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13 November 2017 – TRANSCEND Media Service – We just got home in UK last night. This is my little reflection on what we witnessed. I came home with a long list of “To-Do’s”.
Women carry emergency food supplies from a World Food Programme (WFP) helicopter that landed in Thanyang, South Sudan. Photo: UNICEF/Holt
“More than anything else, the world needs to wake up, and end these wars and these conflicts, so we can make real progress in ending hunger,” said David Beasley, the Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme in a news release on today 20 July) 2017.
“Around 800 million people – one in nine around the world – go to bed on an empty stomach. But man-made conflicts and other strife make it difficult to help those who need it most. Reducing these roadblocks would ease the path towards long-term solutions.”
The need for additional resources come amid significant changes to the international food assistance sector since 2009.
Within WFP, the share of assistance delivered as food declined from 54 per cent to less than 40 per cent. Conversely, the share of cash-based transfers surged from less than 1 per cent in 2009 to 20 per cent in 2016.
In this scenario, the WFP report argues that improvements such as more accessible and safe humanitarian access could reduce costs by almost $1 billion each year.
Furthermore, if the roughly 80 countries where the UN agency operates were better able to cope with climate-related, political, and economic shocks, another $2.2 billion annually could be saved.
And if food systems – the networks responsible for producing food, transforming it and ensuring that it reaches hungry people – could be improved in these countries, another $440 million could be saved annually.
“If solutions or improvements to these challenges were found, cost savings to WFP could be as high as $3.5 billion per year,” noted the UN agency. (SOURCE: UN).
My wife Natalie and I work as a two-person team of researchers and writers. We use each other as a sounding board and we teach each other on the Rohingya. She is the one who initially helped me overcome my own anti-Muslim racism and my own ignorance about Rohingyas.
So naturally, I wanted Natalie and Nilah to bear witness to my country’s Buddhist genocide–note no quotations marks–of the most vulnerable segment of our society, the Rohingyas.
Here is my 8-year-old Nilah and Nat meeting with Rohingya children and moms.
On World AIDS Day, people in Nigeria took a walk in the Asokoro neighbourhood of Abuja to increase HIV/AIDS awareness in the general public (file). Photo: UNAIDS
“We met the 2015 target of 15 million people on treatment and we are on track to double that number to 30 million and meet the 2020 target,” said Michel Sidibé, the Executive Director of the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in a press statement.
“We will continue to scale up to reach everyone in need and honour our commitment of leaving no one behind,” he added.
The UNAIDS report, Ending AIDS: Progress towards the 90¬-90-90 targets, gives a comprehensive analysis of the 2014 targets to accelerate progress so that by 2020, 90 per cent of all HIV-infected people know their status, 90 per cent of all HIV-diagnosed people are accessing antiretroviral therapy (ART) and 90 per cent of those taking ART are virally suppressed.
It states that last year, 19.5 million of the 36.7 million people living with HIV had access to treatment and AIDS-related deaths have fallen from 1.9 million in 2005 to one million in. With continued scale-up, this progress puts the world on track to reach the global target of 30 million people on treatment by 2020, according to the report.
“We will continue to scale up to reach everyone in need and honour our commitment of leaving no one behind,” Mr. Sidibé stressed.
Eastern and southern Africa, which account for more than half of all people living with the virus, are leading the way. Since 2010, AIDS-related deaths there have declined by 42 per cent and new HIV infections by 29 per cent, including a 56 per cent drop in new infections among children over that period – a remarkable achievement of HIV treatment and prevention efforts aimed at putting that region on track towards ending its AIDS epidemic.
On the 90-90-90 track
The Ending AIDS report reveals that in 2016, more than 70 per cent of HIV-infected people knew their status, 77 per cent of whom were accessing treatment. Of those, 82 per cent were virally supressed and helping to prevent virus transmission.
Eastern and southern Africa, western and central Europe and North America and Latin America are on track to reach the targets by 2020 – with Botswana, Cambodia, Denmark, Iceland, Singapore, Sweden and the UK having already achieved it.
The Caribbean, and Asia and the Pacific can also reach them if programmes are further accelerated, says the report.
The most significant impact of scale-up has been in reducing AIDS-related deaths, which have almost halved in the past 10 years. Accordingly, life expectancy has significantly increased in the most affected countries, particularly in eastern and southern Africa.
“Communities and families are thriving as AIDS is being pushed back,” said Mr Sidibé. “As we bring the epidemic under control, health outcomes are improving and nations are becoming stronger.”
Lagging behind
In contrast, progress against the targets has been poor in the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where AIDS-related deaths have pointedly risen. Exceptions, however, include Algeria, Morocco and Belarus, which have increased HIV treatment access from 2010 to 2016.
The report also shows that globally, 30 per cent of people living with HIV still do not know their status, 17.1 million are unable to access ART and more than half are not virally suppressed. (SOURCE: UN).
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPimfXfKB3g]VIDEO:AIDS-related deaths have nearly halved since 2005 and more than half of all people with HIV now have access to treatment, according to a new UN report launched. But AIDS-related deaths are on the rise in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Credit: UN News
On World AIDS Day, people in Nigeria took a walk in the Asokoro neighbourhood of Abuja to increase HIV/AIDS awareness in the general public (file). Photo: UNAIDS
“We met the 2015 target of 15 million people on treatment and we are on track to double that number to 30 million and meet the 2020 target,” said Michel Sidibé, the Executive Director of the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in a press statement.
“We will continue to scale up to reach everyone in need and honour our commitment of leaving no one behind,” he added.
The UNAIDS report, Ending AIDS: Progress towards the 90¬-90-90 targets, gives a comprehensive analysis of the 2014 targets to accelerate progress so that by 2020, 90 per cent of all HIV-infected people know their status, 90 per cent of all HIV-diagnosed people are accessing antiretroviral therapy (ART) and 90 per cent of those taking ART are virally suppressed.
It states that last year, 19.5 million of the 36.7 million people living with HIV had access to treatment and AIDS-related deaths have fallen from 1.9 million in 2005 to one million in. With continued scale-up, this progress puts the world on track to reach the global target of 30 million people on treatment by 2020, according to the report.
“We will continue to scale up to reach everyone in need and honour our commitment of leaving no one behind,” Mr. Sidibé stressed.
Eastern and southern Africa, which account for more than half of all people living with the virus, are leading the way. Since 2010, AIDS-related deaths there have declined by 42 per cent and new HIV infections by 29 per cent, including a 56 per cent drop in new infections among children over that period – a remarkable achievement of HIV treatment and prevention efforts aimed at putting that region on track towards ending its AIDS epidemic.
On the 90-90-90 track
The Ending AIDS report reveals that in 2016, more than 70 per cent of HIV-infected people knew their status, 77 per cent of whom were accessing treatment. Of those, 82 per cent were virally supressed and helping to prevent virus transmission.
Eastern and southern Africa, western and central Europe and North America and Latin America are on track to reach the targets by 2020 – with Botswana, Cambodia, Denmark, Iceland, Singapore, Sweden and the UK having already achieved it.
The Caribbean, and Asia and the Pacific can also reach them if programmes are further accelerated, says the report.
The most significant impact of scale-up has been in reducing AIDS-related deaths, which have almost halved in the past 10 years. Accordingly, life expectancy has significantly increased in the most affected countries, particularly in eastern and southern Africa.
“Communities and families are thriving as AIDS is being pushed back,” said Mr Sidibé. “As we bring the epidemic under control, health outcomes are improving and nations are becoming stronger.”
Lagging behind
In contrast, progress against the targets has been poor in the Middle East, North Africa, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where AIDS-related deaths have pointedly risen. Exceptions, however, include Algeria, Morocco and Belarus, which have increased HIV treatment access from 2010 to 2016.
The report also shows that globally, 30 per cent of people living with HIV still do not know their status, 17.1 million are unable to access ART and more than half are not virally suppressed. (SOURCE: UN).
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPimfXfKB3g]VIDEO:AIDS-related deaths have nearly halved since 2005 and more than half of all people with HIV now have access to treatment, according to a new UN report launched. But AIDS-related deaths are on the rise in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. Credit: UN News
I interviewed two dozen survivors, the majority of whom were mothers between the ages of 18 and 35. The youngest survivor I interviewed was a 10-year-old Rohingya boy who was shot in the leg.
The most sadistic tale I heard a survivor recount was this:
Her father was shot in the head in front of their house as he ran to the house where her daughter , 16, was tied up and gang-raped by a group of Burmese government troops, wearing red scarves (light infantry unit commandos, as far as I know).
The father’s head got blew open, and one soldier picked up bits of his brain and fed them to the chickens.
This IS an act of genocidal and sadistic killing, seen against the backdrop of what else has been done to the Rohingyas as a group by Myanmar over the last 40 years.
Women carry emergency food supplies from a World Food Programme (WFP) helicopter that landed in Thanyang, South Sudan. Photo: UNICEF/Holt
“More than anything else, the world needs to wake up, and end these wars and these conflicts, so we can make real progress in ending hunger,” said David Beasley, the Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme in a news release on today 20 July) 2017.
“Around 800 million people – one in nine around the world – go to bed on an empty stomach. But man-made conflicts and other strife make it difficult to help those who need it most. Reducing these roadblocks would ease the path towards long-term solutions.”
The need for additional resources come amid significant changes to the international food assistance sector since 2009.
Within WFP, the share of assistance delivered as food declined from 54 per cent to less than 40 per cent. Conversely, the share of cash-based transfers surged from less than 1 per cent in 2009 to 20 per cent in 2016.
In this scenario, the WFP report argues that improvements such as more accessible and safe humanitarian access could reduce costs by almost $1 billion each year.
Furthermore, if the roughly 80 countries where the UN agency operates were better able to cope with climate-related, political, and economic shocks, another $2.2 billion annually could be saved.
And if food systems – the networks responsible for producing food, transforming it and ensuring that it reaches hungry people – could be improved in these countries, another $440 million could be saved annually.
“If solutions or improvements to these challenges were found, cost savings to WFP could be as high as $3.5 billion per year,” noted the UN agency. (SOURCE: UN).
The Burmese society is brainwashed to hate the Rohingyas for no real reason: the Tatmadaw’s racist, pathetic generals have adopted the institutionalized threat perception – that they are a threat to national security and that their presence is a part of Bangladesh’s cold war of population transfer from Chittagong to N. Rakhine.
The Burmese military (Tatmadaw) have, accordingly, manufactured and propagated lies after lies over 40-years.
I know every other influential figure personally who has been involved in this genocide.
I view them as evil as the Nazis. They consider me a “national traitor” and “enemy of the state”.
I identify with the survivors of my country’s genocide despite our differences in ethnicity and faith background.
So, I said, “Sorry”, to this Rohingya brother who broke into tears at the site of a “good Burmese” at Kutupalong camp.
Women carry emergency food supplies from a World Food Programme (WFP) helicopter that landed in Thanyang, South Sudan. Photo: UNICEF/Holt
“More than anything else, the world needs to wake up, and end these wars and these conflicts, so we can make real progress in ending hunger,” said David Beasley, the Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme in a news release on today 20 July) 2017.
“Around 800 million people – one in nine around the world – go to bed on an empty stomach. But man-made conflicts and other strife make it difficult to help those who need it most. Reducing these roadblocks would ease the path towards long-term solutions.”
The need for additional resources come amid significant changes to the international food assistance sector since 2009.
Within WFP, the share of assistance delivered as food declined from 54 per cent to less than 40 per cent. Conversely, the share of cash-based transfers surged from less than 1 per cent in 2009 to 20 per cent in 2016.
In this scenario, the WFP report argues that improvements such as more accessible and safe humanitarian access could reduce costs by almost $1 billion each year.
Furthermore, if the roughly 80 countries where the UN agency operates were better able to cope with climate-related, political, and economic shocks, another $2.2 billion annually could be saved.
And if food systems – the networks responsible for producing food, transforming it and ensuring that it reaches hungry people – could be improved in these countries, another $440 million could be saved annually.
“If solutions or improvements to these challenges were found, cost savings to WFP could be as high as $3.5 billion per year,” noted the UN agency. (SOURCE: UN).
We held each other for about 5 minutes. No conversation as he did not speak Burmese. But no conversation was needed either.
Compassion and pain are universal.
A young Rohingya mother and widow (18) recounted to me how she was gang-raped by Myanmar soldiers. They handcuffed her with a small rope, and she tried to untie the rope with her teeth, and they put her hands on the table and chopped off a finger, with the hand still tied, for resisting the rape!
Women carry emergency food supplies from a World Food Programme (WFP) helicopter that landed in Thanyang, South Sudan. Photo: UNICEF/Holt
“More than anything else, the world needs to wake up, and end these wars and these conflicts, so we can make real progress in ending hunger,” said David Beasley, the Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme in a news release on today 20 July) 2017.
“Around 800 million people – one in nine around the world – go to bed on an empty stomach. But man-made conflicts and other strife make it difficult to help those who need it most. Reducing these roadblocks would ease the path towards long-term solutions.”
The need for additional resources come amid significant changes to the international food assistance sector since 2009.
Within WFP, the share of assistance delivered as food declined from 54 per cent to less than 40 per cent. Conversely, the share of cash-based transfers surged from less than 1 per cent in 2009 to 20 per cent in 2016.
In this scenario, the WFP report argues that improvements such as more accessible and safe humanitarian access could reduce costs by almost $1 billion each year.
Furthermore, if the roughly 80 countries where the UN agency operates were better able to cope with climate-related, political, and economic shocks, another $2.2 billion annually could be saved.
And if food systems – the networks responsible for producing food, transforming it and ensuring that it reaches hungry people – could be improved in these countries, another $440 million could be saved annually.
“If solutions or improvements to these challenges were found, cost savings to WFP could be as high as $3.5 billion per year,” noted the UN agency. (SOURCE: UN).
This Rohingya gentleman (photo below) has something dignified about him. He is 67 years old, from Maungdaw, and was a Class Cell leader at a township level in the Ruling Burma Socialist Party during General Ne Win’s early days when Rohingyas continued to be recognized as an ethnic community of Burma with full citizenship rights.
Women carry emergency food supplies from a World Food Programme (WFP) helicopter that landed in Thanyang, South Sudan. Photo: UNICEF/Holt
“More than anything else, the world needs to wake up, and end these wars and these conflicts, so we can make real progress in ending hunger,” said David Beasley, the Executive Director of the UN World Food Programme in a news release on today 20 July) 2017.
“Around 800 million people – one in nine around the world – go to bed on an empty stomach. But man-made conflicts and other strife make it difficult to help those who need it most. Reducing these roadblocks would ease the path towards long-term solutions.”
The need for additional resources come amid significant changes to the international food assistance sector since 2009.
Within WFP, the share of assistance delivered as food declined from 54 per cent to less than 40 per cent. Conversely, the share of cash-based transfers surged from less than 1 per cent in 2009 to 20 per cent in 2016.
In this scenario, the WFP report argues that improvements such as more accessible and safe humanitarian access could reduce costs by almost $1 billion each year.
Furthermore, if the roughly 80 countries where the UN agency operates were better able to cope with climate-related, political, and economic shocks, another $2.2 billion annually could be saved.
And if food systems – the networks responsible for producing food, transforming it and ensuring that it reaches hungry people – could be improved in these countries, another $440 million could be saved annually.
“If solutions or improvements to these challenges were found, cost savings to WFP could be as high as $3.5 billion per year,” noted the UN agency. (SOURCE: UN).
This grandfather Rohingya man (76) was a former teacher and agricultural technician who heard Prime Minister U Nu speak in his hometown of Maungdaw in the 1950’s when Rohingyas were full citizens and carried an original National Registration Card first issued in mid-1950’s (the first of its kind in the history of ID in Burma’s recorded history).
In English, there are two terms: politics, which is term for the machinery, and politics, that is the vision.
In Latin languages, there is only one, politics, and that is now becoming the adequate term also for English-speaking countries, from May’s UK to Trump’s US.
In a few years, we have seen an astonishing flourishing of authoritarian governments.
Turkey’s Erdogan may be the best example.
He was elected in 2002, and hailed as proof that you could be a Muslim and also a champion of democracy.
At the end of the decade, he started to take a more fundamentalist and authoritarian approach, until in 2013 there was the famous crackdown on thousands of protesters, protecting a Park in Istanbul intended to be razed for a supermarket.
Since then, the tendency to use power has accelerated. In 2014, Erdogan was accused, along with his son, of corruption (three sons of cabinet ministers were also arrested). He blamed it on the Gulenist Movement, a spiritual movement led by an earlier ally, Fethullah Gulen, who now lives in the US.
And when in 2016 some military factions attempted a coup against him, he used the coup as a reason to get rid of Gulenist and other dissidents. It has put 60,000 people in jail, and he has dismissed from public employment a staggering 100,000 people.
What is reminiscent of Stalin and Hitler’s practices is how those 100,000 have been treated. They have been banned from private employment, and their passports as well the ones of their families have been revoked. When asked how they will survive, the government’s reaction was to scoff that even eating roots would be “too good” for them.
We’re talking of hundreds of judges, tens of thousands of teachers, university professors, who have been dismissed without any hearing and without any formal imputation. Europe’s reaction? Empty declarations, and since then Erdogan has become more authoritarian.
He has built a Presidential Palace of 1,150 rooms, larger than the White House and the Kremlin, where there is a three-room office dedicated to taste his food to avoid poisoning. The palace cost between 500 million euro (the government’s declaration), and 1 billion dollars (opposition’ estimates).
It could be said in Europe’s defence that Turkey is not a member of the European Union, and his actions have made it extremely unlikely that membership in the EU is possible.
But Poland and Hungary not only are members of the EU, but also the main beneficiaries of his economic support. Poland joined the EU in 2004, has received more than 100 billion dollars in various subsidies: double the Marshall Plan in current dollars, the largest transfer of money ever done in modern history.
Yet the government has embarked in a firm path to dismantle democratic institutions (the last, the judicial system), and even the sleepy EU has been obliged to warn that it could take away the right of Poland to vote, to the total indifference of the government.
Yet nobody has formally proposed to cut the subsidies, which are now in the budget from 2014 to 2020 another 60 billion dollars – half of what the world spends for development aid for nearly 150 countries.
Hungry is run since 2010 by Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who campaigns for “an illiberal democracy”, and, like Poland’s PM Szydlo, has refused to accept any immigrants, in spite of EU subsidies. Hungary, despite its small population (less than 10 million, versus Poland’s 38 million) is the third largest recipient of EU’s subsidies, or 450 dollars per person.
One third of the world population lives on less than that. In addition, the European Investment Bank gives a net subsidy of 1 billion euro, and Hungary received 2.4 billion euro from the balance of Payment Assistance Program.
The two countries have formed with Slovakia and Czechia, the Visegrad group, which is in a permanent campaign against the EU and its decisions. Needless to say, subsidies to Slovakia and Czechia largely surpass their contributions.
Are Erdogan, Orban, Szydlo and dictators? On the contrary, they are democratically elected, like Duterte in the Philippines, Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Maduro in Venezuela and other 30 authoritarian presidents in the world. But in Europe this is new.
And it is also new to see an American President, Donald Trump, present an agenda of isolationism and international confrontation, who was also regularly elected.
A poll at the end of his first semester revealed that his voters would re-elect him again, with the Republican support going down only from 98% to 96%. Nationwide, his popularity has declined to 36%. If elections were held today, he would likely get a second term.
Which brings us to wonder why we still consider elections equivalent to democracy? Because this is how the people can express themselves. But people certainly do not like corruption, which in polls anywhere is considered the most prominent problem of modern governments.
However, unless it reaches a totally systematic level, like in Brazil, a studies don’t show a strong correlation between corruption and electoral punishment. Corruption, in politics, has been used by populists, who has promised to get rid of it to the electorate: exactly what Trump did in his campaign, while now his conflict of interest and lack of transparency with his private interests have no precedent in the White House.
That bring us to the next question. If ideologies are gone, and politics have become mainly a question of administrative efficiency and personalities, what is the link between a candidate and his voters, and whose support persists despite everything, like those who voted for Erdogan, Trump, Orban and Szydlo?
Perhaos it is time that we start to look to politics with a new approach. What did we learn from the last few years’ elections?
That people are aligning themselves under a new paradigm, which is not political in the sense we have used until now: it is called IDENTITY.
Voters now elect those with whom they identify, and support them because in fact they defend their identity, no matter what. They do not listen to contradictory information, which they dismiss as “fake news.” Let us see on what this identity issue is based: the new four divides.
There is first a new divide: cities against rural areas, small towns, villages, hamlets. In Brexit, people in urban areas voted to stay in Europe.
The same goes for those who voted against Erdogan, who is unpopular in Istanbul, but very popular in the rural areas. In the US, those who vote d for Trump were largely from the poor states.
The same has happened with Orban and Szydlo. None would be in power if the vote was restricted to the capital and the major towns.
There is a second new divide: young and older voters. Brexit would not have happened if all young people cared to vote.
Same with Erdogan, Trump, Orban and Szydlo. The problem is that young people have in serious percentages stopped to be active in politics because they feel left out, and look to parties as self-maintaining machines, ridden with corruption and inefficiency.
Of course, this plays in favour of those who are already in the system, which perpetuates itself, without the generational lift for change. Italy found 20 billion dollars to save four small banks while the total subsidies for young people are 2 billion euro. No wonder they feel left out.
There is the third divide, which is also new, ideologies of the past were basically more inclusive, even if of course the class system played a significant role. The third divide is between those who have finished at least high school, and those who did not. This is going to increase dramatically in the next two decades, when the robotization of industry and services will reach at least 40% of the production.
Tens of millions of people will be left out, and they will be those with less education, unable to fit in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Elites look with disdain at the choices of electors who are considered ignorant and provincial, while the latter in turn consider the elite winners who reap whatever they can, and marginalize them.
Finally, there is a fourth divide, which is very important for the values of peace and cooperation as a basis for a world governance.
It is the divide between those who see the return to nationalism as the solution to their problems (and therefore hate immigrants), and those who believe that their country, in an increasing competing world, can be better if it integrates in international or regional organizations.
Two extremely simplified examples: Europe and the US. There was a survey done by the EU among the nine million Erasmus, or the students who with a scholarship from that exchange program went to make lives in other countries. They have had more than 100,000 children by marrying somebody met abroad: the real Europeans.
In the poll, they were at 92% asking for more Europe, not less Europe. And in the US, the classic Trump voters, as white (a demographic group in decline: at every election 2% less of white vote), who did not get beyond secondary education, who do not read newspapers or books, coming from the poorer states.
People who lost their jobs, often after closure of factories or mines, strongly believe that they are victims of globalization, which created social and economic injustice.
This is a consequence of the fact that during two decades, only macroeconomic indexes have been used, like the GNP. Social indicators were largely shunned.
How the growth that GNP indicated was divided was not a concern for the IMF, World Bank, the EU and most politicians, who blindly believed that market was the only engine for growth and would solve social problems: only now have they tried to brakes on, too late.
The world has seen an unprecedented explosion of inequality, which is helping nationalism and xenophobia to become a central part of the political debate.
Nationalism is not confined to Trump, Erdogan, Orban and Szydlo, and to Brexit. China, India, Japan, the Philippines, Israel, Egypt, Russia, and other countries are now run by nationalist and authoritarian governments.
This brings us to a very simple conclusion. Either the transition to an unknown new political system, that will certainly replace the present unsustainable system, will be based on the values of social justice, cooperation and peace (probably updating the present international organizations), or it is difficult to see how we will avoid conflicts, wars and bloodshed.
Why the man is the only animal who does not learn from previous experience?
——-
*Author: Roberto Savio is the founder and former Director-General of international news agency Inter Press Service (IPS).
In recent years he has also founded Other News, a service providing ‘information that markets eliminate’.
*Roberto Savio’s Op-Ed was published in IPS. Go to Original. Some updates provided by the author have been incorporated.
He spoke about his life-long desire to return to Burma, his birthplace, although he has been in the Registered Refugee camp at Kutupalong in the last 20 years.
He showed me his family IDs and pictures of the mosque he said his well-to-do family built in Maungdaw in 1895.
The typically repeated media and official narrative that Rohingyas were not citizens or an ethnic group of Burma is a verifiable lie on which rests the genocidal policies.
The mosque this Rohingya gentleman’s foreparents built in 1895.
.
Finally, this is my Bangladeshi host (HFM Mr Ali) (photo below), who made it possible for our family to bear witness to the inter-generational impact of my own country’s genocide and hear firsthand the harrowing tales from Rohingya survivors.
They ARE survivors, not simply IDPs or refugees. They have survived the genocide across the borders in N. Rakhine State.
We are extremely grateful to the Honourable Foreign Minister and his MOFA staff who enabled us to get the most out of our week-long visit to Dhaka and Cox’s Bazaar.
Based on what we have learned on this trip I will soon be hitting the speaking trail in UK, USA, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Bangladesh the rest of this year and early January. Nat will continue to write critical pieces that challenge conventional but flawed ideas about the survivors ‘return/repatriation’ ‘statelessness’ and all those policy non-senses.
Meanwhile 1 million Rohingya survivors wait anxiously – and in inhuman conditions – what the mythical international community will do to help secure a normal human future.
This little Rohingya survivor girl waited for her family’s turn for food ration at Kutupalong registered camp under the scorching sun, taking advantage of the little shade from the two standing men’s longis.
.
As a father, I ask myself, naturally, what I would do or how I would feel if my 8-year-old were in this Rohingya girl’s shoes, and so should every decent human.
——-
*A Buddhist humanist from Burma, Maung Zarniis a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia.
His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times.
Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal, forthcoming). He holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education) , National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015).
