Myanmar (Burma) is purging itself of Muslims
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N_Fiddledog @ Mon Sep 11, 2017 11:19 am
There was confusion on the previous page as to which was the more correct term to describe this conflict - Genocide or Ethnic Cleansing:
UN: Myanmar's treatment of Rohingya 'textbook example of ethnic cleansing'
$1:
Ethnic cleansing is the systematic deliberate removal of ethnic or religious groups from a given territory with the intent of making it ethnically homogeneous.[1][page needed] The forces applied may be various forms of forced migration (deportation, population transfer), intimidation, as well as mass murder and genocidal rape.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing
$1:
Genocide is intentional action to destroy a people (usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group) in whole or in part. The hybrid word "genocide" is a combination of the Greek word génos ("race, people") and the Latin suffix -cide ("act of killing").[1] The United Nations Genocide Convention, which was established in 1948, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".[2][3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
Technically it's ethnic cleansing here. It's about pushing the Rohingya out of the Myanmar state of Rakhine.
Tricks @ Mon Sep 11, 2017 12:25 pm
Pst, ethnic cleansing is still bad, and still a crime.
And it is genocide.
$1:
Genocide is intentional action to destroy a people (usually defined as an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group) in whole or in part.
Key word, in part. They are intentionally murdering people based on their religion (including children) ergo, genocide.
I assume you guys are against killing children/infants. At least I would hope so.
BartSimpson @ Mon Sep 11, 2017 2:39 pm
Tricks Tricks:
I guess we should have ethnically cleansed germans.
We did. After WW2 the Germans and German-speaking natives were ethnically cleansed from many countries but in particular Czechoslovakia, France, Netherlands, Belgium, and most egregiously the Western Allies sat on their hands as the Russians ethnically cleansed Eastern Germany and then handed it over to Poland.
Lots of info on this sordid little chapter of history...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rm-dougla ... 25437.html
$1:
In December 1944 Winston Churchill announced to a startled House of Commons that the Allies had decided to carry out the largest forced population transfer — or what is nowadays referred to as “ethnic cleansing” — in human history.
Millions of civilians living in the eastern German provinces that were to be turned over to Poland after the war were to be driven out and deposited among the ruins of the former Reich, to fend for themselves as best they could. The Prime Minister did not mince words. What was planned, he forthrightly declared, was “the total expulsion of the Germans... For expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting.”
The Prime Minister’s revelation alarmed some commentators, who recalled that only eighteen months previously his government had pledged: “Let it be quite clearly understood and proclaimed all over the world that we British will never seek to take vengeance by wholesale mass reprisals against the general body of the German people.”
In the United States, senators demanded to know when the Atlantic Charter, a statement of Anglo-American war aims that affirmed the two countries’ opposition to “territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned” had been repealed. George Orwell, denouncing Churchill’s proposal as an “enormous crime,” took comfort in the reflection that so extreme a policy “cannot actually be carried through, though it might be started, with confusion, suffering and the sowing of irreconcilable hatreds as the result.”
Orwell greatly underestimated both the determination and the ambition of the Allied leaders’ plans. What neither he nor anybody else knew was that in addition to the displacement of the 7-8 million Germans of the East, Churchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had already agreed to a similar “orderly and humane” deportation of the more than 3 million German-speakers — the “Sudeten Germans” — from their homelands in Czechoslovakia. They would soon add the half-million ethnic Germans of Hungary to the list.
Although the governments of Yugoslavia and Romania were never given permission by the Big Three to deport their German minorities, both would take advantage of the situation to drive them out also.
By mid-1945, not merely the largest forced migration but probably the largest single movement of population in human history was under way, an operation that continued for the next five years. Between 12 and 14 million civilians, the overwhelming majority of them women, children and the elderly, were driven out of their homes or, if they had already fled the advancing Red Army in the last days of the war, forcibly prevented from returning to them.
From the beginning, this mass displacement was accomplished largely by state-sponsored violence and terror. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, hundreds of thousands of detainees were herded into camps — often, like Auschwitz I or Theresienstadt, former Nazi concentration camps kept in operation for years after the war and put to a new purpose.
The regime for prisoners in many of these facilities was brutal, as Red Cross officials recorded, with beatings, rapes of female inmates, gruelling forced labour and starvation diets of 500-800 calories the order of the day. In violation of rarely-applied rules exempting the young from detention, children routinely were incarcerated, either alongside their parents or in designated children’s camps. As the British Embassy in Belgrade reported in 1946, conditions for Germans “seem well down to Dachau standards.”
Though the death rates in the camps were often frighteningly high — 2,227 inmates of the Mysłowice facility in southern Poland alone perished in the last ten months of 1945 — most of the mortality associated with the expulsions occurred outside them.
Forced marches in which inhabitants of entire villages were cleared at fifteen minutes’ notice and driven at rifle-point to the nearest border, accounted for many losses. So did train transports that sometimes took weeks to reach their destination, with up to 80 expellees crammed into each cattle car without adequate (or, occasionally, any) food, water or heating.
The deaths continued on arrival in Germany itself. Declared ineligible by the Allied authorities to receive any form of international relief and lacking accommodation in a country devastated by bombing, expellees in many cases spent their first months or years living rough in fields, goods wagons or railway platforms.
Malnutrition, hypothermia and disease took their toll, especially among the very old and very young. Although more research is needed to establish the total number of deaths, conservative estimates suggest that some 500,000 people lost their lives as a result of the operation.
Not only was the treatment of the expellees in defiance of the principles for which the Second World War had professedly been fought, it created numerous and persistent legal complications. At the Nuremberg trials, for example, the Allies were trying the surviving Nazi leaders on charges of carrying out “deportation and other inhumane acts” against civilian populations at the same moment as, less than a hundred miles away, they were engaging in large-scale forced removals of their own.
Similar problems arose with the UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention, the first draft of which outlawed the “forced and systematic exile of individuals representing the culture of a group.” This provision was deleted from the final version at the insistence of the U.S. delegate, who pointed out that it “might be interpreted as embracing forced transfers of minority groups such as have already been carried out by members of the United Nations.”
To the present day, expelling states continue to go to great lengths to exclude the deportations and their continuing effects from the reach of international law. In October 2009, for example, the current President of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus, refused to sign the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty unless his country was granted an “exemption” ensuring that surviving expellees could not use the Treaty to seek redress for their maltreatment in the European courts. Facing the collapse of the accord in the event of Czech non-ratification, the EU reluctantly acquiesced.
To this day, the postwar expulsions — the scale and lethality of which vastly exceed the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the break-up in the 1990s of the former Yugoslavia — remain little known outside Germany itself. (Even there, a 2002 survey found that Germans under thirty had a more accurate knowledge of Ethiopia than of the areas of Europe from which their grandparents were deported.)
The textbooks on modern German and modern European history I use regularly in my college classroom either omit mention of the expulsions altogether, or relegate them to a couple of uninformative, and frequently inaccurate, lines depicting them as the inevitable consequence of Germany’s wartime atrocities. In popular discourse, on the rare occasions that the expulsions are mentioned at all it is common to dismiss them with the observation that the expellees were “got what they deserved,” or that the interest of the expelling states in unburdening themselves of a potentially disloyal minority population should take precedence over the deportees’ right to remain in the lands of their birth.
Superficially persuasive as these arguments may appear, they do not stand up to scrutiny. The expellees were deported not after individual trial and conviction for acts of wartime collaboration — something of which the children could not have been guilty in any event — but because their indiscriminate removal served the interests of the Great Powers and the expelling states alike.
Provisions to exempt proven “anti-fascists” from detention or transfer were routinely ignored by the very governments that adopted them; Oskar Schindler, the most famous “anti-fascist” of all who had been born in the Czech town of Svitavy, was deprived by the Prague authorities of nationality and property like the rest.
The proposition, moreover, that it is legitimate in some circumstances to declare in respect of entire populations that considerations of human rights are simply not to apply is an exceedingly dangerous one. Once the principle that certain specially disfavoured groups may be treated in this way is admitted, it is hard to see why it should not be applied to others. Scholars including Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, John Mearsheimer and Michael Mann have already pointed to the expulsion of the Germans as an encouraging precedent for the organization of similar forced migrations in the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East and elsewhere.
The history of the postwar expulsions, though, shows that there is no such thing as an “orderly and humane” transfer of populations: violence, cruelty and injustice are intrinsic to the process. As the former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia as a small child, has correctly noted: “Collective punishments, such as forced expulsions, are usually rationalized on the grounds of security but almost always fall most heavily on the defenseless and weak.”
It is important to bear in mind that no valid comparison may be drawn between the expulsion of the Germans and the far greater atrocities for which Nazi Germany was responsible. Suggestions to the contrary — including those made by expellees themselves — are both offensive and historically illiterate.
Nonetheless, as the historian B.B. Sullivan has observed in another context, “greater evil does not absolve lesser evil.” The postwar expulsions were by any measure one of the most significant occurrences of the mass violation of human rights in recent history. Their demographic, economic, cultural and political effects continue to cast a long and baleful shadow across the European continent. Yet their importance remains unacknowledged, and many vital aspects of their history have not been adequately studied.
Nearly seventy years after the end of the Second World War, as the last surviving expellees are passing from the scene, the time has come for this tragic and destructive episode to receive the attention it deserves, so that the lessons it teaches may not be lost and the unnecessary suffering it engendered may not be repeated.
Millions of civilians living in the eastern German provinces that were to be turned over to Poland after the war were to be driven out and deposited among the ruins of the former Reich, to fend for themselves as best they could. The Prime Minister did not mince words. What was planned, he forthrightly declared, was “the total expulsion of the Germans... For expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting.”
The Prime Minister’s revelation alarmed some commentators, who recalled that only eighteen months previously his government had pledged: “Let it be quite clearly understood and proclaimed all over the world that we British will never seek to take vengeance by wholesale mass reprisals against the general body of the German people.”
In the United States, senators demanded to know when the Atlantic Charter, a statement of Anglo-American war aims that affirmed the two countries’ opposition to “territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the people concerned” had been repealed. George Orwell, denouncing Churchill’s proposal as an “enormous crime,” took comfort in the reflection that so extreme a policy “cannot actually be carried through, though it might be started, with confusion, suffering and the sowing of irreconcilable hatreds as the result.”
Orwell greatly underestimated both the determination and the ambition of the Allied leaders’ plans. What neither he nor anybody else knew was that in addition to the displacement of the 7-8 million Germans of the East, Churchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had already agreed to a similar “orderly and humane” deportation of the more than 3 million German-speakers — the “Sudeten Germans” — from their homelands in Czechoslovakia. They would soon add the half-million ethnic Germans of Hungary to the list.
Although the governments of Yugoslavia and Romania were never given permission by the Big Three to deport their German minorities, both would take advantage of the situation to drive them out also.
By mid-1945, not merely the largest forced migration but probably the largest single movement of population in human history was under way, an operation that continued for the next five years. Between 12 and 14 million civilians, the overwhelming majority of them women, children and the elderly, were driven out of their homes or, if they had already fled the advancing Red Army in the last days of the war, forcibly prevented from returning to them.
From the beginning, this mass displacement was accomplished largely by state-sponsored violence and terror. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, hundreds of thousands of detainees were herded into camps — often, like Auschwitz I or Theresienstadt, former Nazi concentration camps kept in operation for years after the war and put to a new purpose.
The regime for prisoners in many of these facilities was brutal, as Red Cross officials recorded, with beatings, rapes of female inmates, gruelling forced labour and starvation diets of 500-800 calories the order of the day. In violation of rarely-applied rules exempting the young from detention, children routinely were incarcerated, either alongside their parents or in designated children’s camps. As the British Embassy in Belgrade reported in 1946, conditions for Germans “seem well down to Dachau standards.”
Though the death rates in the camps were often frighteningly high — 2,227 inmates of the Mysłowice facility in southern Poland alone perished in the last ten months of 1945 — most of the mortality associated with the expulsions occurred outside them.
Forced marches in which inhabitants of entire villages were cleared at fifteen minutes’ notice and driven at rifle-point to the nearest border, accounted for many losses. So did train transports that sometimes took weeks to reach their destination, with up to 80 expellees crammed into each cattle car without adequate (or, occasionally, any) food, water or heating.
The deaths continued on arrival in Germany itself. Declared ineligible by the Allied authorities to receive any form of international relief and lacking accommodation in a country devastated by bombing, expellees in many cases spent their first months or years living rough in fields, goods wagons or railway platforms.
Malnutrition, hypothermia and disease took their toll, especially among the very old and very young. Although more research is needed to establish the total number of deaths, conservative estimates suggest that some 500,000 people lost their lives as a result of the operation.
Not only was the treatment of the expellees in defiance of the principles for which the Second World War had professedly been fought, it created numerous and persistent legal complications. At the Nuremberg trials, for example, the Allies were trying the surviving Nazi leaders on charges of carrying out “deportation and other inhumane acts” against civilian populations at the same moment as, less than a hundred miles away, they were engaging in large-scale forced removals of their own.
Similar problems arose with the UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention, the first draft of which outlawed the “forced and systematic exile of individuals representing the culture of a group.” This provision was deleted from the final version at the insistence of the U.S. delegate, who pointed out that it “might be interpreted as embracing forced transfers of minority groups such as have already been carried out by members of the United Nations.”
To the present day, expelling states continue to go to great lengths to exclude the deportations and their continuing effects from the reach of international law. In October 2009, for example, the current President of the Czech Republic, Václav Klaus, refused to sign the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty unless his country was granted an “exemption” ensuring that surviving expellees could not use the Treaty to seek redress for their maltreatment in the European courts. Facing the collapse of the accord in the event of Czech non-ratification, the EU reluctantly acquiesced.
To this day, the postwar expulsions — the scale and lethality of which vastly exceed the ethnic cleansing that accompanied the break-up in the 1990s of the former Yugoslavia — remain little known outside Germany itself. (Even there, a 2002 survey found that Germans under thirty had a more accurate knowledge of Ethiopia than of the areas of Europe from which their grandparents were deported.)
The textbooks on modern German and modern European history I use regularly in my college classroom either omit mention of the expulsions altogether, or relegate them to a couple of uninformative, and frequently inaccurate, lines depicting them as the inevitable consequence of Germany’s wartime atrocities. In popular discourse, on the rare occasions that the expulsions are mentioned at all it is common to dismiss them with the observation that the expellees were “got what they deserved,” or that the interest of the expelling states in unburdening themselves of a potentially disloyal minority population should take precedence over the deportees’ right to remain in the lands of their birth.
Superficially persuasive as these arguments may appear, they do not stand up to scrutiny. The expellees were deported not after individual trial and conviction for acts of wartime collaboration — something of which the children could not have been guilty in any event — but because their indiscriminate removal served the interests of the Great Powers and the expelling states alike.
Provisions to exempt proven “anti-fascists” from detention or transfer were routinely ignored by the very governments that adopted them; Oskar Schindler, the most famous “anti-fascist” of all who had been born in the Czech town of Svitavy, was deprived by the Prague authorities of nationality and property like the rest.
The proposition, moreover, that it is legitimate in some circumstances to declare in respect of entire populations that considerations of human rights are simply not to apply is an exceedingly dangerous one. Once the principle that certain specially disfavoured groups may be treated in this way is admitted, it is hard to see why it should not be applied to others. Scholars including Andrew Bell-Fialkoff, John Mearsheimer and Michael Mann have already pointed to the expulsion of the Germans as an encouraging precedent for the organization of similar forced migrations in the former Yugoslavia, the Middle East and elsewhere.
The history of the postwar expulsions, though, shows that there is no such thing as an “orderly and humane” transfer of populations: violence, cruelty and injustice are intrinsic to the process. As the former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia as a small child, has correctly noted: “Collective punishments, such as forced expulsions, are usually rationalized on the grounds of security but almost always fall most heavily on the defenseless and weak.”
It is important to bear in mind that no valid comparison may be drawn between the expulsion of the Germans and the far greater atrocities for which Nazi Germany was responsible. Suggestions to the contrary — including those made by expellees themselves — are both offensive and historically illiterate.
Nonetheless, as the historian B.B. Sullivan has observed in another context, “greater evil does not absolve lesser evil.” The postwar expulsions were by any measure one of the most significant occurrences of the mass violation of human rights in recent history. Their demographic, economic, cultural and political effects continue to cast a long and baleful shadow across the European continent. Yet their importance remains unacknowledged, and many vital aspects of their history have not been adequately studied.
Nearly seventy years after the end of the Second World War, as the last surviving expellees are passing from the scene, the time has come for this tragic and destructive episode to receive the attention it deserves, so that the lessons it teaches may not be lost and the unnecessary suffering it engendered may not be repeated.
xerxes @ Mon Sep 11, 2017 2:49 pm
It wasn't right then and it isn't right now.
BartSimpson @ Mon Sep 11, 2017 3:13 pm
xerxes xerxes:
It wasn't right then and it isn't right now.
Maybe if you were a Czech who had just undergone six years of brutal occupation, rape, murder, and mass murder at the hands of the Germans you'd have had a different opinion.
Keep in mind that my wife's family is from Heidelberg.
xerxes @ Mon Sep 11, 2017 5:25 pm
True, but the Russians quickly proved that they wouldn't be any better.
desertdude @ Mon Sep 11, 2017 9:51 pm
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
xerxes xerxes:
It wasn't right then and it isn't right now.
Maybe if you were a Czech who had just undergone six years of brutal occupation, rape, murder, and mass murder at the hands of the Germans you'd have had a different opinion.
Keep in mind that my wife's family is from Heidelberg.
Yeah only that the Rohingya have been treated this way for more than 60 yrs now and only of late have started to fight back and its not only the Rohingya but the Karen on the opposite border with Thailand too, and the Karen insurgency against Burma has been far more violent and longer. Burma does not like minorities, period.
So in your own words both the Rohingya and Karen have a "different opinion"
martin14 @ Mon Sep 11, 2017 9:55 pm
xerxes xerxes:
It wasn't right then and it isn't right now.
"right" is a moral idea.
It may not have been 'right', but it did work.
Rearranging countries along ethnic lines has worked.
The problems cropped up in places where there were sizeable minorities.
xerxes xerxes:
True, but the Russians quickly proved that they wouldn't be any better.
In what way ?
martin14 @ Mon Sep 11, 2017 10:16 pm
desertdude desertdude:
and only of late have started to fight back and its not only the Rohingya
This, as usual from you, a lie.
$1:
Mujahideen separatist movements (1947–1960s)
Early separatist insurgency
Rohingya Islamist movements (1972–2001)
Islamist movements in the 1970s and 1980s
Military expansions in the 1990s
Anti-Muslim riots in Mandalay (1997)
Anti-Muslim riots in Sittwe and Taungoo (2001)
2012 Rakhine State riots
Mandalay riots (2014)
Early separatist insurgency
Rohingya Islamist movements (1972–2001)
Islamist movements in the 1970s and 1980s
Military expansions in the 1990s
Anti-Muslim riots in Mandalay (1997)
Anti-Muslim riots in Sittwe and Taungoo (2001)
2012 Rakhine State riots
Mandalay riots (2014)
even wiki can't hide the truth, but I guess Aljajizya has no problem with that.
$1:
On 28 October 1998, the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation merged with the Arakan Rohingya Islamic Front and formed the Arakan Rohingya National Organisation (ARNO), operating in-exile in Cox's Bazaar.[2] The Rohingya National Army (RNA) was established as its armed wing.
One of the several dozen videotapes obtained by CNN from Al-Qaeda's archives in Afghanistan in August 2002 allegedly showed fighters from Myanmar training in Afghanistan.[3] Other videotapes were marked with "Myanmar" in Arabic, and it was assumed that the footage was shot in Myanmar, though this has not been validated.[2][53] According to intelligence sources in Asia,[who?] Rohingya recruits in the RSO were paid a 30,000 Bangladeshi taka ($525 USD) enlistment reward, and a salary of 10,000 taka ($175) per month. Families of fighters who were killed in action were offered 100,000 taka ($1,750) in compensation, a promise which lured many young Rohingya men, who were mostly very poor, to travel to Pakistan, where they would train and then perform suicide attacks in Afghanistan.[2][53]
The Islamic extremist organisations Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami[56] and Harkat-ul-Ansar[57] also claimed to have branches in Myanmar.
One of the several dozen videotapes obtained by CNN from Al-Qaeda's archives in Afghanistan in August 2002 allegedly showed fighters from Myanmar training in Afghanistan.[3] Other videotapes were marked with "Myanmar" in Arabic, and it was assumed that the footage was shot in Myanmar, though this has not been validated.[2][53] According to intelligence sources in Asia,[who?] Rohingya recruits in the RSO were paid a 30,000 Bangladeshi taka ($525 USD) enlistment reward, and a salary of 10,000 taka ($175) per month. Families of fighters who were killed in action were offered 100,000 taka ($1,750) in compensation, a promise which lured many young Rohingya men, who were mostly very poor, to travel to Pakistan, where they would train and then perform suicide attacks in Afghanistan.[2][53]
The Islamic extremist organisations Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami[56] and Harkat-ul-Ansar[57] also claimed to have branches in Myanmar.
mmmm, another tasty jihad for Islam.
N_Fiddledog @ Tue Sep 12, 2017 12:10 am
The way I heard it there have been spats, conflicts, wars, alliances, betrayals since the 15th century and the Sultanate of Bengal had influence across its borders into Arakana (Rakhine), but the line was really drawn between Muslim and Infidel in Rakhine state during the second world war.
$1:
Inter communal violence
Aye Chan, a historian at the Kanda University, has written that as a consequence of acquiring arms from the Allies during World War II, Rohingyas tried to destroy the collaborationist Arakanese villages instead of resisting the Japanese.[2]
Muslims from Northern Rakhine State killed around 50,000 Arakanese, including the Deputy Commissioner U Oo Kyaw Khaing, who was killed while trying to settle the dispute. [3] In return the Buddhist also killed a large number of Rohingya muslims.
Persecution by the Japanese forces
Defeated, 50,000 Arakaneses eventually fled to the Dinaspur Chittagong Division of Bangladesh after repeated massacres by the Rohingya and Japanese forces.
Imperial Japanese forces slaughtered, raped, and tortured Rohingya Muslims and Indian muslims. They expelled tens of thousands of Rohingya into Bengal in British India. The Japanese committed countless acts of rape, murder and torture against thousands of Rohingyas.[7] During this period, some 22,000 Rohingyas are believed to have crossed the border into Bengal, then part of British India, to escape the violence.[8][9] Defeated, 40,000 Rohingyas eventually fled to Chittagong after repeated massacres by the Burmese and Japanese forces.[10]
British report stated, that after massacres "the area then occupied by us was almost entirely Mussulman Country".[2]
Aye Chan, a historian at the Kanda University, has written that as a consequence of acquiring arms from the Allies during World War II, Rohingyas tried to destroy the collaborationist Arakanese villages instead of resisting the Japanese.[2]
Muslims from Northern Rakhine State killed around 50,000 Arakanese, including the Deputy Commissioner U Oo Kyaw Khaing, who was killed while trying to settle the dispute. [3] In return the Buddhist also killed a large number of Rohingya muslims.
Persecution by the Japanese forces
Defeated, 50,000 Arakaneses eventually fled to the Dinaspur Chittagong Division of Bangladesh after repeated massacres by the Rohingya and Japanese forces.
Imperial Japanese forces slaughtered, raped, and tortured Rohingya Muslims and Indian muslims. They expelled tens of thousands of Rohingya into Bengal in British India. The Japanese committed countless acts of rape, murder and torture against thousands of Rohingyas.[7] During this period, some 22,000 Rohingyas are believed to have crossed the border into Bengal, then part of British India, to escape the violence.[8][9] Defeated, 40,000 Rohingyas eventually fled to Chittagong after repeated massacres by the Burmese and Japanese forces.[10]
British report stated, that after massacres "the area then occupied by us was almost entirely Mussulman Country".[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arakan_massacres_in_1942
I'll clarify the beginning there, just in case somebody missed it. The British armed the Muslims as they (the British) retreated from Myanmar with the understanding the Muslim Rohingya would use the weapons to harry the Japanese.
The Muslim Rohingya had a better idea. They turned their new british weaponry on the locals killing thousands of Arakanese. The Arakanese (Arakana is what they used to call Rakhine) then allied with the Japanese and unleashed Hell on earth for the Rohingya.
Somebody's been bitching about that Wikipedia post lately, but this one's good for the part of the story they discuss too:
https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south- ... hine-state
N_Fiddledog @ Tue Sep 12, 2017 12:36 am
Actually, to be fair I'll give you the International Crisis Group's telling of the tale too:
$1:
During the Second World War, Rakhine was the front line between the Japanese invaders and allied forces. Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists were on opposing sides; most of the former remained pro-British, while the latter supported the Japanese until a last-minute switch enabled the eventual allied reoccupation of Rakhine. Both communities formed armed units and attacked the other, with accounts of massacres on both sides in 1942-1943. Muslims fled to the north, where they were the majority, and Rakhine Buddhists moved south.
https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south- ... hine-state
Following this was the Mujahadeen rebellion Martin spoke of.
MeganC @ Tue Sep 12, 2017 4:51 am
N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:
Actually, to be fair I'll give you the International Crisis Group's telling of the tale too:
https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south- ... hine-state
Following this was the Mujahadeen rebellion Martin spoke of.
$1:
During the Second World War, Rakhine was the front line between the Japanese invaders and allied forces. Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists were on opposing sides; most of the former remained pro-British, while the latter supported the Japanese until a last-minute switch enabled the eventual allied reoccupation of Rakhine. Both communities formed armed units and attacked the other, with accounts of massacres on both sides in 1942-1943. Muslims fled to the north, where they were the majority, and Rakhine Buddhists moved south.
https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south- ... hine-state
Following this was the Mujahadeen rebellion Martin spoke of.
The Muslims supported the Nazis and the Japanese in World War Two? I guess that makes sense.
Sunnyways @ Tue Sep 12, 2017 9:21 am
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
xerxes xerxes:
It wasn't right then and it isn't right now.
Maybe if you were a Czech who had just undergone six years of brutal occupation, rape, murder, and mass murder at the hands of the Germans you'd have had a different opinion.
Keep in mind that my wife's family is from Heidelberg.
No, it was wrong then and it is utterly wrong now. The people who seek to justify such massacres are sick.
BartSimpson @ Tue Sep 12, 2017 9:40 am
Sunnyways Sunnyways:
No, it was wrong then and it is utterly wrong now. The people who seek to justify such massacres are sick.
Sometimes it's what it takes to gain peace.
If you have a group that's a persistent pain in the ass to everyone else in their country then sooner or later you shouldn't be surprised when the 'everyone else' unites to deal with the problem.
Myanmar has 135 distinct ethnic groups and the Rohingya Muslims have managed to unite the other 134 groups against them. Some of the people allied in the ouster of the Rohingya Muslims are other Muslims.
And after two successive world wars I also can't fault a number of European countries for telling their German citizens to GTFO. People will only put up with so much before they just want the problem to go away.
Thanos @ Tue Sep 12, 2017 9:48 am
The Soviets wiped out about a thousand years of ethnic intermixing in less than three years after World War Two when the forcibly chased all German ethnics out of Ukraine, Russia, and Eastern Europe and forced them all to go to Germany; in a true statistical oddity Germany ended up with more people in it after the war due solely to the forced migrants replacing those Germans that were killed from 1939 to 1945. Ditto with the Poles and Ukrainians, whom the Soviets also forced apart and then redrew all the former borders.
Ethnic cleansing is brutal and awful. It's also one of the few phenomena that succeeds in creating a more-or-less stable peace between peoples that hate each other once the separation process is concluded. The irredentism of the defeated pining over lost lands and former glories isn't even worth paying attention to, when they completely lack the means and the might to do anything about it.
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