Burma: catch all thread

[davidbfpo]

If you need a book this might help; from the publisher's website:

Ibrahim’s searing book documents the slow-motion genocide of the Muslim Rohingyas and exposes the culpability of the Buddhist clergy in fomenting the religious cleansing of Myanmar.

This is a new, revised edition and a paperback costs £12.99.
Link:http://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/...eid=80d42c7c0a

[davidbfpo]

A decent backgrounder on the crisis that outsiders probably think is new, when in fact there is a long history and recent reporting I have seen made almost no mention of the history involved. Let alone the communal and ethnic problems within Burma.
Link:https://thediplomat.com/2018/01/rohi...-of-partition/

[AdamG]

Reference a survivor returning to the scene of the August slaughter,

They are among more than five mass graves, all previously unreported, that have been confirmed by The Associated Press through multiple interviews with more than two dozen survivors in Bangladesh refugee camps and through time-stamped cellphone videos. The Myanmar government regularly claims such massacres of the Rohingya never happened, and has acknowledged only one mass grave containing 10 “terrorists” in the village of Inn Din. However, the AP’s reporting shows a systematic slaughter of Rohingya Muslim civilians by the military, with help from Buddhist neighbors — and suggests the presence of many more graves with many more people.

The Massacre
Survivors said that the soldiers carefully planned the Aug. 27 attack, and then deliberately tried to hide what they had done. They came to the slaughter armed not only with rifles, knives, rocket launchers and grenades, but also with shovels to dig pits and acid to burn away faces and hands so that the bodies could not be identified. Two days before the attack, villagers say, soldiers were seen buying 12 large containers of acid at a nearby village’s market.
The killing began around noon, when more than 200 soldiers swept into Gu Dar Pyin from the direction of a Buddhist village to the south, firing their weapons. The Rohingya who could move fast enough ran toward the north or toward a river in the east, said Mohammad Sha, 37, a shop owner and farmer.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/apos-coul...044549546.html

[AdamG]

YANGON (Reuters) - A court in Myanmar declined to grant bail on Thursday for two Reuters journalists accused of violating the country’s Official Secrets Act, although their defense lawyer said information in documents at the center of the case was publicly available.

Wa Lone, 31, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 27, had worked on Reuters coverage of a crisis in Rakhine state, where an army crackdown on insurgents that started on Aug. 25 has triggered the flight of nearly 690,000 Rohingya Muslims to neighboring Bangladesh, according to the United Nations.
The reporters were detained on Dec. 12 after they had been invited to meet police officers over dinner in Yangon. They have told relatives they were arrested almost immediately after being handed some documents at a restaurant by two officers they had not met before.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-m...-idUSKBN1FK3C2

[AdamG]

Bound together, the 10 Rohingya Muslim captives watched their Buddhist neighbors dig a shallow grave. Soon afterwards, on the morning of Sept. 2, all 10 lay dead. At least two were hacked to death by Buddhist villagers. The rest were shot by Myanmar troops, two of the gravediggers said.
"One grave for 10 people," said Soe Chay, 55, a retired soldier from Inn Din's Rakhine Buddhist community who said he helped dig the pit and saw the killings. The soldiers shot each man two or three times, he said. "When they were being buried, some were still making noises. Others were already dead."
The killings in the coastal village of Inn Din marked another bloody episode in the ethnic violence sweeping northern Rakhine state, on Myanmar's western fringe. Nearly 690,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled their villages and crossed the border into Bangladesh since August. None of Inn Din's 6,000 Rohingya remained in the village as of October.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...cid=spartandhp

[davidbfpo]

Via Reuters a rarely seen update on the internal situation in Rakhine, the eastern province. Curious to see this insurgent group has had help from the still fighting Kachins in the north of Burma.
Link:https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-rakhine-explainer/explainer-the-insurgents-plunging-myanmars-rakhine-back-into-chaos-idUSKCN1P90KZ?