Atrocities against Rohingya Muslims

By ABDUR RASHID, ARAKAN, MYANMAR
Persecution, rape, kidnapping and torture of Rohingya Muslims by the military junta and its cronies have become a daily feature of life in Arakan, Myanmar. They are also subject to extortion and forced labor.

Rohingyas can't even be described as birds in a cage. Birds are given food timely but Rohingyas are not fed; rather they have to find something to eat themselves. As Aristotle said, "The master is only the master of the slave; he does not belong to him, whereas the slave is not only the slave of his master, but wholly belongs to him. ... And a possession may be defined as an instrument of action..." The situation in Myanmar continues to deteriorate and the military regime is committing crimes against humanity and ethnic minorities with impunity.

Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crimes of Genocide (1948) defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intention to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious groups" including:

1. Killing members of a group;

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group and

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The military junta has been perpetrating almost all the crimes mentioned in Article 2 of the Convention against the Rohingya people.

Why this special persecution of Rohingyas? This is because alone among the people of Arakan, Rohingyas are seen as a threat to junta's continuous grip over Arakan. If Milosevic, Radovan Karadzic and others could be brought to the International Court of Justice to face charges of war crimes and genocide, why not the leaders of Myanmar's military junta?

View link: http://arabnews.com/opinion/letters/article37575.ece