Habib Siddiqui

YANGON/UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Thursday called on countries to suspend providing weapons to Myanmar over violence against Rohingya Muslims until the military puts sufficient accountability measures in place. It was the first time the United States called for punishment of military leaders behind the repression, but stopped short of threatening to reimpose U.S. sanctions which were suspended under the Obama administration. “We cannot be afraid to call the actions of the Burmese authorities what they appear to be - a brutal, sustained campaign to cleanse the country of an ethnic minority,” Haley told the U.N. Security Council, the first time Washington has echoed the U.N.’s accusation that the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people in Rakhine State was ethnic cleansing. Myanmar rejects accusations of ethnic cleansing. “The Burmese military must respect human rights and fundamental freedoms. Those who have been accused...

United Nations: Act Now to End and Remedy Crimes Against Humanity in Myanmar U.N. Secretary General to brief Security Council today, 88 organizations call for arms embargo, sanctions on Myanmar (NEW YORK and BANGKOK, September 28, 2017)—The United Nations Security Council and U.N. member states should act urgently to impose an arms embargo on the Myanmar military and targeted sanctions on individuals responsible for atrocity crimes against Rohingya Muslims and others in Rakhine State, Fortify Rights said today. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres will today publicly brief the U.N. Security Council on the human rights situation in Rakhine State. “No more excuses, the international community must act now,” said Kate Vigneswaran, Legal Director at Fortify Rights. “Condemnations from the international community are important, but concrete action is urgently needed to end and remedy atrocities against Rohingya and others.”   Fortify Rights, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty Intern...

Antonio Guterres urges Myanmar's government to end military operation as refugees continue to flee to Bangladesh. 28 Sep 2017 20:16 GMT The United Nations boss has called for action to end "violence" against the Rohingya, pleading to the Myanmar government to immediately end military operations against the Muslim ethnic group. In a speech to the UN Security Council on Thursday, Antonio Guterres said the current crisis is "steadily deteriorating", adding that since the conflict began last month about 500,000 Rohingya have already crossed the border to Bangladesh to flee the violence in Myanmar's Rakhine State.  "The situation has spiraled into the world's fastest developing refugee emergency - a humanitarian and human rights nightmare," Guterres said. "The reality on the ground demands action. Swift action, to protect people, alleviate suffering, prevent further instability, address the root causes of the situation and forge a lon...

Has the UN failed Myanmar's Rohingya Muslims? By Jonah Fisher of BBC   The UN leadership in Myanmar tried to stop the Rohingya rights issue being raised with the government, sources in the UN and aid community told the BBC. One former UN official said the head of the UN in Myanmar (Burma) tried to prevent human rights advocates from visiting sensitive Rohingya areas. More than 500,000 Rohingya have fled an offensive by the military, with many now sheltering in camps in Bangladesh. The UN in Myanmar "strongly disagreed" with the BBC findings. In the month since Rohingya Muslims began flowing into Bangladesh, the UN has been at the forefront of the response. It has delivered aid and made robust statements condemning the Burmese authorities. But sources within the UN and the aid community both in Myanmar and outside have told the BBC that, in the four years before the current crisis, the head of the United Nations Country Team (UNCT), a Canadian called...

Nazis March into Germany’s Parliament by Thomas Klikauer        On 24 th September  2017, elections to Germany’s parliament resulted in the fact that for the first time since 1949, a neo-Nazi party was elected with 12.6%, just behind Merkel’s conservatives (32.9%) and the social-democratic SPD (20.5%). Other parties entering the German parliament are the neo-liberal FDP (10.7%), the Left (9.2%), and the Greens (8.9%). Unlike the old Nazis who called themselves Nazis, the new Nazis call themselves “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) camouflaging their true ideology. The AfD is also known as “alternative for the dumb” in the best tradition of the AfD’s ideological predecessors. Neither Himmler, Goering or Hitler suffered from intellectualism – they were “men”(!) of brutality and action. Much of Hitler’s almost unreadable “Mein Kampf”, for example, was a fight against German grammar as it was a fight against Jews, workers, and the left. The Nazi’s tra...

Muslim Nations Are Rallying to Protect the Rohingya, What About the Rest of Us? by John Feffer   They were Muslims, and they were leaving the country in droves. Their homeland, a remote corner of a multiethnic country, had become a warzone. Militants had taken up arms to fight for their rights, and the central government retaliated in force. Human rights abuses, mostly by the government, were rampant. Caught in the gunfire, hundreds of thousands of people became refugees. The central government wasn’t unhappy to see them leave, since it believed that the refugees belonged with their ethnic and confessional brethren across the border. The story of the Rohingya of Burma/Myanmar is a familiar one. But it also sounds an awful lot like what happened to the Kosovars in the late 1990s. At the time, the Clinton administration declared the situation a humanitarian crisis, a genocide in the making, and intervened militarily on the Kosovars’ behalf against the Yugoslav gover...

It is imperative to call Myanmar’s Rohingya persecution by its legal name, GENOCIDE Gregory Stanton BA (Oberlin College), MTS (Harvard Divinity School), MA and Ph.D. in Anthropology (U. of Chicago), and J.D. (Yale Law School) Research Professor in Genocide Studies and Prevention, George Mason U., USA The press and spokespersons for governments have called the Myanmar government’s aggression “ethnic cleansing.” This is a term invented by Slobodan Milosevic as a euphemism for forced displacement and genocide. It is an insidious term because there is no international treaty law against it, whereas there are international laws against forced displacement and genocide. Genocidal massacres are acts of genocide. Genocide consists of acts of genocide intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Genocide is precisely what the Myanmar government and supporting militias are committing against the Rohingya. Myanmar is committing both “ethnic c...