Wednesday 28 May 2014

Who were Raped and Killed to Buddhist girl.

MA THIDA HTWE - 2 YEAR MEMORIAL Ma Thida Htwe was raped and murdered by a group of three Muslim youths near her village Tha Pri Chaung, on May 28, 2012, when she was returning home from Kyauk Ni Maw Village in Rambree township, Rakhine (Arakan) State, Burma (Myanmar).
The rape and murder of Thida Htwe sparked the cycle of violence that subsequentially spiraled out of control, but, it was not the root caus...e.
It was one of many sparks. There are many rapes of Buddhist women and girls, mainly in the Muslim dominated townships of Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathaydaung. In these townships, and others with large Muslim populations, the Rakhine Buddhists continually complain that the Bengalis steal their property, their cattle and crops, and harass, attack and sometimes kill the Buddhists, and other non-Muslims.

And, disturbingly, the Bengalis seem to even find justification, for being contemptuous of the Rakhine people, their culture and their Buddhist faith. The Muslims are beholden to the insular dictates of their faith, which does not encourage assimilation with others, nor admiration or even tolerance, but upholds expansionism, superiority, and the inarguable belief that Islam will - by Allah’s (God’s) decree - be accepted by all people, everywhere.
Meanwhile, a school building built in the memory of Ma Thida Htwe opened in her native village - Tha Pri Chaung - under the supervision of a prominent monk known as Bogalay Sayadaw.

Tuesday 27 May 2014

၂၀၀၁ခုနွစ္မွ၂၀၁၄ခုနွစ္ထိ ေမာင္ေတာေဒသတြင္ ဘဂၤလီမ်ား အၾကမ္းဖက္သတ္ျဖတ္မႈေၾကာင့္ ဒဏ္ရာရေသဆံုးခဲ႔ၾကသည့္ လံုၿခံဳေရး`ရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႔ဝင္´မ်ားစာရင္း


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…၂၀၀၁ခုနွစ္ ဇူလိုင္လ၁၁ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ေမာင္ေတာၿမိဳ႕ ၿမိဳ႕သူႀကီးေက်းရြာမွ ဘဂၤလီမ်ားတိုက္ခိုက္မႈေၾကာင့္ `တပ္ၾကပ္ႀကီးတစ္ဦးေသဆံုး´
…၂၀၀၁ခုနွစ္ နိုဝင္ဘာလ၂၃ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ေမာင္ေတာၿမိဳ႕ေျမာက္ပိုင္း ေလာင္းဒံုရဲစခန္းတြင္ ဘဂၤါလီမ်ားတိုက္ခိုက္၍ `လံုၿခံဳေရးတပ္ဖြဲ႔ဝင္ေျခာက္ဦးေသဆံုး´ၿပီး ရိုင္ဖယ္ေသနတ္ေျခာက္လက္ပါ ယူေဆာင္သြား။
...
…၂၀၀၄စက္တင္ဘာလ၂ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ဘဂၤါလီမ်ားတိုက္ခိုက္မႈေၾကာင့္ `ဒုရဲအုပ္တစ္ဦးေသဆံုး´ လက္နက္လည္းေပ်ာက္။
…၂၀၀၈ခုနွစ္ စက္တင္ဘာလ၁၈ရက္ေန႔ ညအခ်ိန္က ကင္းေခ်ာင္းရဲစခန္းမွ တပ္ၾကပ္ႀကီးနွင့္ရဲသံုးဦး (ေပါင္းေလးဦး)အား ဘဂၤါလီမ်ားတိုက္ခိုက္မႈေၾကာင့္ ဒဏ္ရာမ်ားရရွိ။
…၂၀၀၉ခုနွစ္ ဧၿပီလ၂၂ရက္တြင္ ကင္းလွည့္ေနသည့္ လံုၿခံဳေရးတပ္ဖြဲ႔အား သက္ေခ်ာင္းရြာမွ ဘဂၤါလီမ်ားတိုက္ခိုက္၍ ခုနွစ္ဦးတိတိ ဒဏ္ရာမ်ားရရွိ။
အထက္ပါ ေဖာ္ျပခ်က္မ်ားသည္ ၂၀၁၂ခုနွစ္ ကုလား-ရခိုင္ ပဋိပကၡ မျဖစ္ပြားမွီကပင္ ဘဂၤါလီမ်ားက လက္စြမ္းျပထားေသာ အေျခအေန ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ ေအာက္တြင္ေဖာ္ျပမွာကေတာ့ ၂၀၁၂ပဋိပကၡျဖစ္ၿပီးမွ လက္စြမ္းျပထားျခင္းမ်ား ျဖစ္ပါသည္။
…၂၀၁၃ခုနွစ္ မတ္လ၂၇ရက္ေန႔က ကုလားတရားခံတစ္ဦးကို လိုက္လံရွာေဖြေနသည့္ ရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႔အား ဘဂၤါလီမ်ားက အုပ္စုဖြဲ႔ ဝိုင္းဝန္းတိုက္ခိုက္မႈေၾကာင့္ ရဲႏွစ္ဦး ဒဏ္ရာရရွိ။
…၂၀၁၄ ဇန္နဝါရီလ၁၃ရက္ေန႔က ကင္းလွည့္ရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႔အား ဒုခ်ီရာတန္းေက်းရြာမွ ကုလားမ်ားက အုပ္စုဖြဲ႔တိုက္ခိုက္ေသာေၾကာင့္ ရဲတပ္ၾကပ္ႀကီးတစ္ဦးေသဆံုး။လက္နက္လည္းေပ်ာက္ဆံုး။
…၂၀၁၄ခုနွစ္ ေမလ၁၇ရက္ေန႔က ျမန္မာ-ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ နယ္စပ္ၿခံစည္းရိုးနားတြင္ ကင္းလွည့္ေနေသာ နယ္ျခားေစာင့္ ရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႔ဝင္မ်ားကို RSOဟုအမည္ခံထားေသာ ဘဂၤါလီမ်ားက ေခ်ာင္းေျမွာင္းပစ္ခတ္ေသာေၾကာင့္ ရဲေလးဦးက်ဆံုး။ဒုရဲအုပ္တစ္ဦး ေသနတ္မွန္ဒဏ္ရာရရွိ။
ဤစာရင္းသည္ ``ေမာင္ေတာေဒသမွ ရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႔ဝင္မ်ား´´သာ ေသဆံုးဒဏ္ရာရရွိမႈ စာရင္းျဖစ္ပါသည္။ေမာင္ေတာေဒသမွ `စစ္သား´မ်ားစာရင္း မပါရွိေသးသလို ရခိုင္ျပည္ရွိ အျခားေနရာမ်ားျဖစ္ေသာ စစ္ေတြ၊ေျမာက္ဦး၊ေက်ာက္ေတာ၊ေပါက္ေတာ စသည့္ၿမိဳ႕မ်ား၌ ေသဆံုးဒဏ္ရာရရွိၾကသည့္ ရဲ၊စစ္သားမ်ား၏ စာရင္းလည္း မပါရွိေသးပါ။ဤစေတးတပ္မွာ 26.5.2014ေန႔ထုတ္ Weekly Eleven ဂ်ာနယ္မွ စာ-34တြင္ပါရွိသည့္ ေဆာင္းပါးထဲမွာ ထုတ္နဳတ္တင္ျပထားျခင္း ျဖစ္ပါသည္။

Saturday 24 May 2014

"Rohingya," More a Political Rhetoric Than an "Ethnic Identity."

Aye Chan
I: Early Muslim Settlers in the Kingdom of Arakan
Although the term “Arakan” denotes Present Rakhine State of Union of Burma in the European Literature from the 16th century, it was clearly a derivation from the Portuguese corruption of “Rakhine.” The people of Rakhine State of Union of Burma call themselves “Rakhine” and their country, formerly an independent kingdom, “Rakhinepray.” Sir Henry Yule an expert of Colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, quoting contemporary Portuguese sources writes:
“It is called by some Portuguese Orrakan, by others among them Arrakaon and
by some again Rakan” (Yule 1985: 34).
The famous Bengali poet of the seventeenth century, Daulat Qazi, in his Collection of Bengali Poems, “Sati Maina” writes about Rakhine Kingdom as:
“To the East of the River Karnafuli there is a palace, “Roshang City” by name, like the Heaven. There rules the glorious king of Maghada descent, a follower of the Buddha.” (Huq 2005: 12).
In this poem again “Roshang” clearly is the corrupted Bengali pronunciation for “Rakhine.” In the literary works of the Bengali literature Rakhine is called “Roshang” or “Rohong.” During the colonial period the country was known as “Arakan Division.”
A Japanese historian, Kei Nemoto testified at the Supreme Court of Japan, supporting the fact of existence of “Rohingya” as an ethnic group in the Arakan (Rakhine) State of Union of Burma (Myanmar) as:
“Jaeger attempted to reconstruct the history of the Rohingya by describing the three stages where Muslim communities had been formed in Arakan. The first stage is a period when a large number of Muslims had migrated from diverse areas (especially from Bengal) in the Mughal Kingdom (1526-1857; its golden days were from the 16th century to the mid-17th century) in India. Jaeger notes that they are the origin of the Rohingya ethnic group.”
For this passage Nemoto does not give any reference and page number either. I have occasionally read Moshe Yegar’s books many times and I did not see such a passage in any of his works. And even if Yegar would have written in any piece of his publication that I have not read, I can say with certainty that it is a wrong historical fact. Actually, Moshe Yegar is not reconstructing the history of “Rohingya.” As an authority in the study of the Muslim minorities in Southeast Asia his attempt was at most to examine how the problem of Muslim minority in Rakhine State escalated to a Jihad(Holy War) in Myanmar after the independence, and the causes that led to the persistent flights of the Muslim refugees into neighboring Bangladesh (Yegar 2002: 19 -47).
Certainly, Yegar writes that the Arab castaways settled in the Rakhine coast in the 8th and 9th centuries were earliest Muslim settlers and the Muslim followers of King Min Saw Mon (1430-1433) after he was restored to the throne with the help of military assistance from Bengal were allowed to make Arakan their home. The two accounts given in the Rakhine chronicles might be taken by Yegar as the first and second stages of Muslim migration to Rakhineland. About the Arab travelers coming to trade with Arakan French historian Jacques Leider critically asserts as:
“Since the Muslim traders had come to Arakan, we do not exactly know.
Pretending that Arab traders had come to Arakan since the 8th and 9th century is largely a matter of speculation linked to the early history of Chittagong”
(Leider 1998:202).
In the study of Southeast Asian history all the scholars agree that the Arab navigators’ accounts have been based on the secondary information and not substantially reliable. Ibn Majid in mid-fifteenth century noted down about the navigable difficulties of the shallow and rocky channels in the entrance to the Rakhine City (Tibetts 1981: 381). Besides his record, there is no informative source on Rakhine coast left by the Arab navigators. We can definitely assume that Arabs sailors were not well aware of Arakan.
Yegar, with a little knowledge of Burmese literature, certainly relies on the secondary sources, especially Arthur Phayre’s works in English. Phayre always follows the chronicles. A student of Burmese history will clearly understand if he reads Phayre’s History of Burma that is more a collection of legends of Old Burma than a history book. In case of Rakhine history too, every scholar of Burmese history would soon realize the chroniclers’ accounts on the history of Arakanese Kingdom in the First Millennia AD are almost the folk tales. It can be clearly seen that some stories from Indian, especially Buddhist literature were directly copied for some events. As a historian, I confidently say that the dynastic chronicles of Dannyawadi and Wethali Periods (c.100 – 1000) are hopelessly unreliable as primary sources and not even as secondary ones. The stories of Arab settlers are all based on the chroniclers’ account of the shipwrecks at the Rakhine coast and the “Kular castaways” who settled in Rakhine Kingdom. The chronicles do not give exact dates of the shipwrecks and do not say that they were Arabs. “Kular” is a Burmese word for all those who came from the west by sea. The Europeans are called “Kular Phyu” that means “White Kular.”
(To be continued.)

Saturday 10 May 2014

အၿငိမ္းစားၿဗိတိသွ်သံအမတ္ၾကီးကၿဗိတိသွ်အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရးကာလၿမန္မာၿပည္မွာရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ
မရွိဘူးလို႔ေရးတာကိုရိုဟင္ဂ်ာဘေလာဂါေတြက၀င္ဖ်က္လို႔ညီးေနရွာတယ္။ေအာက္မွာ
ဖတ္ၾကည့္ၾကပါ။ သံအမတ္ၾကီးက Derek Tonkin ၿဖစ္ပါတယ္။
I had it coming to me. Rohingya Bloggers have sought to demolish my recent presentation of the British experience in Arakan. It is not merely that I am a dolt and a moron, but so too it seems were all those British administrators who sought to depict in gazetteers and censuses the bewildering kaleidoscope of ethnic diversity which they found in the country which Britain had conquered.

Who are the Rohingya


It is not only Aye Chan who says that there has never been such an ethnic group as "Rohingya" in Burmese history.
British Ambassador Derek Tonkin writes: Although they are reluctant to admit this, Muslims in Rakhine State are overwhelmingly of Bengali origin, though this may well go back to the 16th Century and even earlier. Those who emigrated from the Chittagong District and from further afield in Bengal from the mid-1850s onwards were already well established as permanent... residents at least a century ago. The percentage of all Indians, Hindu as well as Muslim, born in India, remained static in Arakan at 23.5% (1911), 25.0% (1921) and 23.2% (1931) according to the censuses in those years. By 1940 when Financial Secretary James Baxter issued his Report on Indian Immigration, it was not thought that there had been any change of substance. The detailed figures for 1931, given on page 49 of the Baxter Report, for Akyab District where about 97% of the Indian population in Arakan was concentrated, and which under British administration included both present-day Sittwe and Maungdaw Districts,....