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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: Oppose genocide in Myanmar

Myanmar once again faces unspeakable, widespread violence. 

The Rohingya of Myanmar, a Muslim minority in the nation formerly known under British colonial rule as Burma, has become the victim of genocide.

Ethno-Buddhist death squads, with the help of the Burmese military, have turned the Rakhine state in western Myanmar into a hellscape, driving around 400,000 Rohingya into neighboring Bangladesh since late August. 

The scope of these atrocities is staggering. And the establishment press’ apathy and relative silence on this event is repulsive. 

Western media has long possessed a general air of anti-Muslim bias. Its failure to publicize what the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, Zeid Ra‘ad al-Hussein, has called “textbook ethnic cleansing” further substantiates these anti-Muslim accusations. 

Together with the genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s and ISIS’s ethnic cleansing of the Yazidis, what now seems to be a permanent effort to cleanse the Rohingya joins these other monstrous events as one of the major genocides of the early 21st century. 

The Rohingya, swept up in the history of post-colonial Burma, faced religious violence and a previous mass migration to Bangladesh in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, Myanmar’s military junta, in power since a military coup in 1962, relegated the Rohingya to ethnic minority status and stripped them of citizenry.  

The administration of elections and democracy only returned to Myanmar in 2011, and at the time, had been trumpeted as a win for the Obama administration. The transitional president, Aung San Suu Kyi, had been a political prisoner and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. 

As her nation’s military carries out ongoing ethnic cleansing, President Kyi now sees eye to eye with fellow war criminal peace prize laureates, such as Woodrow Wilson, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama

Going forward, any moral nation should support a UN resolution condemning the genocide perpetrated by Myanmar’s government and call for the end of arms sales to its military. 

The EU has backed, though impotently, such arms embargos since the days of the Burmese military junta, and international publicity would discourage the steady stream of arms pumped into Myanmar by numerous governments. 

Myanmar receives most of its weaponry from China, Russia, Ukraine, Israel and India. Though Israel, a U.S. ally, is strident in its continued support for the ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Rohingya, the critical flash point in this developing conflict is China’s apparent endorsement of Myanmar’s actions. 

The White House has not released a word on these matters. Perhaps this is because President Trump’s national security team is considering politicizing the genocide to conform to a larger political and military confrontation with China, a showdown already simmering with continued provocations between North Korea and the U.S. 

We cannot allow the suffering of the Rohingya to become a political tool for Washington. 

Politico remains under the delusion that Trump is a unique break from U.S. human rights policy. Since at least Jimmy Carter, the concept of human rights has been used as a public relations tool to advance the goals of U.S. imperial policy, from the Balkans, Libya, Syria and Venezuela. 

As someone that has physically stood in one of the many U.S.-backed torture centers across Latin America, I can assure you this nation does not care about human rights. International support and solidarity for the Rohingya has to remain insulated from the manipulations of U.S. policy. 

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