'No way back' in Myanmar's crucible of communal hate

Agencies
September 25, 2017

Myanmar, Sept 25: Hindus once sold food to Rohingyas, spoke the same language and even cut the hair of their Muslim neighbours. But co-existence among the collage of ethnicities in Myanmar's Rakhine state has been ruptured -- perhaps irreversibly -- by the bloodshed of the last month.

Violence has periodically cut through the western state, where communal rivalries have been sharpened by British colonial meddling, chicanery by Myanmar's army and a fierce dispute over who does -- and does not -- belong in Rakhine.

But the events of August 25, when raids by Rohingya militants unleashed a swirl of violence across the north, have sunk Rakhine to new depths of hate.

"All of our family died in the village... we will not go back," said Chaw Shaw Chaw Thee, one of the hundreds of displaced Hindus seeking shelter in the state capital Sittwe.

The 20-year-old said she lost 23 family members as Rohingya militants swarmed the clutch of Hindu villages in Kha Maung Seik, near the Bangladesh border.

On Sunday the army said 28 badly-decomposed bodies of Hindu men, women and children had been pulled from two mass graves in the same area.

It was not immediately clear if they belonged to Chaw Shaw Chaw Thee's family. Heavily pregnant when she fled, she gave birth at a disused football stadium in Sittwe, where hundreds of traumatised Hindus now sleep on grubby mats in the overcrowded concourse.

An army lockdown has made it impossible to independently verify what happened in the villages of northern Rakhine, an area dominated by Rohingya Muslims who are a minority elsewhere in the mainly Buddhist country.

But allegations, carved along ethnic lines, are spinning out as conspiracy and competing for identity claims override empathy between former neighbours.

Hindus, who make up less than one percent of Rakhine's population, accuse Rohingya of massacring them, burning their homes and kidnapping women for marriage.

Meanwhile, the Rohingya, some 430,000 of whom have fled to Bangladesh, trade accusations with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists of grisly mob attacks and army "clearance operations" that have emptied their villages.

Small ethnic groups such as the Mro, Thet and Diagnet have also been caught up in the killings and chaos of the last month.

"We were barbers for Muslims, our women sold things in Muslim villages, I had Muslim friends, we had no problems," said Kyaw Kyaw Naing, a 34-year-old Hindu who can dance across linguistic divides in Hindi, Rakhine, Burmese and Rohingya.

Community ties in what is also Myanmar's poorest state have now unravelled. "We want to go back, but we will not if the Muslims are there."

Last week Myanmar's leader Aung san Suu Kyi told the international community that Rohingya refugees were welcome back if they were properly "verified".

But delivering on that promise will be almost impossible in a country where the status of the Rohingya is incendiary.

The Rohingya say they are a distinct ethnic group whose roots stretch back centuries.

Myanmar's powerful military insists they are "Bengalis" who were first brought to the country by British colonisers and have continued to pour in illegally ever since.

"It can't be solved in the short-term... to be stable and harmonious could take decades," Oo Hla Saw, a lawmaker for the Arakan National Party, which represents Rakhine Buddhists, told AFP.

Rakhine's history is bitterly contested and flecked by rivalries. Once a proud a Buddhist kingdom with a deep Muslim influence from trade and settlement, Rakhine's demographics were overhauled by British colonial administrators.

They shunted in large numbers of Hindu Indians and Bengali Muslims as farm hands to an area already populated by a soup of ethnicities including the Rohingya and Rakhine.

The Japanese invasion during World War II saw Rakhine clash with Rohingya, who were perceived to have been favoured by the retreating British.

Since 1962 the military has kindled anti-Rohingya sentiment, painting itself as the protector of the Buddhist faith from conquest by Islam.

Three major campaigns -- in 1978, the early 90s and now -- have driven Rohingya from Myanmar in huge numbers.

The army, which ran the country for 50 years and still has its hands on key levers of power, has also gradually rubbed out the group's legal status.

A 1982 law stripped Rohingya of citizenship, subjecting them to suffocating controls on everything from where they can travel to how many children they can have.

"The army wants to clear the Muslim community from Rakhine state," says Kyaw Min, a Rohingya and former MP, who has had his citizenship revoked.

"The intention is to drive down the Rohingya population. They have achieved that in the south of Rakhine, now they are targeting the north." Repression has fed Rohingya militancy, according to analysts.

Last month a government-backed commission on Rakhine's troubles, led by former UN chief Kofi Annan, urged "all communities to move beyond entrenched historical narratives".

But a few hours after its report was published, the militants attacked, sparking a ferocious military response that the UN believes amounts to "ethnic cleansing".

The report also urged the government to boost the economy to uplift a poor population and build community bonds.

Business ties and personal relations once defied communal lines, with Rohingya who could not legally own property relying on Rakhine neighbours to secure deeds for them on the sly.

Now the fearful displaced inside Rakhine say there is no way they can ever again live alongside Rohingya neighbours.

Khin Saw Nyo, 48, an ethnic Rakhine, said nearby Muslim villagers suddenly turned on her community near the Bangladesh border, forcing them to flee to the mountains.

"We will die if we go back," she told AFP from inside a monastery sheltering refugees in Sittwe, adding Rohingya militants are still preparing to strike. "They warned us to eat well... they said the next time we will not escape."

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Agencies
April 2,2020
Thailand's controversial king has created a category of his own with his idea of self-isolation.
 
According to reports, King Maha Vajiralongkorn, also known as Rama X, has hired out an entire luxury hotel in Germany, where he has been 'self-isolating' with 20 women.
 
The luxury hotel, the Grand Hotel Sonnenbichl, is in the Alpine resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
 
The 67-year-old king is self-isolating with his entourage that includes a 'harem' of 20 concubines and several servants, reported Bild.
 
However, it is unclear if his four wives are currently living in the same hotel.

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News Network
May 20,2020

Kensington (United States), May 20: The world cut its daily carbon dioxide emissions by 17% at the peak of the pandemic shutdown last month, a new study found.

But with life and heat-trapping gas levels inching back toward normal, the brief pollution break will likely be “a drop in the ocean" when it comes to climate change, scientists said.

In their study of carbon dioxide emissions during the coronavirus pandemic, an international team of scientists calculated that pollution levels are heading back up — and for the year will end up between 4% and 7% lower than 2019 levels.

That's still the biggest annual drop in carbon emissions since World War II.

It'll be 7% if the strictest lockdown rules remain all year long across much of the globe, 4% if they are lifted soon.

For a week in April, the United States cut its carbon dioxide levels by about one-third.

China, the world's biggest emitter of heat-trapping gases, sliced its carbon pollution by nearly a quarter in February, according to a study Tuesday in the journal Nature Climate Change. India and Europe cut emissions by 26% and 27% respectively.

The biggest global drop was from April 4 through 9 when the world was spewing 18.7 million tons (17 million metric tons) of carbon pollution a day less than it was doing on New Year's Day.

Such low global emission levels haven't been recorded since 2006. But if the world returns to its slowly increasing pollution levels next year, the temporary reduction amounts to ''a drop in the ocean," said study lead author Corinne LeQuere, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia.

“It's like you have a bath filled with water and you're turning off the tap for 10 seconds," she said.

By April 30, the world carbon pollution levels had grown by 3.3 million tons (3 million metric tons) a day from its low point earlier in the month. Carbon dioxide stays in the air for about a century.

Outside experts praised the study as the most comprehensive yet, saying it shows how much effort is needed to prevent dangerous levels of further global warming.

“That underscores a simple truth: Individual behavior alone ... won't get us there,” Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann, who wasn't part of the study, said in an email.

“We need fundamental structural change.”

If the world could keep up annual emission cuts like this without a pandemic for a couple decades, there's a decent chance Earth can avoid warming another 1.8 degrees (1 degree Celsius) of warming from now, study authors said. But getting the type of yearly cuts to reach that international goal is unlikely, they said.

If next year returns to 2019 pollution levels, it means the world has only bought about a year's delay in hitting the extra 1.8 degrees (1 degree Celsius) of warming that leaders are trying to avoid, LeQuere said. That level could still occur anywhere from 2050 to 2070, the authors said.

The study was carried out by Global Carbon Project, a consortium of international scientists that produces the authoritative annual estimate of carbon dioxide emissions. They looked at 450 databases showing daily energy use and introduced a measurement scale for pandemic-related societal “confinement” in its estimates.

Nearly half the emission reductions came from less transportation pollution, mostly involving cars and trucks, the authors said. By contrast, the study found that drastic reductions in air travel only accounted for 10% of the overall pollution drop.

In the US, the biggest pollution declines were seen in California and Washington with plunges of more than 40%.

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News Network
May 19,2020

New Delhi, May 19: The number of coronavirus cases crossed the one lakh mark in the country on Tuesday, while the death toll due to the infection touched 3,163, according to the Union Health Ministry.

A total of 134 deaths and 4,970 COVID-19 cases were reported in the country in the past 24 hours since 8 pm on Monday, it said.

The total number of coronavirus cases has risen to 1,01,139, the ministry said.

The number of active COVID-19 cases stood at 58,802 while 39,173 people have recovered and one patient has migrated, it said.

"Thus, around 38.73 per cent patients have recovered so far," a senior health ministry official said.

The total confirmed cases include foreigners.

Of the 134 deaths reported since Monday morning, 51 were in Maharashtra, 35 in Gujarat, 14 in Uttar Pradesh, eight in Delhi, seven in Rajasthan, six in West Bengal, four in Madhya Pradesh, three in Tamil Nadu, two each in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, and one each in Bihar and Telangana.

Of the 3,163 fatalities, Maharashtra tops tally with 1,249 deaths. Gujarat comes second with 694 deaths, followed by Madhya Pradesh at 252, West Bengal at 244, Delhi at 168, Rajasthan at 138, Uttar Pradesh at 118, Tamil Nadu at 81 and Andhra Pradesh at 50.

The death toll reached 37 each in Karnataka and Punjab and 35 in Telangana.

Jammu and Kashmir has reported 15 fatalities due to the disease, Haryana has 14 deaths while Bihar has registered nine and Kerala and Odisha each have reported four deaths.

Jharkhand, Chandigarh and Himachal Pradesh each have recorded three COVID-19 fatalities, while Assam has reported two deaths.

 Meghalaya, Uttarakhand and Puducherry have reported one fatality each, according to the data provided by the ministry.

According to the ministry's website, more than 70 per cent of the deaths are due to comorbidities, the existence of multiple disorders in the same person.

According to the health ministry's data updated in the morning, the highest number of confirmed cases in the country are from Maharashtra at 35,058, followed by Tamil Nadu at 11,760, Gujarat at 11,745, Delhi at 10,054, Rajasthan at 5,507, Madhya Pradesh at 5,236 and Uttar Pradesh at 4,605.

The number of COVID-19 cases has gone up to 2,825 in West Bengal, 2,474 in Andhra Pradesh and 1,980 in Punjab.

It has risen to 1,597 in Telangana, 1,391 in Bihar, 1,289 in Jammu and Kashmir, 1,246 in Karnataka and 928 in Haryana.

Odisha has reported 876 coronavirus infection cases so far, while Kerala has 630 cases. A total of 223 people have been infected with the virus in Jharkhand and 196 in Chandigarh.

Tripura has reported 167 cases, Assam has 107, Uttarakhand and Chhattisgarh have 93 cases each, Himachal Pradesh has 90 and Ladakh has registered 43 cases so far.

Goa has reported 38 COVID-19 cases, while the Andaman and Nicobar Islands has registered 33 infections.

Puducherry has registered 18 cases, Meghalaya has 13 and Manipur has seven cases. Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh and Dadar and Nagar Haveli have reported a case each till how.

"814 cases are being reassigned to states," the ministry said on its website, adding "our figures are being reconciled with the ICMR".

State-wise distribution is subject to further verification and reconciliation, it said.

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