Habib Siddiqui

NOBEL PEACE LAUREATE MAIREAD MAGUIRE HAS CALLED ON UN AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY TO ACT URGENTLY TO END BURMESE GOVERNMENT LED REPRESSION AGAINST BURMA’S ROHINGYA MUSLIMS. NOBEL PEACE LAUREATE MAIREAD MAGUIRE RECENTLY SAID: ‘THE STATELESS ROHINGYAS OF BURMA, HAVE SUFFERED FROM PERSECUTION AND DISCRIMINATION FOR DECADES AND ARE NOW FACING INTER-COMMUNAL VIOLENCE WHICH HAS EVOLVED INTO LARGE-SCALE STATE SPONSORED VIOLENCE AGAINST THEM. SHE SAID ‘THE UN AND INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY HAVE A MORAL AND LEGAL RESPONSIBILITY TO ACT NOW AND STEP UP DIPLOMATIC AND NONVIOLENT METHODS TO STOP THE PERSECUTION AND SUFFERING OF THE ROHINGYA PEOPLE AND TO END THE BURMESE GOVERNMENT LED ABUSE OF HUMAN RIGHTS AND REPRESSION AGAINST THE ROHINGYAS.’ In her earlier letter in July to Burma Campaign, UK, she wrote : "BURMESE POLICE, SECURITY FORCES AND SOLDIERS ARE RAPING, LOOTING, TORTURING AND ARBITARILY KILLING ROHINGYA PEOPLE. THERE HAVE BEEN MASS ARRESTS WITH ROHINGYA PEOPLE KEPT IN D...

Carlos Sardina Galache has done a great job analyzing President Obama's recent trip to Burma (Myanmar). He says, " For decades,   the regime has been fostering   ethno-racial hatred against Rohingya Muslims to deflect the majority’s attention away from the myriad political and economic problems plaguing the Burmese population and to pit the staunchly nationalistic Arakanese against an enemy other than the central government. General Ne Win’s regime rendered the Rohingya stateless in 1982, when the government passed a law that denied the group citizenship by alleging that they were not one of the 135 ethnic groups that lived in Burma before the first Anglo-Burmese war of 1824. This is a hotly contested point among scholars, but there are references   as early as 1820   to the “Rooinga” as the “Mahommedans who have been long settled” in Arakan." Several of my own articles have shown that there is absolutely no doubt that Rohingyas are the descendants of the original ...

To many Burmese and Rakhine Buddhists of today’s Myanmar the existence of the non-Buddhist Rohingya people is mostly seen as a direct result of Indian, or more particularly, Bengali immigration during the post-1826 era of British occupation of the territories. To them, the Rohingya history starts with the British occupation of Burma , dating back to 1826 after the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824-26 in which Arakan and Tenasserim came under the East India Company, with its bases in Calcutta (today’s Kolkata in West Bengal of India ). The so-called Indian immigration to Burma is intimately linked with the colonial administration’s desire to transform Burma into a rice bowl for the British Empire . In this paper an attempt is made to reappraise the events during the British occupation of Burma starting with its annexation of Arakan and its commercial attractiveness which drew people from other parts of the region to settle – mostly temporarily – there. The questionable influx of...

Peter Lee has done an excellent job reviewing the Rohingya crisis in the Asia Times. You can read the piece by clicking here .

Here is an article posted in the Zaman by Nay San Lwin about the Rohingya issue and how the ultra-racist Rakhine Buddhist leadership wants to drive out the Rohingya the same way Palestinians are driven out of what was once historical Palestine. Interestingly, as I noted elsewhere, the tactics to demonize the Rohingya people follow the blueprint of fascist Nazi campaign against the Jews of Germany. What an irony!

As I mentioned in my two last articles (click here and here ), when a genocide takes place, all kinds of linguistic camouflage are often used by people within various governments and world bodies that don't want to take the responsibility of stopping it.  When the Tutsis were victims of genocide in Rwanda, it was depicted as an ethnic trouble, a sectarian trouble, nothing too serious for the African Union to seriously intervene, or the UN to engage into. During the Bosnian crisis, for too long the genocide of the Bosnian Muslims was portrayed as a small matter without depicting correctly who were the targets of a genocidal campaign. The shelling of Bosnian civilian population was not even mentioned. Here see the excerpt from a book (Goldhagen's - Worse than War) -  "Mike Habib, a high-ranking U.S. State Department official, in keeping with Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s principal objective regarding the Serb’s mass slaughter of Bosniaks (or Bosnian Muslims), w...

Dr. Maung Zarni, an expert on Myanmar, who is now with the London School of Economics, has written a very thought-provoking article in the Nation, Bangkok. For anyone curious about understanding the mindset of the quasi-civil regime of ex-General Thein Sein and the hypes that come with his so-called reform government must read this article. Here is the link .

Five Nobel Laureates have written a letter to presidents Obama and Thein Sein to bring an end to the escalating and systematic violence in Rakhine State of Myanmar. The full letter can be seen here .

Attacks and arson in late October by ethnic Arakanese Maghs (Rakhines) against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar ’s Arakan State were at times carried out with the support of state  security  forces and local government officials, Human Rights Watch said lately. New satellite imagery obtained by Human Rights Watch shows extensive destruction of homes and other property in the predominantly Rohingya Muslim areas of Pauktaw, Mrauk-U, and Myebon townships, all sites of violence and displacement in late October 2012. You can view the HRW report by clicking here . For an old report in August which says that the government could have stopped the violence, click here . For the latest satellite images on Rohingya villages and towns destroyed by Rakhine Buddhist terrorists, click here , here , here  and here . HRW's Asia Director Brad Adams said, "President Obama should make clear to the Burmese president that the attacks on the Rohingya need to stop if the Burma government wants ...

Dear Mr. President, I am somewhat puzzled by your decision to visit Myanmar , which has the worst records of human rights in our planet. As an overture to your trip, your administration has recently lifted import restrictions on Myanmar , broadly authorizing Myanmar-origin goods to enter the United States for the first time in almost a decade. So, you can understand why like so many other concerned human rights activists, I am at a loss to understand your rationale for the trip. I am sure your administration is well aware of Myanmar government’s apartheid policy and its monumental crimes against its own people, esp. the Rohingya, who remain the worst persecuted people in our time. The root cause of the Rohingya people lies with the 1982 Citizenship Law, which is at odds with scores of international laws. This law, formulated during the hated dictator Ne Win’s era, has effectively made the Rohingya people stateless in their ancestral homeland. President Thein Sein’s quasi-...

Today, I came across a cartoon, sent by a classmate, published probably in a Bangladeshi newspaper, which says it all about corruption. The cartoon is about a class room setting in English grammar where a teacher asks the students to name the tense in the sentence: "One day our Bangladesh will become corruption-free." "Future 'impossible' tense," replies a student. Yes, the student is right, or so it appears from Bangladesh's losing record to tame corruption within its society. It is sad to see that Bangladesh has not been able to tame this nasty beast. Through its laws, passed at the parliament, every government that comes to power, ensures that its own corrupt members could not be tried while in office. It ensures that the Anti-Corruption Commission remains a toothless and nail-less tiger, as so aptly complained by its Chairman, Mr. Golam Rahman. The government puts a limit on how much money the ACC can spend in legal fees to pursue cases against ...

My attention has been drawn to an interview of Jacques P. Leider in the Irrawaddy.org. Here is my comment below: Jacques Leider is long known for his academic dishonesty. In his own writings he mentioned that during the British era only a few dozens of Bengali migrants moved to Arakan, and now he claims that Rohingyas were not known until the 18th century. Well how about poet Syed Alaol's writings from the early 17th century?  The greatest crime one can do is when it denies the rights of others to define themselves. The Rohingyas are a distinct religious and racial group from the Mongoloid- tribes of Burma, esp. the Rakhine Buddhists. By any definition in sociology, they are an ethnic group, whether or not Leider agrees.  He has been parroting Aye Chan's flawed thesis to plant seeds of racism and intolerance, and thus justifying the current genocidal activities of the joint Myanmar-Rakhine criminal racist cliques. It is shameful activity for anyone claiming to be a resear...

Part 1: Current Situation inside Arakan Myanmar ’s western state of Arakan (Rakhine) is again burning. In Mrauk-U, the former capital of the independent kingdom of Arakan , hundreds of young Rakhine Buddhist men were on the march: packed on the backs of pickups, on motorcycles, on trishaws, tuk-tuks and bicycles, but mostly on foot. They carried spears, swords, cleavers, bamboo staves, slingshots, crossbows and the occasional petrol bomb. Their target: the unarmed Rohingya Muslims. As the Economist (dated Nov. 3, 2012) of the UK noted, one Buddhist terrorist tugged at an imaginary beard and made a grisly throat-cutting gesture. Sadly, Mrauk-U is not the only town where Rohingya Muslims are facing a genocidal campaign at the hands of Rakhine terrorists. From the reports collected inside Myanmar , there is little doubt that the Rakhine Buddhist terrorists, aided by local and central government politicians, police and security forces, are carrying out a pre-meditated genocidal...