[New post] March 28 2022 Tyranny Throws Itself a Party, But No One Comes To the Ball: Burma/Myanmar
jayofdollhousepark posted: " Tyranny throws itself a party in Burma, but no one comes to the ball. Nor am I surprised, for the fascist military junta that has imprisoned a nation, plunders the public wealth in partnership with criminal syndicates prote"
Tyranny throws itself a party in Burma, but no one comes to the ball. Nor am I surprised, for the fascist military junta that has imprisoned a nation, plunders the public wealth in partnership with criminal syndicates protected under the patronage of the Chinese Communist Party, and attempts to annihilate all differences of ethnicity and faith in campaigns of genocide against tribal peoples; the apex predators of Myanmar and I know each other well.
Over thirty years ago now we first met in battle, the circumstances of which I shall once again recount here; I have been thinking of this today, as I go about my work making mischief for tyrants and those who would enslave us in the tunnels beneath Mariupol. If I must be a tunnel rat, I remain a rat who comes back no matter how many times you try to flush him.
The Mayor of Mariupol has today ordered the total evacuation of the city, as it is in enemy hands; I however am in no one's chain of command, recognize no authority, and obey no orders as things beneath my contempt. I shall fight on, when and where and in the manner I choose, and I will bet my refusal to submit against any force of subjugation.
It's always worked for me before; thank you for that Jean Genet, who set me on my life's path in 1982 Beirut, with the Oath of the Resistance; "We swear our loyalty to each other, to resist and yield not, and abandon not our fellows", and the strategic principle by which I have lived for nearly forty years; "When there is no hope, we are free to do impossible things, glorious things."
As my intermittent and questionable satellite link permits, news of the junta's celebration and of Min Aung Hlaing's declaration of his regime's intent to "annihilate them to (the) end" regarding his brutal repression of the tribal peoples and the democracy movement now united in the liberation of Burma, has captivated my attention because the moment the world now faces in Ukraine parallels that of Burma. Sadly, there is nothing unique in this.
The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is portrayed to the world as an anomaly, a vast crime against humanity of racist and sectarian hate which happened in 2017 and is unrelated to Myanmar's current apartheid ethnic and religious policies. But this is a lie.
Here is how I came by accident to be fighting with indigenous peoples in the Shan States of northern Burma against a campaign of slave raiding and genocide by the Burmese government; I awoke on the veranda of my stilt house one morning to what was later tallied as eight hundred rounds of one hundred millimeter Russian mortar fire, and mounted my elephant to escape, who panicked and went the wrong way, uphill to the enemy positions. I was yelling "Run away!" when one of the Karen tribesmen handed me a spear and shouted in S'gaw; "The American is charging the enemy! Take the mortars!" and we became more than a dozen elephants leading a human wave assault.
After participating in a cavalry charge on the back of an elephant carrying a spear and our capture of the mortars, I discovered we were behind the lines of the advancing Burmese Army in one of their annual campaigns of slave raiding and ethnic cleansing against the indigenous tribes including those with whom I had been living; exactly where I belong and prefer to be if there is no escape from conflict, and ideally positioned to disrupt their advance. To run amok and make mischief in the enemy's rear area of operations is a special joy, and an opportunity not to be wasted.
The policy of genocide and its periodic campaigns of death and fear have been part of the fascist tyranny of the Burmese state since the liberation from Japan, one designed to provide a pretext for military rule through the creation of a national identity of religious and racial purity. In the case of the Karen, a Christian ethnic minority and former British allies, as with the Islamic Rohingya who immigrated from India, all three fascist boxes of exclusionary otherness are checked; blood, faith, and nationality.
Its possible this bears the force and authority of tradition, and has for centuries been a key strategy of state power in Burma as it has to a degree in virtually all human civilizations. As George Washington once said; "Government is about force; only force."
Fear, power, force; it is a universal circle of dehumanization and subjugation by authoritarian elites. So pervasive and endemic is the Ring of Power that it seems a human constant.
But it need not be so. From all that I have seen and all that I have learned, from all that I am and for all that we may become, I tell you this one true thing; our addiction to and captivity by the Ring of Power is not a flaw of our natural condition or of an evil impulse, but a sum of our history and of choices we have made over time about how to be human together.
As Wagner illustrates with his great theme of renunciation of wealth and power and abandonment of force in Der Ring des Nibelungen, only those who foreswear love can seize dominion over others. This principle has a negative space which is also true; love can redeem the flaws of our humanity, beauty can balance the brokenness of the world, hope can empower us to emerge victorious against overwhelming force, and faith can answer the terror of our nothingness.
I hope that one day humankind will discover that such things as love, compassion, mercy, loyalty, trust, and faith in one another are not weaknesses but strengths, and awaken to the beauty of our diversity and the necessity of our interdependence.
As written anonymously in The Guardian; "Myanmar's military ruler vows to 'annihilate' resistance groups; Min Aung Hlaing also urges ethnic minorities not to support militias opposed to army rule.
Myanmar's top general has vowed to intensify action against homegrown militia groups fighting the military-run government, saying the armed forces would "annihilate" them.
Gen Min Aung Hlaing, speaking at a military parade marking Armed Forces Day on Sunday, also urged ethnic minorities not to support groups opposed to army rule and ruled out negotiations with them.
The military seized power last year from the democratically elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. Security forces have since used lethal force to suppress mass nationwide protests, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,700 civilians, according to a detailed tally compiled by the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.
Forced to turn away from peaceful protests, many of those opposed to military rule took up arms, forming hundreds of militia groups called People's Defence Forces – better known as PDFs. In some parts of the country, they've joined forces with well-organised, battle-hardened ethnic armed groups, which have been fighting for greater autonomy for decades.
Min Aung Hlaing, addressing thousands of military personnel during the parade in the capital Naypyidaw, said he would not negotiate with "terrorist groups and their supporters for killing innocent people" and threatening peace and security.
He said the military, known as the Tatmadaw, "will annihilate them to (the) end", according to an official translation of his speech.
His government has declared major resistance organisations – regardless of whether they are directly engaged in armed struggle – as terrorist groups. Membership or even contact with them carries harsh punishment under law.
"I would like to highlight that there are no governments or armies worldwide that negotiate with any terrorist groups," he said.
Despite a huge advantage in equipment and numbers, Myanmar's military has struggled to crush the new militia units. Outgunned and outmanned, the PDFs have relied on support from local communities and knowledge of the terrain to carry out often surprisingly effective attacks on convoys, patrols, guard posts, police stations and isolated bases in remote areas.
The military is currently conducting operations in Sagaing, in central Myanmar, and in Kayah State, in the country's east, using airstrikes, artillery barrages and the burning of villages. The army recently seems to have expanded its offensive into Chin State in the west and Kayin State in the south-east as well.
Last year's Armed Forces Day was the single bloodiest since the military's seizure of power on 1 February 2021. Security forces across the country opened fire on demonstrators, killing as many as 160 people.
Anti-military protests were held on Sunday despite the risks in Yangon, the country's biggest city, and elsewhere. To avoid arrest or injury, urban street protests usually involve flashmobs, which quickly disperse before security forces crack down.
The main opposition group, the self-styled National Unity Government, urged people to join a "power strike" on Sunday night by switching off the lights and their televisions for 30 minutes while the military parade was broadcast on state-run TV channels.
The group said the strike was also intended to protest daily power outages. The blackouts started several months ago, and the government blames them on high gas prices and damage to power lines caused by sabotage.
The US, European Union and 20 other countries issued a statement marking Armed Forces Day by recalling "those killed and displaced by violence over the last year, including at least 100 people killed on this day alone one year ago".
The US, UK and Canada on Saturday imposed the latest in a series of coordinated sanctions on senior military officials and business leaders who allegedly act as arms dealers for Myanmar's army."
As I wrote in my post of February 1 2022, Anniversary of the Military Coup in Myanmar; A Day of Silence and national strike made silent the cities of Burma today, in the face of threats of death and arrest by the regime of tyranny and state terror which has captured the state for a year now, after a morning of mass protests and defiant marches, and while these performances of liberty and guerrilla street theatre valorized resistance and democracy and unified the peoples of Burma in solidarity against those who would enslave them, liberation forces took the fight to the enemy in direct actions against police and military targets as demonstrations of the powerlessness of carceral states of force and control against a people not divided by sectarian and ethnic hierarchies of otherness and belonging or driven in to submission by learned helplessness and brutal repression, but united in the cause of liberty and refusal to submit.
Last night the enforcers of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege and the beneficiaries of fascisms of blood, faith, and soil could sleep secure from the will of the people and the reckoning of their victims, confronted by a protest movement of limited political goals and no true threats to the cabal of monarchists, oligarchs, and militarists which have ruled Burma since the fall of the colonial empire of Britain in 1948; today they awake to a new day in which all of this has changed forever, for the Revolution has come to Burma.
Democracy fell one year ago in Myanmar to a military coup by tyrants of brutal repression and theft of citizenship and perpetrators of genocide and ethnic cleansing in an ongoing campaign against ethnic and religious minorities, often tribal peoples living in areas the junta wishes to plunder of natural resources.
Here is a litany of woes repeated endlessly throughout history and the world, of the conquest of indigenous peoples and the inquisitions and holocausts of those whom divisions of exclusionary otherness and hierarchies of elite belonging dehumanize as monsters to be cast out.
Gathering forces of change have swept the nation this last year, mobilizing not only tribal armies of the Chin, Karen, Shan, Arakan, and other peoples but also mass protests in every major city organized by the Civil Disobedience Movement, national strikes- especially that of hospitals and doctors, a boycott of the military, the emergence of a National Unity Government, pressure from both Catholic and Buddhist organizations, actions of international solidarity by President Biden and Pope Francis, and the resurgence of the Communist Party of Burma's People's Liberation Army after thirty years.
This in resistance to state terror and tyranny, in which about 12,000 democracy activists have been arrested and about 1400 killed by the military and police since the coup, and a campaign of ethnic cleansing which in 2021 alone created 400,000 refugees and killed several thousand. We have seen death and state terror on this scale in Burma during the Rohingya Genocide in 2017, which in a few months killed 25,000 and drove a million refugees to Bangladesh and another million to North Africa.
But the use of social force obeys the Third Law of Motion, and for every act of oppression there are equal and opposite forces of resistance.
A regional democracy movement, the Milk Tea Alliance, has emerged to unify action in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, and Burma, and has now become a global liberation movement in the Philippine Islands, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia, with important networks and organizations in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, and allied movements in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Iran.
The three finger salute from The Hunger Games adopted by the Thai democracy revolution in 2014 was embraced a year ago in Burma, and one week after the coup was seen among the mass protests in Yangon. As the Thai democracy leader Sirawith Seritiwat described it in The Guardian; "We knew that it would be easily understood to represent concepts of freedom, equality, solidarity."
This is what we must offer the peoples of Burma now, and wherever men hunger to be free, all those throughout the world whom Frantz Fanon called the Wretched of the Earth, the powerless and the dispossessed, the silenced and the erased, and to whom our Statue of Liberty offers a beacon of hope to the world with the words of a poem written by a Jewish girl, Emma Lazarus, in reference to the Colossus of Rhodes;
"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Freedom, Equality, Solidarity; let us reclaim America as a guarantor of liberty and redeem our promise to the world and to the future of humankind.
Cui Bono? Who are the beneficiaries and sponsors of genocide and state terror in Burma?
As written by Priscilla A. Clapp and Jason Tower for the United States Institute of Peace; "In December 2021, at a grand ceremony in Myanmar's capital Naypyidaw, the country's military chief — and leader of last year's coup — awarded the highest honors for "extraordinary contributions to the development of the state" to an internationally obscure entrepreneur named Liu Zhengxiang.
Liu, a pivotal figure in a semi-autonomous area adjacent to China, had certainly provided financial support to the ruling junta, drawing on his underworld ties. But his greatest contribution stemmed from a pre-coup initiative: Liu was a founder of an army-sponsored Border Guard Force in his home district of Kokang. Today, with Burma's military rulers rattled by a nationwide armed insurrection, the border guard forces have become a crucial element in the military's counter-insurgency strategy.
The Border Guard Forces (BGF), militarized units of former ethnic insurgents now under the command of the army, are strung along the Chinese and Thai frontiers in zones adjacent to territories controlled by Myanmar's ethnic armed organizations. Increasingly key to the generals' plans for suppressing the insurgency, the BGFs serve as a force multiplier particularly against major ethnic armed organizations, providing battlefield intelligence, logistics support and even troops. In addition, the BGFs' cross-border connections into Thailand and China are helpful for spreading junta propaganda internationally and enhancing the junta's relations with neighbors.
In exchange for their aid to the generals, BGF leaders are given free rein to conduct a range of illicit business activities and special access to the military-controlled economy, which has enabled them to establish corporate conglomerates across Myanmar. These enterprises, in turn, pour funds into assisting the coup regime's efforts to control and influence the population.
Of the BGFs along the China border, the Kokang Border Guard Force is the most important to the junta because of its control of the Kokang Special Administrative Zone (Kokang SAZ) — a territory slightly smaller than Rhode Island that extends like an arrow into China's Yunnan Province along one of China's most important trade corridors. The leaders of the Kokang BGF maintain close ties with local officials of the Chinese Communist Party despite their full integration into China's criminal underworld and heavy involvement in narcotics trafficking and illegal online gambling.
On the Thai border, the Karen BGF is the primary player, controlling a key logistics corridor into Thailand. Since 2016, the Karen BGF has expanded dramatically in size and influence after forming an alliance with a notorious Chinese criminal network to convert its headquarters into a hub for regional criminal activity.
While the BGFs are not as well-known as Myanmar's Ethnic Armed Organizations (EAOs), understanding their contribution to the coup regime is essential to assessing the junta's violent campaign to control the country. This article is the first in a three-part series: A subsequent piece will probe similar developments in Karen state and a final installment will lay out steps the U.S. and other countries could take to staunch the growth of transnational crime tied to the BGFs.
Most of Myanmar's BGFs were formed in the late 2000s as part of a military campaign to pacify ethnic armed organizations. The military demanded the EAOs come under control of the army and in exchange offered the right to develop largely criminal business empires. One of the founders of the Kokang BGF, Liu Zhengxiang (Lee Kyein Chan) is best known as chair of the Fully Light company, a multi-billion-dollar business conglomerate and a key player in China's illegal online gambling market. The company operates large casinos, hotels and industrial-scale online gambling operations in Kokang, Karen State and Sihanoukville, Cambodia.
One of four principal Kokang BGF-affiliated conglomerates, Fully Light has built a business empire with more than 30 subsidiaries across Myanmar since the Kokang BGF was established in 2009. Major investments include two jade mines in neighboring Kachin State, including a $1.6 million investment in a jade factory and trading operation in China's Zhenkang county (Ruixiang Trading, Ltd); a coal mine in Sagaing State with annual output of 52,000 tons; a $10 million cement factory in Kokang; a billion-dollar new city project in Mandalay that is larger than Washington, D.C.; a 20-square-kilometer sugarcane farm near Lashio; and multiple import-export companies central to the China-Myanmar border commerce, including the sugar trade, over which Fully Light holds a monopoly.
How did Liu earn his award from the leader of the coup that ousted a democratic government last year? According to Chinese media reports, Liu donated more than 1.85 billion Myanmar kyats ($1 million) to conservative Buddhist foundations across Myanmar for construction of monuments that symbolize the Buddhist nationalism the generals seek to be identified with. Liu's Fully Light company also made repeated donations to the junta's COVID-19 health response, to its public works projects and to the advancement of "public administration" following the coup.
While the Liu family appears to have developed the closest ties to the junta's governing administrative council, the leaders of the other three clans (Bai, Wei and Li) that comprise the leadership of the Kokang SAZ have made similar contributions to the junta.
Beyond financing, the Kokang BGF has assisted the regime in the multiple ways:
Tactical Support: After the coup, the Kokang SAZ leadership mobilized the Kokang Police Force to engage in what it calls "counter-terror" operations, supporting the Myanmar Police crackdown on all forms of popular resistance to military rule. The Kokang BGF Police have publicized these operations on Kokang TV.
Political Support: The Kokang SAZ leaders hold positions in the military's USDP party, previously representing the party in the National and Shan State Parliaments. The Kokang USDP branch has promoted junta efforts to stage an election in 2023, and even organized pro-military parades in the China-Myanmar border area. Much of this activity is amplified on China's WeChat platform, having the added effect of influencing attitudes in China.
Business Connectivity in China: The Kokang BGF leaders maintain strong ties in Yunnan Province, particularly with local-level officials in Zhenkang Prefecture, Lincang City and within the Yunnan Provincial Government. Kokang leaders and their businesses have leveraged these ties to advance business initiatives helpful for the military after the coup. For example, Kokang leaders, including Kokang SAZ Chair Li Zhengfu and Council Member Bai Yingneng, met repeatedly with Lincang City officials throughout 2021 to negotiate the reopening of the critical border trade between China and Myanmar. The Kokang BGF later facilitated construction of a cross-border sanitation facility to meet China's trade requirements and played an essential role in organizing the virtual China–Myanmar Border Trade Fair in August 2021 and a RCEP meeting in February 2022. Kokang elites have also poured support into the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor, most significantly by initiating an investment to expand the LNG facilities connected to the China-Myanmar pipeline project in Kyaukphyu.
Why Are the Kokang SAZ Leaders So Committed to the Cause of Min Aung Hlaing?
The answer can be found in the origins of the Kokang SAZ and BGF in 2009, when a military operation led by Min Aung Hlaing defeated the Kokang Army — the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) — which had refused to become a BGF in 2009. Following the battle, four Kokang clans led by former deputy commander of the MNDAA Bai Suocheng defected to the military side, agreeing to form a new militia under the military's control in exchange for ruling Kokang. Ironically, the Myanmar army justified the 2009 attack on the MNDAA as means of eliminating narcotics trafficking, but then permitted the new Kokang BGF leaders to engage in whatever illicit businesses they chose to.
Kokang Criminals; While Chinese court cases provide ample evidence of rampant narcotics trafficking through the Kokang SAZ that implicates many of the zone's leading businesses, the mainstay of Kokang's economy has long been illegal gambling marketed to Chinese nationals. Many of the Chinese citizens involved in cross-border gambling have been subject to Chinese law enforcement, particularly after an intensified crackdown began in late 2019. The impact in Myanmar, however, has been to make the casino operations owned by Kokang leaders only more powerful. Those operators include the Fully Light casinos owned by the Liu clan, the Hanley casinos owned by the Wei clan, and the Baisheng casinos owned by Bai Suocheng's clan.
The Fully Light company's new casinos in Kokang, Sihanoukville, Cambodia and Karen State territory controlled by the Karen BGF illustrates the effect. China's crackdown has not kept these companies from using the Chinese internet, social media and banking systems. As of early February 2022, Fully Light's GoBo East Casino continued to operate online, allowing gamblers to use China's Unipay platform, despite GoBo East's implication in the conviction of multiple Chinese triad figures from Guizhou and Sha'anxi Province.
In early February, Chinese media exposed an even darker side to the illegal activity, reporting that Kokang and Chinese gangs jointly set up Tik Tok accounts designed to lure Chinese nationals into captivity in Kokang. Promised high wages or the chance to marry an attractive Kokang man or woman, hundreds of Chinese were tricked into taking jobs at the BGF casino operations in Kokang, only to be held for ransom or sold to Chinese crime groups in Cambodia.
Undermining Chinese National Security to Shore up Min Aung Hlaing's Regime; The activities of the Kokang BGF clans put China in an awkward position.
On one hand, they have partnered with the Chinese government to respond to COVID-19, to re-open border trade and to initiate new economic collaboration with the Myanmar military government following the coup. On the other hand, these same families are the kingpins in a multi-billion-dollar criminal network that preys on victims in mainland China. This undermines a nationwide Chinese campaign to crack down on cross-border gambling and fraud and makes a mockery of China's efforts to protect its nationals overseas.
This raises an important question: Despite projecting a tough stance on crime, is the Chinese government looking the other way as a means of supporting the SAC's campaign and mobilizing resources into its connectivity plans for Myanmar?
What is clear for now is that the Kokang BGF has emerged as a clear beneficiary of the Myanmar army's ongoing attack on democracy."
Here follows the text of the historic speech of Secretary Antony J. Blinken to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., March 21 2022, on the Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity in Burma;
"SECRETARY BLINKEN: Thank you very much, and good morning, everyone. Stu, thank you for those very kind words, but also thank you for so many decades of extraordinary service to this country and to its ideals.
This is something of a sacred place for me. Every time I walk through these doors, it has the same impact. And so I'm grateful to Sara and her leadership of this institution; Naomi, who walked us through the extraordinary exhibit on the story, the plight of the Rohingya that we'll be talking about today. I urge everyone: Come, see this. Experience this. It will speak incredibly powerful to you.
To the entire team behind this essential institution, behind the exhibit, thank you for your enduring efforts to teach us the darkest parts of history – and the work you're doing to strive that the past does not become prologue. It's your efforts that make this museum a living memorial. That is the incredible enduring power of this institution.
One of the unsettling truths of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is that there's never a time I visit here when its lessons do not feel deeply resonant. But I have to tell you, I can recall few times when that history felt so urgent, or the responsibility it imparts on all of us so pressing.
As we meet, the Russian Government continues to wage its unprovoked, brutal war on Ukraine. Each day brings more harrowing attacks, more innocent men, women, and children killed.
That includes the five people who were killed in a strike on March 1st, on a TV tower and the surrounding area on the outskirts of Kyiv, the same site where, just over 80 years ago, 33,771 Jews were killed by the Nazis in just 2 days. Babyn Yar.
Ukraine is home to nearly 10,000 Holocaust survivors, including an 88-year-old woman, Natalia Berezhnaya of Odessa. Here's what she said in a recent interview, and I quote: "It's hard to wrap my mind around the fact that in 1941, I had to hide in the basement of this building, and that I'm going to have to do that again now."
The Kremlin has tried to justify this war by falsely claiming that it's intervening to stop genocide, abusing the term that we reserve for the gravest atrocities, disrespecting every victim of this heinous crime. Yet even as we are working to increase international pressure on the Kremlin to end this unjustified war, we know there are many other places in the world where horrific atrocities are being committed. Over recent weeks, as I've spoken with diplomats from around the world about Ukraine, I've also heard a constant refrain. Many of them say, "Yes, we stand with the people of Ukraine. But we must also stand with the people suffering atrocities in other places."
Like Xinjiang, where the Chinese Government continues to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other minority groups. Like the atrocities committed in the conflict in Ethiopia by all parties to that conflict, as well as by Eritrean forces. And like the recent flare-up in Darfur, Sudan, which raises alarming echoes of past acts of genocide by Bashir's government forces and the Janjaweed. Standing with victims of atrocities is what brings me here today.
One of my responsibilities as Secretary is determining, on behalf of the United States, whether atrocities have been committed. It's an immense responsibility that I take very seriously, particularly given my family's history.
Beyond the Holocaust, the United States has concluded that genocide was committed seven times. Today marks the eighth, as I have determined that members of the Burmese military committed genocide and crimes against humanity against Rohingya.
It's a decision that I reached based on reviewing a factual assessment and legal analysis prepared by the State Department, which included detailed documentation by a range of independent, impartial sources, including human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as our own rigorous fact-finding.
Among those sources was a joint report, published in November 2017, by the museum's Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide and the human rights group, Fortify Rights; and the museum's determination, in December 2018, that there is compelling evidence that Burmese military committed crimes against humanity and genocide against Rohingya.
Given the gravity of this determination, it was also important that this administration conduct its own analysis of the facts and the law. (Inaudible) instances, the military used similar tactics targeting Rohingya: the razing of villages, killing, rape, torture, and other horrific abuses.
The military's attacks in 2016 forced nearly 100,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. In 2017, attacks killed more than 9,000 Rohingya, and forced more than 740,000 to seek refuge in Bangladesh.
Let me take a moment to share some findings of this report, because they are a key part of how I arrived at my own determination.
The report was based on a survey of more than 1,000 Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh, all of whom were displaced by the violence in 2016 or 2017. Three-quarters of those interviewed said that they personally witnessed members of the military kill someone. More than half witnessed acts of sexual violence. One in five witnessed a mass-casualty event – that is, the killing or injuring of more than 100 people in a single incident.
These percentages matter. They demonstrate that these abuses were not isolated cases. The attack against Rohingya was widespread and systematic, which is crucial for reaching a determination of crimes against humanity.
The evidence also points to a clear intent behind these mass atrocities – the intent to destroy Rohingya, in whole or in part. That intent has been corroborated by the accounts of soldiers who took part in the operation and later defected, such as one who said he was told by his commanding officer to, and I quote, "shoot at every sight of a person," end quote – burn villages, rape and kill women, orders that he and his unit carried out.
Intent is evident in the racial slurs shouted by members of the Burmese military as they attacked Rohingya, the widespread attack on mosques, the desecration of Korans.
Intent is evident in the soldiers who bragged about their plans on social media, such as a lieutenant in the 33rd Light Infantry Division who, as he was deployed to Rakhine State in August 2017, wrote on his Facebook page, and I quote: "If they're Bengali, they'll be killed." His unit is among those reported to have committed atrocities.
Intent is evident in public comments by Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of the Burmese military, who was overseeing the operation. On September 1, 2017, as soldiers were razing villages, killing, torturing, raping men, women, and children, he said this, and I quote: "The Bengali problem was a longstanding one that has become an unfinished job… The government in office is taking great care in solving it," end quote.
This is the same man who, in 2021, would lead the military coup to overthrow Burma's democratically-elected government, and who currently heads its repressive regime.
Intent is evident in the preparatory steps that soldiers took in the days leading up to the atrocities. In the village of Maung Nu, for example, soldiers started by confiscating Rohingyas' kitchen knives and machetes. Then they imposed a curfew. Then they tied pieces of red cloth outside the homes of Rohingya and at a local mosque. And then, only then, did the killing start.
Intent is evident in the military's efforts to prevent Rohingya from escaping, like soldiers blocking exits to villages before they began their attacks, sinking boats full of men, women, and children as they tried to flee to Bangladesh. This demonstrates the military's intent went beyond ethnic cleansing to the actual destruction of Rohingya.
Percentages, numbers, patterns, intent: these are critically important to reach the determination of genocide. But at the same time, we must remember that behind each of these numbers are countless individual acts of cruelty and inhumanity.
Nura, a mother of four, begged soldiers not to rape her in front of her children, but she said, "They did what they wanted to my body."
Harsa's 12-year-old son was torn from her arms and forced to lie face down in front of her before soldiers began to stomp on his head and neck.
It's painful to even read these accounts. And I ask you, I ask each and every one of you listening, put yourself in their place. Imagine this was your own child. Imagine. These stories force us to reckon with the immeasurable pain wrought by every heinous abuse.
That pain ripples outward, from the individual victims and survivors to loved ones, to friends, to entire communities. That is something I saw with my own step-father, Samuel Pisar, who carried with him the loss of his mother, his father, his little sister, and the horrors he'd experienced in the Holocaust, for the rest of his life.
We also must remember these individuals as more than victims, but rather as whole human beings, as mothers, as fathers, as sons, daughters.
People like Jomila and her 15-year-old son, Jahingir, whose story is part of the exhibit that I saw just a little while ago. Jahingir was one of dozens of Rohingya executed by soldiers in August 2017. (1) He was a boy with bright, inquisitive eyes, a dedicated student, who always had a book in his hand.
When soldiers arrived at his village, he hid his books, fearing soldiers would steal them. After he was killed, his mother carried those books with her as she fled to Bangladesh. She still carries them today.
Jomila is one Rohingya mother who lost a child. Out of thousands.
There's another fundamental lesson in the Holocaust Museum's powerful exhibit, which is found in its title: "Burma's Path" – Burma's Path – "to Genocide." That's the groundwork for genocide, the fact that it is laid far in advance, over years, even decades, through a steady process of dehumanization and demonization.
For example, tomorrow, March 22nd, is the day that the Nazis opened their first concentration camp, in Dachau, just 10 miles from Munich. That occurred in 1933, a dozen years – a dozen years – before my stepfather would be sent to that camp after his time in Majdanek and Auschwitz.
The museum's exhibit that I toured shows us the long path to genocide in Burma, how Rohingya, who had been an integral part of Burma's society for generations, saw their rights, saw their citizenship methodically stripped away.
In 1962, when the military staged its first coup, it canceled all Rohingya-language programming on the state-run broadcasting service.
In 1978, when the military used a nationwide campaign to register so-called foreigners as a pretext to terrorize Rohingya, forcing more than 200,000 to flee to Bangladesh.
In 1991, when soldiers carried out killings, rapes, massive destruction of Rohingya communities as part of the military's so-called "Clean and Beautiful Nation," driving an additional 250,000 Rohingya to Bangladesh.
The path is a familiar one, mirroring in so many ways the path to the Holocaust and other genocides.
We see it in the segregation of Rohingya into internally displaced persons camps in Rakhine State, the requirement that all Rohingya households register with the government.
We see it in Burma's 1982 citizenship law, which effectively excluded Rohingya from citizenship and denied them full political rights, echoing the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of their German citizenship.
We see parallels in the dehumanizing hate speech. Rohingya were compared to fleas, to thorns, to an invasive species, just at Tutsis were compared to cockroaches, and Jews to rats and parasites.
Understanding the contours of this path is a core part of the Holocaust Museum's mission. It's crucial to all of us who are committed to living up to the maxim of "Never again." By learning to spot the signs of the worst atrocities, we're empowered to prevent them.
And while today's determination of genocide and crimes against humanity is focused on Rohingya, it's also important to recognize that for decades the Burmese military has committed killings, rape, and other atrocities against members of other ethnic and religious minority groups. Reports of these abuses are widespread; they're well documented. They've occurred in states across Burma. That history, and the determination we're making today, are fundamental to understanding Burma's current crisis.
Many of the military leaders who oversaw the genocidal campaign against Rohingya, including the general who led it, were also involved in abuses committed against other ethnic and religious minority groups. They're the same military leaders who overthrew Burma's democratically elected government on February 1st, 2021 and seized power. Since the coup, we've seen the Burmese military use many of the same tactics, only now the military is targeting anyone it sees as opposing or undermining its repressive rule: student protestors, pro-democracy activists, striking workers, journalists, health workers.
Twenty-two-year-old Thinzar Hein was a nursing student who went to protests to provide medical care to the wounded. On March 28, 2021, she was tending to three injured people at a protest in Monywa when soldiers approached and shot her in the head.
On December 24th, 2021, the military massacred at least 35 people, including women, children, two humanitarian aid workers in Kayah State, and then burned their bodies. According to a doctor who examined the bodies, almost every victim's skull was fractured.
Since seizing power, the military has killed more than 1,670 men, women, and children, and unjustly detained at least 12,800 more in abysmal conditions.
The similarities in these atrocities underscore a fundamental truth of this museum and of history: People who are willing to commit atrocities against one group of people can swiftly be turned against another. This is the warning of the well-known poem by Martin Niemöller on the walls of this museum, which begins, as so many of us know, "First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out…"
And for those who did not realize it before the coup, the brutal violence that has followed has made clear that there is no one the Burmese military won't come for. No one is safe from atrocities under its rule. And so more people in Burma now recognize that ending this crisis, restoring the path to democracy, starts with ensuring the human rights of all people in the country, including Rohingya.
The similarities also matter for the purpose of truth and accountability, something the United States has been working toward since the abuses occurred and continues to do to this day. The passage of time does not diminish this responsibility; if anything, it only makes our quest more urgent.
We strongly supported the UN Fact Finding Mission for Myanmar, and we're doing the same for its successor, the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, as it collects, preserves, and analyzes evidence of the most serious international crimes in Burma. We're providing a wide range of support, including information, resources. And today, I can announce that we're also contributing nearly a million dollars in additional funding.
We have also shared information with The Gambia in connection with the case it has filed against Burma under the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice for the atrocities committed against Rohingya.
Even as we lay the foundation for future accountability, we're also working to stop the military's ongoing atrocities, press for the release of all those unjustly detained, support the people of Burma as they strive to put the country back on the track to democracy.
Alongside allies and partners, we're imposing significant costs on the leaders who bear the greatest responsibility for atrocities. We've imposed targeted sanctions on 65 individuals, including top military commanders, senior officials, their family members. We've applied sanctions or export controls on 26 entities that were either implicated in human rights abuses or generate revenue for the military and its leaders. And we've prevented the regime from plundering Burma's overseas reserves.
In June 2021, we've led efforts at the UN General Assembly to pass a resolution calling on member states to stop the flow of arms into Burma, which 119 countries supported and only one voted against. And in January, we joined 35 nations in calling for an end to the provision of all arms, materiel, and technical assistance to the Burmese military. All governments have a responsibility to keep the pressure on – a report released last month by the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Burma found that China, Russia, and Serbia have all continued to supply the regime with weapons used against civilians since the coup.
We're working closely with our allies and partners – in Asia, around Europe, at the G7, the United Nations, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation – to deny the regime the international access and credibility it craves.
We're supporting ASEAN's efforts to end the regime's violence and seek a peaceful resolution to the crisis through its Five-Point Consensus, and we appreciate the work of ASEAN's special envoy, Cambodia's Foreign Minister Prak Sokhonn, who arrived in Burma today for his first visit as envoy. The foreign minister's experience – and that of his country in enduring a genocide – gives crucial perspective on the issues at hand.
The United States also continues to provide significant support to help meet the immediate humanitarian needs of Rohingya and all affected by their persecution – nearly $1.6 billion since 2017 for everything from shelter and education, specialized mental health and psychosocial support for the victims of trauma.
I want to recognize the exceptional generosity of Bangladesh in hosting over 900,000 Rohingya refugees, including its recent efforts to vaccinate hundreds of thousands of Rohingya as part of its national COVID-19 vaccination campaign.
I've spoken today about the path to genocide. But let me close by saying something about the path out of genocide.
Today's determination is one step on that path as it tells Rohingya, and victims in particular, that the United States government recognizes the gravity of the atrocities committed against them. And it affirms Rohingyas' human rights and dignity, something the Burmese military has tried to destroy.
In the wake of the coup, we've seen growing solidarity with Rohingya across Burma, including an important commitment by the "National Unity Government" to ensure that the human rights of Rohingya – and of all ethnic and religious minority groups – are respected.
Of course, the path out of genocide also runs through justice. And while today that justice may feel elusive, to look around this room is to get a sense of just how determined people are to end the Burmese military's decades-long impunity. And there are many of us.
Rohingya activists who have dedicated their lives to defending the rights of members of their community, several of whom are here today. And thank you for being with us.
Local and international human rights organizations, which have spent years documenting atrocities against Rohingya and other ethnic and religious groups in Burma.
Members of the United States Congress, who have demonstrated sustained bipartisan leadership in condemning the atrocities committed against Rohingya, providing humanitarian assistance, supporting the democratic aspirations of the people of Burma.
And of course, the courageous Rohingya survivors who have been willing to come forward to share their stories, to provide accounts of what they experienced.
The case files are growing. The Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar alone has collected more than 1.5 million items of evidence and information, including witness testimonies, documents, messages, photos, videos, geospatial imagery, social media pages.
Efforts are moving forward, not only at the International Court of Justice, but also through the International Criminal Court and through the domestic courts of Argentina, in a case brought under universal jurisdiction.
The day will come when those responsible for these appalling acts will have to answer for them.
Ultimately, the path out of genocide also leads home. Last week, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees released a report based on interviews with thousands of Rohingya refugees across the region. It found that, despite all they have endured, despite decades of being told they do not belong, two out of three Rohingya refugees still want to be able to return home to Burma one day – as long as they can do it safely, with dignity, with human rights, which is not possible now.
And so, with today's determination, the United States reaffirms its broader commitment to accompany Rohingya on this path out of genocide – toward truth, toward accountability, toward a home that will welcome them as equal members, that will respect their human rights and dignity, alongside that of all people in Burma.
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