Don’t get emotional about the Rohingya, sort the facts from the fiction instead.
It’s far too simplistic to believe that Aung San Suu Kyi and the Myanmar state woke up one day and decided to carry out war against the Rohingya and slaughter them. What’s really happening behind the BBC and pseudo left leaning refugee tear stained headlines?
Something must be going on because for the first time in years the BBC is now actively telling us that there is a refugee crisis and that a Nobel peace prize hero is responsible for it.
Just because the BBC, RT and (wait for it) Al Jazeera are telling us that the Rohingya have been living their lives in peace, only to be picked upon by a vicious junta out of a clear blue sky, doesn’t make it so. Because the Rohingya have been far from living their lives in peace in the region, many of them have in fact been advocating blood and thunder instead for decades now.
Culpability lies with an ugly outfit called the ARSA, or Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, who are a violent Islamist group who have been getting funding, money and material from Islamic countries like Pakistan and Malaysia and its training from al-Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan. What have these people been up to? They’ve been forcing all Rohingya males — no matter their age — to attack Rakhine Buddhists and other civilians and to provoke the Myanmar army into violence.
It’s therefore interesting that the word of a Nobel peace prize winner has been ignored to this end and instead the word of the Saudi-backed United Nations (UN) human rights commission has been taken as authoritative, failing to call out the human rights violations perpetrated by ARSA against the Rakhine civilians, as well as against the Rohingya who were being forced to commit acts of terror. This is the height of insult given we are talking about Saudi Arabia and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who when they’re not denying hard-line Islamist propagation in the reason are telling the UN Women’s Rights Commission how to run their business.
Now the BBC is trotting out lots of footage of refugees, wallowing mud and the like without actually presenting us with some real evidence of Myanmar’s army violently attacking the Rohingya Muslims.
When this brouhaha actually started to develop some steam it was discovered that many of the horrifying videos and images of the Rohingya massacre being circulated on social media and major news outlets were actually from places that weren’t even in Myanmar! So instead of showing us what was happening in Burma, we were treated to horrific scenes of an earthquake in China, violent Tibetan activism in India and Tamil Tiger violence in Sri Lanka.
Of course among these refugees there are the innocent, those whose homes are being torched by the Myanmar army, but then there are also the (many) incidents of the ARSA attacking soldiers and Rakhine civilians in the area. While the ARSA is engaging in Jihadi violence, the innocents are fleeing and hiding in monasteries.
But should we really be shedding tears for the Rohingya? They are essentially Muslims of Bangladeshi origin, in case the reader isn’t aware of exactly who they are. But why is it this minority, in a nation where hundreds of different ethnic groups of many religions live together harmoniously, which draws the particular ire of the army?
Well let’s look closer at what the so-called peaceful Rohingya have been up to in the last few decades. Even before the Saudis came along with their money, munitions and al-Qaeda training, many Rohingya Muslims fought violently with Myanmar, and to that end they massacred Buddhists and burned Rakhine villages in a quest to establish an Islamic nation. Eventually they saw it wasn’t working and since the 1990s pretty much resorted to trying to gain citizenship.
Except Myanmar wasn’t playing this game, they weren’t going to reward those whose quest all along was to actuate sedition. Why you might ask? Because Myanmar looked around and could see that Buddhism was getting its backside kicked into extinction, whether it was in Malaysia or Indonesia they could see hard-line Islamism was on the rise, and decided to take pre-emptive action, deciding to expel all Rohingya Muslims from its country before they became just like their neighbours.
Now not all Rohingya are ARSA in this conflict, many have fallen foul of this war and they do deserve protection, and so if they want citizenship they should really get it from Bangladesh, after all that’s where they are really from as originally the Rohingya were brought as slaves from Bangladesh to Burma by the British (by this logic there’s an argument to be had for the UK granting asylum).
The Rohingya have more in common with the Bangladeshis in terms of religious and cultural identity and, moreover, they share the same ethnicity. Even Turkey is willing to foot the bill for Bangladesh to open its arm to these refugees, so what’s holding Bangladesh back?
It’s because Bangladesh-much like Myanmar-knows that the Rohingya are fertile for indoctrination by ARSA affiliated organisations, they will look to spread and encourage these ideologies among them and Suu Kyi knows she cannot afford to incubate such a risk to her people any longer.
In fact she has raised this red flag many times but how can she hope to be heard when the likes of Zeid bin Ra’ad al-Hussein from Saudi Arabia and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights are the ones muffling her protestations? As well as the Kingdom of Saud’s known propaganda to this effect they are also-through the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights-drumming up stories of rape incidents committed by the Myanmar army against the Rohingya. None of these reports are verifiable and indeed some come from propaganda machine Al Jazeera.
Saudi Arabia-through the UN-is quite happy to pour scorn on Suu Kyi and Myanmar through amplifying this crisis, so as to distract from the real humanitarian horror that is taking place under its auspices in Yemen.
