to commit acts of terror.)

The other aspect that is gnawing at this writer is the dearth of material evidence that Myanmar’s army is, in fact, persecuting the Rohingya Muslims as monstrously as the latter and the UN claim.

In June 2015, it was discovered that many of the horrifying videos and images of the Rohingya massacre being circulated on social media and major news outlets were of other disasters – the devastating earthquake in China, violent Tibetan activism in India, the terrorism of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka, and even an oil tanker on fire in the Congo. However, let us give the Rohingya the benefit of the doubt and assume that they have not, in fact, torched their own homes for international attention, as the Myanmar government is claiming (though this writer would not put arson-jihad past ARSA).

Take Maungdaw, for instance, where the Myanmar army last week burnt down the homes of innocent Rohingya. Precisely a week prior to this incident, ARSA had attacked soldiers and Rakhine civilians in the area, who then had to flee their homes and hide in a monastery in Taung Bazaar. The victims in this scenario are clearly all the non-ARSA parties – all the Rohingya and the local Rakhines not engaging in jihadi violence.

Yet, this still begs the question – why the Rohingya? Why are they – the Muslims of Bangladeshi origin – the only community in a nation where over a hundred different ethnic groups of various religions coexist peacefully, being targeted?

The answer lies in the demystified history of the Rohingya. Since the 1940s (even before Saudi oil money, al-Qaeda training, etc), many Rohingya Muslims tried to wage “jihad” against Myanmar (burning Rakhine villages and massacring Buddhists for decades) and upon realising that they’d lost their bid for an Islamic nation, they have been, since the 1990s, trying to gain citizenship.

Fed up and in no mood to reward this community for its sedition with citizenship, Myanmar has taken a good look at its neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia – where Buddhism is waning, Islamism is increasing, and homosexuals and women are being caned in public, and has simply decided to expel all Rohingya Muslims from its country before the same fate hits home.

Nevertheless, there are thousands of Rohingya who are simply innocent victims – collateral damage, so to speak – in this conflict. In spite of the community’s checkered history, the non-violent Rohingya deserve to be treated differently and separately from ARSA. They deserve the protection and citizenship of a nation – that is their human right. Historically, the Rohingya were brought as slaves from Bangladesh to Burma by the British. Why doesn’t the United Kingdom take them in and give them refugee status or citizenship? The Rohingya have more in common with the Bangladeshis in terms of religious and cultural identity and, moreover, they share the same ethnicity. What’s holding Bangladesh back? Turkey’s Erdoğan is even willing to cover the costs for Bangladesh taking in these refugees.

The fact is, these countries know only too well what Myanmar already knows – that certain organisations are secretly encouraging and spreading Islamist ideologies among the Rohingya and will not cease to do so. Suu Kyi has explicitly stated that international organisations have been complicit in aiding Rohingya militants. But she has been pooh-poohed by Zeid bin Ra’ad al-Hussein from Saudi Arabia and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (which is ironical, like Saudi Arabia’s elevation to the UN Women’s Rights Commission; it’s his word against Suu Kyi’s, and the world has chosen to ignore hers).

Reports of rapes committed by the Myanmar army against the Rohingya have their sources in the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Some reports have come from Al Jazeera; that requires no further explanation.

In the meantime, Saudi Arabia is busy bombing Yemen into oblivion and starving millions of Yemeni children to death, all the while singling out Israel and Myanmar for human rights violations.

Why is this writer finding it hard to view the Rohingya crisis as real and not a hoax?

There is a growing discussion on FaceBook on this issue.

Here is one exchange i had after i posted the link to this page.  I am 'Kinana Nadir'.  i have not mentioned the names of the others as I am not sure if that page is public.

FROM: anon

This is a part of international conspiracy by Jehadi group to curve [carve] out an Islamic country comprising two hiil districts of Bangladesh and the Rakhinne of Burma.

FROM: Kinana Nadir

What you say is the pattern throughout history. Recent history show that this Muslim carving has happened, for example in Kosovo. It is being attempted in Mindinoa, Philippines.

TO: Kinana Nadir from another:

I believe the Rohingya are not radical in their religion. 'Muslim carving' happens whenever Islamists are able to invest in a country where Muslims are oppressed and exploit their situation. It did happen in Kossovo to a degree, yet the local populace there stood against the Islamists when these extremists demanded the removal of the statues of Mother Teresa, and Skanderbeg the national hero, in Prishtina the capital. The people, both Christian and Muslim, came together and defiantly stood in front of those statues. Supporting the Muslim reformists will block any attempt by these political Islamists to destroy a culture with their cancer. Therefore, the Rohingya should be supported or the danger is that they will be forced to go over to the Islamist cause.

Reply from: Kinana Nadir

Your comment sounds like a threat. Accommodate moderate Muslims and give in to all their demands or they will turn radical and seek to get their way by force.

Your comment, contrary to your stated intentions, prove just the opposite of what you are saying! And where do Islamists come from? They come from Islam and the teachings found there in. And those teachings are ever present, always pushing the so-called moderate Muslims to act in a stronger way to impose Islam on non-Muslims.

You say that 'the Rohingya are not radical in their religion.' But you left a word out. They 'are not radical in their religion NOW.' You cannot tell, or promise, me that they will forever remain moderate. Instead you tell me just the opposite!

Former State Dept Diplomat on Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar: 'I Don't Accept the Narrative'

The transcript:

F24: You were chief of mission in Burma from 1999 to 2002, it was a time that Aung San Suu Kyi was an icon, a beacon of peaceful resistance. She was put under house arrest while you were there. Has your perception of her changed in the past two weeks?

Clapp: No. I simply don’t accept the narrative that we just heard.

There was indeed a terrorist attack in Rakhine. It came from outside, it was perpetrated by people in the Rohingya diaspora living in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia coming in through Bangladesh. And they have killed a lot of security forces.

This started in October and the latest attack was timed to follow the recommendations, the presentation of the recommendations of the Kofi Annan international commission on Rakhine, which Aung Sun Suu Kyi has accepted and agreed to implement. These recommendations call for a long-term solution there. She was already working on it when it was disrupted by this latest terrorist attack. Their tactics are terrorism. There’s no question about it.

[Kyi is] not calling the entire Rohingya population terrorists, she is referring to a group of people who are going around with guns, machetes, and IEDs and killing their own people in addition to Buddhists, Hindus, and others that get in their way.

They have killed a lot of security forces, and they are wreaking havoc in the region. The people who are running and fleeing out to Bangladesh are not only fleeing the response of the security forces, they are fleeing their own radical groups because they’ve been attacking Rohingya, and in particular the leadership who were trying to work with the government on the citizenship process and other humanitarian efforts that were underway there.

This has all been thrown into a [inaudible] right now with the confusion that has been sown by this latest attack. And I think that the international community has to sort out the facts before making accusations.

The terror attacks that Clapp referenced were committed by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) -- the group launched attacks on 30 northern border outposts on August 25, killing 71 security personnel.

ARSA launched attacks last October that kicked off most of the recent waves of violence:

The real narrative peeks out in BBC reporting about 5 mins into the blubbing about "Muslim victims"... comments like "the Rohingya militants offer to lay down their arms".

Here's the best explanation I've seen.  It's an utter disgrace the fraudulent, one-sided journalism we get from BBC, Telegraph, etc.

https://www.jihadwatch.org/2017/09/reporting-on-the-rohingya-the-ti...

The Lady comes in for some roasting from the Guardian and Desmond Tutu. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/13/aung-san-suu-kyi-myan...

Aung San Suu Kyi is supposed to sort everything out and condemn and stop everything bad.

[But] domestically the issue is clear-cut. Hatred of the Rohingya is the one thing that unites almost everyone in Myanmar, said another diplomat: “The extremist Buddhists, the masses, the army, and even the NLD.”

But maybe she knows more about what is happening in Myanmar than the international observers.  Maybe she even knows more about Islam and Muslim terrorists than these observers.

As with most articles re Islam, The Guardian is not allowing comments.

The truth behind Myanmar’s Rohingya insurgency

While the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army claims to be fighting an ethno-nationalist struggle, its leaders and extremist group links point towards a wider regional agenda

http://www.atimes.com//article/truth-behind-myanmars-rohingya-insur...

While Myanmar’s emergent Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) claims it’s like other ethnic armed groups fighting for self-determination across the country and should not be branded as a terrorist organization, the realities on the ground tell a different tale.

ARSA represents an entirely new type of insurgency, one which the Myanmar military has demonstrated it is wholly ill-equipped to combat...

According to intelligence analysts, its mentor is Abdus Qadoos Burmi, another Pakistani of Rohingya descent. Likewise based in Karachi, he has appeared in videos spread on social media calling for ‘jihad’ in Myanmar.

“It is now clear that the simultaneous attacks on August 25 required meticulous planning. In the months before the attacks, as many as 50 people, Muslims as well as Buddhists suspected of serving as government informants, had their throats slit or were hacked to death in order to deprive the Myanmar military of intelligence in the area.

The timing of the attacks was hardly a coincidence. On August 24, the Advisory Commission on Rakhine state, chaired by former UN secretary general Kofi Annan and commissioned by the Myanmar government, released its report suggesting peaceful means to end the conflict in the area.”

The Islamic way of :

How to make yourself feel welcome by a new country and show graditude towards those you want to help you:

A Muslim Man from Darbanga Bihar is seen giving serious threat to PM Modi that if these illegal immigrants are not welcomed and pampered in India then he and other Muslims will kill all hindus and destroy India. Here is the Video posted on twitter by Sonam Mahajan clearly stating the anti national statement.

https://satyavijayi.com/shocking-muslim-man-warns-pm-modi-help-rohi...

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Muslim man warns PM Modi, says, "Help Rohingyas or we will wipe out Hindus & this country from world map."

https://twitter.com/AsYouNotWish
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“Rohingya terrorists killed our parents calling it a sacrifice to Allah.”~ Hindu survivors from Myanmar.

https://twitter.com/AsYouNotWish/status/912585771231490048

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Mission Overview

Most Western societies are based on Secular Democracy, which itself is based on the concept that the open marketplace of ideas leads to the optimum government. Whilst that model has been very successful, it has defects. The 4 Freedoms address 4 of the principal vulnerabilities, and gives corrections to them. 

At the moment, one of the main actors exploiting these defects, is Islam, so this site pays particular attention to that threat.

Islam, operating at the micro and macro levels, is unstoppable by individuals, hence: "It takes a nation to protect the nation". There is not enough time to fight all its attacks, nor to read them nor even to record them. So the members of 4F try to curate a representative subset of these events.

We need to capture this information before it is removed.  The site already contains sufficient information to cover most issues, but our members add further updates when possible.

We hope that free nations will wake up to stop the threat, and force the separation of (Islamic) Church and State. This will also allow moderate Muslims to escape from their totalitarian political system.

The 4 Freedoms

These 4 freedoms are designed to close 4 vulnerabilities in Secular Democracy, by making them SP or Self-Protecting (see Hobbes's first law of nature). But Democracy also requires - in addition to the standard divisions of Executive, Legislature & Judiciary - a fourth body, Protector of the Open Society (POS), to monitor all its vulnerabilities (see also Popper). 
1. SP Freedom of Speech
Any speech is allowed - except that advocating the end of these freedoms
2. SP Freedom of Election
Any party is allowed - except one advocating the end of these freedoms
3. SP Freedom from Voter Importation
Immigration is allowed - except where that changes the political demography (this is electoral fraud)
4. SP Freedom from Debt
The Central Bank is allowed to create debt - except where that debt burden can pass across a generation (25 years).

An additional Freedom from Religion is deducible if the law is applied equally to everyone:

  • Religious and cultural activities are exempt from legal oversight except where they intrude into the public sphere (Res Publica)"

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