August 2013
Vol 13, No.08
THE TPP - BE CAUTIOUS! By Chandra Muzaffar
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he proponents of the Trans Pacific Partnership argue that the TPP would bring huge benefits to Malaysia “with as much as US $ 40 billion (RM 128.4 billion) in annual export gains and US $ 25 billion in annual income gains by 2025.” Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in particular will reap a bonanza. The TPP, it is said, will also “give Malaysia preferential access to a US $ 15 trillion economy, which means access to the US $ 500 billion in US government tenders.”
As against these projections, there are issues of tremendous significance pertaining to the TPP that have been raised by a variety of citizen groups in almost all the 12 countries (Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States and Vietnam) that are currently part of the negotiation process. These issues have emerged as a result of leaks since no officially sanctioned draft has been placed before the public. The negotiations — the 18th round of which will commence in Kota
Kinabalu( Malaysia) on the 15th of July 2013 — are shrouded in secrecy though representatives of major corporations such as Monsanto, Walmart, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Cargill, Exxon-Mobil, and Chevron, among others, it is alleged, have had full access to the draft and have been “suggesting amendments.” One of the issues that has caused grave concern is a set of rules in the TPP which apparently would empower foreign corporations to bypass domestic laws and courts and challenge government policies and regulations aimed at protecting the public interest via tribunals linked to the World Bank
and the UN. If this is true, it would be an affront to national sovereignty. The TPP also prohibits governments and central banks from imposing capital controls or banning risky financial products. Central banks would have diminished capacity to regulate the entry and exit of speculative capital. Countries that are part of the TPP would be compelled to create an even more conducive environment for casino capitalism. Given Malaysia’s relative success in developing regulatory mechanisms during and after the 1998 Asian financial crisis, this aspect of the TPP would be particularly galling. The adverse impact of this trade pact upon national sovereignty and the economic well-being of countries such as Malaysia is underscored by yet another provision which questions our procurement policies. Apart from seeking to rectify economic imbalances, government procurement policies have also attempted to expedite technology transfers to local industries, enhance export capabilities and curb foreign Turn to next page
STATEMENTS
BY CHANDRA MUZAFFAR.................................P2
.THE BODHGAYA SACRILEGE
ARTICLES .EGYPT: WHAT NOW?
BY CHANDRA MUZAFFAR......................................P 3 .THE CONVICTION OF BRADLEY MANNING
BY BARRY GREY..................................................P 4 .BRITISH AID FOR MYANMAR ETHNIC CLEANSING
BY MAUNG ZARNI................................................P 6
. MODERATE “S HAMI ” I SLAM
W AHHABISM : S HIEKH MOHAMAD SAEED RAMADAN AL BOUTI FINALLY PAYS FOR HIS ANTI- SALAFISM STANCES BY SYRIA TRIBUNE...............................................P 9 VS
.COMMERCIAL COLONISATION OF AFRICA: THE NEW
WILD WEST (PART I) BY GRAHAM PEEBLES..........................................P 10
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exchange outflows. These are goals that do not conform to TPP objectives. The TPP also allows pharmaceutical corporations to increase the price of medicines and to limit consumer access to cheaper generic drugs. Monopoly patents would be better protected and the purchase of generic drugs would be made more difficult. At the same time, by designating a whole spectrum of policies, regulations and practices as “trade barriers” the proposed agreement undermines some of the people oriented measures associated with different TPP countries. For instance, the TPP, it is alleged, upbraids the Malaysian government for “requiring that slaughter plants maintain dedicated halal facilities and ensure segregated transportation for halal and non-halal products.”
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While some of the provisions of the TPP may be set aside at the behest of individual countries, it is obvious that the US which is the driving force behind the pact is determined to use it as its vehicle to strengthen its economic position in the Pacific region in the face of the rise of China. It explains why China itself — economically the most dynamic nation in the region — has not been invited to join the TPP. This is why it would be naïve to view the TPP as a mere economic and trade arrangement. Its underlying motive is clearly political. It is a critical weapon in the US arsenal for curbing and containing the emergence of a power which has the potential of shaping the future of the entire Pacific in the decades to come. The US will not allow this to happen.
L E A D A R T I C L E It knows that in order to remain as the world’s sole superpower it has to ensure that it is at the helm of that one region with the greatest economic viability and vitality. The US already has 320,000 troops in the Pacific region. That is the military arm of Pacific Power. The TPP is designed to secure the economic dimension of Pacific Power. As a nation committed to harmonious relations among states, Malaysia should be extra cautious about participating in any venture by any power, be it the United States or China, to enhance its hegemony over the Pacific — a region whose very name signifies peace. 6 July, 2013 Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the President of International Movement for a Just World (JUST).
STATEMENT THE BODHGAYA SACRILEGE
10 days after a series of blasts at the famous Bodhgaya temple complex in Bihar, India, the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has yet to come up with any lead on who was responsible for the dastardly deed. All that it has produced so far is a sketch of a person moving suspiciously in the area before the 7th July incident. Indian authorities should expedite investigations and nail down the culprit or culprits in the shortest possible time. As long as their identity is not known
and the motives for the heinous act are not established clearly, rumours and suspicions will continue to gain currency. They will poison relations between Buddhists and people of other faiths not only in India but also in other parts of the world.
drafted for this purpose. Though a number of prominent personalities such as Nobel Peace Laureates, Desmond Tutu and Mairead Maguire, and renowned faith based organisations from all major traditions, endorsed the Convention its impact was limited.
All places of worship should be protected and respected. This is why in 2002 the International Movement for a Just World (JUST) launched a worldwide campaign to protect all places of worship. A Convention was
As a place of worship and sacred site, the Bodhgaya temple that houses the holy bodhi tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment, and the massive Mahabodhi statue of the Buddha, has an exalted status in continued next page
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Buddhism. It is highly revered by Buddhists all over the world. UNESCO had named it as a World Heritage site in 2002. It is a shame that whenever the sanctity of a place of worship or a sacred site
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is violated, not many organisations or personalities from other religious backgrounds openly condemn the sacrilege. Most of the time, we appear to be concerned with only our own community and its symbols and institutions. This is an attitude that should change.
S T A T E M E N T To paraphrase the illustrious 13 th century Muslim poet-philosopher, Shaikh Saadi, it is only when we feel for the suffering of the other that we can call ourselves human. Chandra Muzaffar 17 July, 2013
ARTICLES EGYPT: WHAT NOW? By Chandra Muzaffar
whatever form. The 55 mainly Morsi supporters killed outside the Republican Guard Headquarters in Cairo at dawn on July 8th by military personnel is the sort of incident — if it recurs in the future — that will trigger mass, perhaps uncontrollable violence.
In the wake of the military coup of July 3rd 2013, the question that is on the lips of many people is what is going to happen now in Egypt? How will the situation evolve? What is the future of the 80 million people who live in that ancient land? It would be hazardous to try to predict the future, given the uncertainties that befuddle the present. There is however one possible scenario that one hopes will not be the fate of Egypt. Egypt should not become another Algeria. A military coup against the Islamic Salvation Front which had won the first round of a democratic election in 1991 in that country led eventually to an orgy of violence that lasted almost 10 years and left 100,000 people dead. To avoid such a horrendous catastrophe, the military should exercise maximum restraint in dealing with supporters of deposed President Morsi just as the protesters should refrain from resorting to violence in
If the situation does not descend into such violence, the current military backed leadership may be able to implement its road map: a referendum on amendments to the present Constitution, followed by a Parliamentary Election in about six months and then a Presidential Election. Apart from ensuring that the outcome of the referendum is in its favour, the military would be keen on gaining control of the legislature and installing its own candidate as President. For the military to achieve its post-coup political agenda there is a vital prerequisite. It has to deliver on the economy. If within the next six to nine months, it shows that it is capable of providing jobs, checking the cost of living, ensuring a regular supply of water and energy to various parts of Cairo, and meeting some of the demands for affordable housing, it would gain a degree of credibility and win the confidence of a segment of the citizenry. But even if there is some economic
improvement and a measure of political stability, it is quite conceivable that the fundamental challenges facing the Egyptian people will remain. Since the military will retain real power, any attempt at creating democratic structures of governance would be merely cosmetic. It will continue to protect its almost 40% stake in the Egyptian economy which in itself is an impediment to economic reform. At the same time, the military can also be expected to pursue the type of crony capitalism which characterised the Mubarak regime and which bred massive corruption. The military will remain as committed as ever to preserving, and perhaps even strengthening, its close ties to both Saudi Arabia and Israel. Indeed, it has been argued by some analysts that it was Morsi’s opposition to a dam project which Saudi Arabia and Israel favoured that was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. The project seeks to divert the waters of the Nile to Israel. A month before his ouster, Morsi had apparently declared that, “We have very serious measures to protect every drop of Nile water.” It is reported that the dam is now scheduled for completion in 2017. As critical as its relationship to these countries are the military’s deep ties continued next page
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with Washington. It is well-known that it receives an annual US aid package of 1.5 billion dollars. The US has merely suspended but not cancelled (which is what it should have done) its shipment of four F-16 fighter planes to the Egyptian military. In fact, by refusing to describe Morsi’s overthrow as a coup, the Obama Administration is sending a clear message to the postcoup leadership— whose pivotal figure, General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, is close to Washington and Riyadh— that it is on the side of the military, its longstanding, most trusted ally in Egypt. If this is the possible scenario in the event of a military backed leadership perching itself in power after elections next year, how would Morsi’s Ikhwanul-Muslimin, the Muslim Brotherhood, address domestic and external challenges on the off chance that it emerges victorious in the polls? The Ikhwan, there’s no need to emphasise, has to adopt a different approach, even display an altogether different mindset, if it is to transform Egyptian society. To start with, it has to be more strategic in dealing with the military. A
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head-on collision with the latter will not serve the interests of Ikhwan or the nation. Perhaps, the Ikhwan should take a leaf from the book of Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Erdogan, on how he succeeded to emasculate the powerful military over a decade.
securing an IMF loan and obtaining aid from wealthy neighbours such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia. It was not able to focus upon the implementation of its An-Nahda (Renaissance) economic programme, partly because of the political environment.
Part of the strategy should be a totally inclusive approach to politics and society. Inclusiveness does not merely mean offering important positions to liberal and left leaders which is what Morsi tried to do. It means listening and responding to all sections of society, and not just confining one’s interaction to Ikhwan’s constituency. Absorbing the values and attitudes of diverse elements in society would invariably demand that certain aspects of one’s dogma be set aside. It was partly because Morsi and the Freedom and Justice Party established by Ikhwan was not able to transcend dogma that they alienated segments of the female population and the artistic community.
There was also a great deal of inconsistency in Ikhwan’s foreign policy. On the one hand, it offered moral support to Hamas; on the other hand, it closed down an underground tunnel to Gaza presumably at the behest of Israel. Initially, Morsi sought to reach out to Iran. Shortly before his ouster, he ordered the closure of the Syrian Embassy in Cairo in a bid to please the sponsors of the Syrian rebels in the region such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey and their Western patrons. In both its foreign and domestic and policies, the Ikhwan appeared to lack a clear, coherent vision which could be translated into specific policies.
Perhaps it was also because of its attachment to dogma, that it failed to prioritise the economic woes of the people. Its emphasis was upon
If this is the situation vis-a-vis the military, on the one hand, and the Ikhwan, on the other, what hope is there for the Egyptian people? 22 July, 2013
THE CONVICTION OF BRADLEY MANNING: A TRAVESTY OF JUSTICE By Barry Grey
character of the entire trial.
The guilty verdict handed down Tuesday in the court-martial of whistleblower Bradley Manning is a travesty of justice. The judge, Col. Denise Lind, found the 25-year-old Army private guilty of 19 of the 21 counts lodged against him, including five counts under the 1917 Espionage Act. Manning faces a prison term of up to 136 years in the sentencing phase of the trial that begins today at Fort Meade, Maryland. Manning‘s acquittal on the charge of “aiding the enemy,” which carries a
potential death sentence, reflects the awareness of the military and the Obama administration of the broad popular opposition to the proceedings against the young soldier. At the same time, it underscores the fraudulent
The prosecution denounced Manning as a “traitor” and charged him with aiding Al Qaeda and carrying out espionage even though there were no allegations that he handed over information to any foreign government or terrorist organization. Instead, in a sinister and unprecedented attempt to make the revealing of government secrets potentially a capital crime and undermine First Amendment guarantees of speech and press freedom, the government argued that any leaking of continued next page
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classified information constituted espionage because the information could be accessed by those deemed to be enemies. As the government well knows, the “enemy” for whose benefit Manning courageously exposed proof of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, was the American people.
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It is largely because of the cowardice of the official media and its complicity in covering up government lies and crimes that individuals such as Manning and National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden have been compelled to sacrifice their freedom and jeopardize their lives to get the truth out to the public.
The US ruling elite was all the more frightened that the broad opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was finding expression among a section of rank-and-file soldiers. The response of the Obama administration was to imprison Manning for more than three years before any charges were laid, keeping him for much of that period in solitary confinement and subjecting him to cruel and abusive conditions that were condemned by human rights organizations around the world as tantamount to torture. The trial itself was a legal farce. It was a show trial aimed at intimidating popular opposition to the wars and further subordinating an already cowed press.
waging of wars of aggression. The Obama administration is guilty of this crime not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in Libya and Syria, and it is preparing further and even bloodier wars against regimes deemed to be obstacles to the geostrategic and financial interests of the American ruling class, including Iran and China. In April of 2011, while Manning was languishing in prison, Obama said of the Army private: “We are a nation of laws. We don’t let individuals make decisions about how the law operates. He broke the law.”
Manning’s conviction, particularly on espionage charges, establishes a reactionary precedent that will be used against whistle-blowers and journalists in the future. Of all the revelations made by WikiLeaks on the basis of material supplied by Manning, the one that most infuriated Obama and the military was the video posted on YouTube in April 2010 showing the wanton and coldblooded killing of unarmed civilians and reporters in Baghdad by an American helicopter gunship. That incident graphically summed up the criminal nature of the war.
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Manning’s court-martial, in the final analysis, arises from Washington’s launching of an illegal war of aggression against Iraq and the attempt of the government to conceal all of the crimes—torture at Abu Ghraib and other US prisons, the destruction of Fallujah and other Iraqi cities, the incitement of a sectarian civil war— that arose from that war. Because the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were criminal enterprises, based on lies, none of the allegations against Manning, who sought to expose the criminal character of those wars, has any legal or moral substance. Under the principles established by the Nuremberg Tribunal, which tried and convicted Nazi leaders after World War II, it should be Obama and other top US civilian and military leaders who are standing in the dock, rather than Manning. The chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, insisted that the central crime committed by the defendants, and the source of all other crimes, was the preparation and
Not only did this statement from the chief executive make a mockery of any claim to due process in the Manning case, it came from a president who has been caught shredding the US Constitution and the democratic rights guaranteed in its Bill of Rights. It is well known that Obama is presiding over a massive and illegal spying operation against the American people and millions more around the world, that he oversees a program of drone assassinations, including of American citizens, and sanctions the use of forcefeeding and other forms of torture against detainees at Guantanamo and other US gulags. The American president is engaged in the erection of the framework of a police state within the United States. The vindictive prosecution of Bradley Manning and the international with-hunt against Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange are bound up with the preparations for repression on a mass scale against social and political opposition. 31 July, 2013 Barry Grey is a regular contributor to World Socialist Web Site. Source: wsws.org
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BRITISH AID FOR MYANMAR ETHNIC CLEANSING By Maung Zarni Islamophobic “Buddhist” society such as the present-day Myanmar, there is only a short jump between the deliberate act of mis-classifying the Rohingya as “illegal Bengali” or “Bengalis” and being dehumanized as “viruses”, “ogres” or the local language equivalent of “niggers”. The next stage is mass violence with state impunity against a given dehumanized community.
Britain, the largest donor country and former colonizer of Myanmar, is effectively aiding and abetting the unfolding “ethnic cleansing” of Muslim Rohingya by helping to finance the country’s controversial 2014 national census. Ex-general and head of Myanmar’s quasi-civilian government Thein Sein made an official visit to Britain this week, during which his hosts announced a new 30 million-pound (US$45.6 million) development assistance package and resumption of arms sales. One third of that amount is earmarked to bankroll the former colony’s census, “which is essential to make sure support is getting to those who need it more”, according to an official British government statement. Because Thein Sein’s government is forcing the Rohingya people to register as “Bengali”, a continuation of a decades-old policy of stripping the Rohingya of both their citizenship and ethnic identity, Britain’s financial support for this process is troubling. The coming census will no doubt be used to reinforce this racist policy and practice of forcibly registering the selfreferenced Rohingya and erasing the fact that the Rohingya as an ethnic nationality group ever existed in Myanmar. During a question and answer session following his beautifully written, liberal sounding speech at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, or Chatham House, Thein Sein was emphatic about his government’s policy towards the estimated 800,000 to one million Rohingya whose cultural, economic and historical roots can be found on both sides of the once East Bengal and former Arakan State.
He stated that “to use the term Rohingya, in our ethnic history we do not have the term Rohingya”. This official denial and the racist policies that perpetuate the marginalization of the Rohingya is tantamount to ethnocide, a blatant erasure of a verifiable fact that a distinct ethnic community, with all its typical sociological fluidity, exists in Myanmar. Gregory Stanton of George Mason University, who is president of Genocide Watch and a world renowned scholar in genocide studies, sees in Myanmar ’s mistreatment of the Rohingya a Nazi-like “us versus them” classification in which the dominant group and its political state dish out discrimination, mistreatment and eventually “final solutions”. In his influential essay entitled “The Eight Stages of Genocide”, Stanton writes: “We treat different categories of people differently. Racial and ethnic classifications may be defined by absurdly detailed laws - the Nazi Nuremberg laws, the “one (African blood) drop” laws of segregation in America, or apartheid racial classification laws in South Africa.” Classification is universal across all cultures and political systems. However, when it is carried out in a militaristic state with a deeply
That is precisely what has happened to the Rohingyas of western Myanmar since 1978. In February that year, the Burma Socialist Programme Party-led government, a one-party, one-man dictatorship under General Ne Win, launched the country’s first large-scale ethnic cleansing operation. Known as the Na-Ga-Min, or King of the Snakes, operation, inter-ministerial and interagency units from police, customs, immigration, army, navy, intelligence, civil administration and the home ministry’s religious affairs department were mobilized against the Rohingya. Even the government’s conservative estimate put the number of Rohingya who fled to neighboring, newly independent Bangladesh at 150,000; other independent sources put the figure much higher. Since then the Rohingya have been living in security grids where virtually every aspect of their lives is severely restricted and monitored as a matter of policy. A cursory glance at doctor-patient ratios, adult illiteracy and mortality rates among children under five speaks volume about the policy-induced dire conditions under which the Rohingya are forced to live. The doctor-patient ratio for the Rohingya in northern Rakhine State is 1:83,000, adult illiteracy is over 90%, and the mortality rate for under-five children is twice as continued next page
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high as Myanmar’s already very high national average. No longer able to endure decades of myriad forms of sexual violence, summary execution, forced labor, extortions, and other means of abuse, many Rohingya families - including women, children and the elderly - have attempted to flee the country, willingly risking their lives in rickety boats on the Andaman Sea and facing an uncertain future as stateless people in countries as varied as Canada, Australia, Thailand, Malaysia and neighboring Bangladesh. Unconscionable policy Ethnocide may sound like esoteric academic jargon but its consequences are grave and of growing international concern. A policy of ethnocide sets the ideological and social-psychological stage for an otherwise peaceful people to carry out unspeakable and unconscionable atrocities against those whom they have been trained to consider an existential threat. The military-controlled state in Myanmar - now headed by ex-general Thein Sein and his quasi-civilian government in Naypyidaw - has both paved the way for and carried out ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. Ethnocide of the Rohingya has empowered the racist, ultra-nationalists among the local Buddhist Rakhine, national leaders and Buddhist society at large to dehumanize the Rohingya. The fact that Thein Sein felt comfortable enough to repeat his government’s ethnocidal stance on the Rohingya at the prestigious Chatham House should ring alarm bells among the British public. His speech spoke volumes about the extent to which Myanmar’s former colonial master has become officially complicit in the
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atrocities against the Rohingya, London’s expressed “human rights concerns” notwithstanding.
are far more convincing and far closer to Arakan’s historical realities than is Thein Sein’s dubious explanation.
Apparently designed to hit Britain’s subliminal colonial guilt, Thein Sein framed the Rohingya as a problem which the former British colony inherited from the Raj upon achieving independence in 1948. In Thein Sein’s words: “During the colonial administration there was a migration of economic migrants from other countries into the Rakhine State (formerly known as Arakan) to work on the lands... So they grew their crops and then they did the harvest and then they went back home. But later on they decided to settle in the region. During the colonial administration there were 50,000 Muslims in that region... Now we have 800,000 Muslim population in the region. That of course caused a lot of tension.”
In a public seminar on the Rohingya held at Columbia University in September last year, Amartya Sen, the world renowned Bengali philosopher and economist and Harvard University professor, perceptively observed: “The Rohingya did not come to Burma. But Burma came to the Rohingya.”
Colonial-era statistics have proven more often than not unreliable and the racial conceptualizations and classifications on which these demographic data rest were often full of racist and pseudo-scientific methodologies that were part and parcel of colonial rule. In 1824, the year of the British annexation of the Arakan, itself a pre-British feudal colony that was depopulated by both Buddhists and Muslims by repressive military conquest, around one-third of the population of Arakan was Muslim, according to colonial records. Today, out of the estimated three million who live in Rakhine State, around a third are Muslim. This is hardly a demographic threat to the local Rakhines and certainly not a national threat to the predominantly Buddhist country of 50-plus million people. Beyond the numbers’ games, there are other people-centered - as opposed to nation state-centric - perspectives that
Like other borderland ethno-cultural communities, the Rohingya as a people can be found on both sides of the borders of modern nation states, namely the former Burma, which since 1989 has been known as Myanmar, and former East Pakistan, which since 1971 has been known as Bangladesh. The boundaries of once boundary-less feudal kingdoms, many characterized by fluctuating territorial control and administrative powers, were abruptly locked and divided into post-colonial nation states. In fact, there is nothing strange or persecution-worthy about numerous ethno-cultural and linguistic communities being split and scattered across these manufactured borders as nation states emerged out of wars, conflicts and other processes of exploitation. Even in the case of Myanmar, there are other groups such as the Chin, Kachin, Karenni, Mon, Shan, Tai, and, yes, even the Buddhist Rakhine, who also belong to different neighboring nation states. Notably, none of these communities are facing ethnocide or genocide by Thailand, Laos, Bangladesh, India or China. Twisted history The truth is that the Rohingya were not always denied their existence by the Myanmar state. In contrast to Thein Sein’s ethnocidal perspective, and in spite of the contemporary debates as continued next page
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continued from page 7 to whether the Rohingya are historical or ancestral “children of the land”, four successive Myanmar governments the parliamentary democracy government of prime minister U Nu (1948-58), the caretaker government of General Ne Win (1958-60), the Union Government of premier U Nu (1960-62) and General Ne Win’s early military government, namely the Revolutionary Council (1962-74) - had all officially recognized the Rohingya as a distinct ethno-cultural community.
The Rohingya had their own national ethnic language program based at the state’s sole national broadcasting service (Burma Broadcasting Service, or BBS) alongside other national ethnic language programs such as Shan, Lahu, Bama and others. The official social studies textbooks described them as Myanmar ’s Rohingya ethnic nationality and placed them on the ethnic map of the country. The household lists and national identification cards bore the word “Rohingya” for those who selfidentified as such. All cabinet offices of these aforementioned governments used the word “Rohingya” in their official dispatches and records, while senior military generals in the ministry of defense addressed the Rohingya community and its religious leaders as ‘esteemed Rohingya leaders’ in the former’s public remarks and speeches. The government’s official Burmese Encyclopedia (published in 1964, two years after the military government came to power) had a specific section on the Rohingyas of northern districts of the country. Since the first genocidal operation against the Rohingya in February 1978, successive military leaderships have been relentless in their drive to cleanse western Myanmar of the ethnic group whom they now derisively and officially
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insist on calling “Bengali” - both from state discourse and from the land. Ethnocide began under Ne Win’s whimsical dictatorship, which was steeped in nationalist and anti-colonial ideologies that justified draconian policies towards the Rohingya. As a result, Myanmar now has an apartheid system for the Rohingya, who have survived various waves of ethnic cleansing since 1978. Instead of confronting Thein Sein over his past and present role in the ethnocide and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, the British government instead gave 10 million pounds for his government’s 2014 census, a project that will almost surely drive the final nail into the coffin of the Rohingyas’ existence in Myanmar. This also puts Britain’s plan to involve the British Ministry of Defense in training Myanmar’s armed forces in the areas of human rights and civil-military relations in a new light. For while British officials talk of human rights and accountability in military classrooms, they will simultaneously be financing a census that will be used to facilitate ethnic cleansing with British tax-payers’ money. For those familiar with Britain’s international trajectory, its decision to help fund Myanmar ’s ethnocidal census, which in turn will be technically assisted by the United Nations Population Fund, should not come as a surprise. Nor should the British government’s decision to reward Thein Sein with the export of made-in-UK arms worth $5 million. Foreign Office spin-masters will, one can be sure, soon be justifying this questionable arms deal as one to help end the country’s ethnic conflicts. On July 19, 1947, made-in-England bullets killed independence hero Aung San and a group of the country’s co-
A R T I C L E S founders in a British-assisted but locally carried out assassination. Aung San, a staunch anti-imperialist nationalist, was then seen as an obstacle to the unfettered pursuit of Britain’s post-colonial, post-World War II commercial and strategic interests in Myanmar. Sixty years on, the resumption of export of made-in-UK arms to Thein Sein’s military-backed, genocidal regime sends an ominous signal to those ethnic and religious minorities who may not be as open to British official and corporate interests as the ethnic Burman military generals and their cronies. In pursuit of its own hidden and notso-hidden strategic and corporate interests, Britain is simply repeating the old colonial policy of ethnic divide and exploit. In the days of the British Raj of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the British pursued their imperialist aims and interests through the use of the country’s non-Buddhist ethnic minorities along the country’s borderlands, then referred to as the “frontier peoples”. In 2013, Britain’s new design in Myanmar is about pursuing British interests through the dominant “Buddhist” generals and their repressive state while looking the other way when their colonial era ethnic instruments, namely the frontier or borderland ethnic peoples of the Rohingya, Karen, Kachin, and others are being further marginalized, militarily overwhelmed or ethnically cleansed. 19 July, 2013 Muang Zarni is a Burmese dissident blogger and a Visiting Fellow at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit at the London School of Economics. Source: www.atimes.org
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MODERATE “SHAMI” ISLAM VS WAHHABISM: SHIEKH MOHAMAD SAEED RAMADAN AL BOUTI FINALLY PAYS FOR HIS ANTI- SALAFISM STANCES By Syria Tribune
Damascus Islamic scholars at that time did not agree with his extreme views, and they kept confronting him till he died in jail.
The suicide explosion that took the life of Sheikh Mohamad Saeed Ramadan Al Bouti among 42 others in Damascus yesterday (21 March 2013) is not a Syrian crisis incident. This event commemorates a struggle that has been going for the past 35 years for Al Bouti in person and the past one and a half millennia for Islam itself. A research long overdue, much like the explosion itself Before I start this short journey in ancient and recent Islamic history, I would like to emphasize that I am a secular researcher. I spent 7 years in Sudan under the rule of the Islamic Front (now called the National Congress of Sudan). The Sudanese Islamic Front is one of the different faces of political Islam that conquered the Arab World during the second half of the 20th Century. The mother of all these political Islam movements is the one and only Muslim Brotherhood, who ruled of Egypt explicitly until recently, and a few other countries under different names. This research is long overdue; specially from a person who considers himself an expert in Islamic movements in the Middle East and North Africa. The bloody events in Damascus yesterday pushed me to write this article, but this is just step one in a series of articles on this important issue. As for the explosion in Damascus yesterday, it is also long overdue. Al Bouti has been the sworn enemy of Salafism and Muslim Brotherhood militia since the early 80s of the past century. Read on to know why. Historical roots The term Salafism appeared for the first
time in the 13th century in the teachings of the controversial Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyyah. Ibn Taymiyyah called upon Muslims to go back to the way their great ancestors (in Arabic: Al Salaf Al Saleh, hence the term Salafism) used to understand Islam. What he wanted was to rid Islam of what he called foreign influence on Islam, which was the natural order of history, given the interaction between Muslims and the wide variety of cultures in areas conquered by the Islamic state. Ibn Taymiyyah is the God Father of the concept of Islamic Sharia rule, and the most prominent scholar whose teachings influenced political Islam movements. In the 18th century, Mohamad bin Abd Al Wahhab, the creator of modern Salafism, Wahhabism (after him), restructured Salafism in light of modern life, and established what will later be the ruling doctrine for all political Islam movements. The turning point in Wahhabism was the alliance with Ibn Saud, the founder of the Saudi dynasty still ruling the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia until today. Meanwhile in Damascus Damascus has always been a melting pot where various cultures and doctrines mixed to form a unique damascene form of Islam. It is worth mentioning that Ibn Taymiyyah was jailed several times in Damascus.
The damascene version of Islam was closely linked to Sufism, a mystical method that focuses on the spiritual aspects of the religion rather than the political ones. Damascus still has the tomb of Mohey El Din Ibn Arabi, one of the most prominent Sufi scholars in history, and the founder of the Akbari Sufi method. Unlike Ibn Taymiyyah and Abdul Wahhab, Ibn Arabi was a philosopher and researcher, not a salafi follower. Damascus is also linked to the Ashaari method, a follower of which is Ibn Rushd, one of the most prominent philosophers in the history of humankind. So damascene or “Shami” Islam is historically different of that of Salafism and Wahhabism. This could help the reader understand the conflict between Al Bouti and Salafi scholars. Al Bouti was not happy about the Muslim Brotherhood influence on the International Union of Muslim Scholars, headed by Aljazeera’s spokesperson, Sheikh Yusuf Al Qaradawi, so he established the Union of Sham Land Scholars. Al Bouti vs the Muslim Brotherhood In the late 70s and early 80s of the past century, the Muslim Brotherhood attempted toppling the Baath regime and late President Hafiz Al Assad. As confessed by their leader Riyad Al Shakfeh on the BBC, they used terrorism in their attempt. They were also backed by regional and continued next page
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international powers, from Saddam Hussein to the BBC itself back then. They used the media to portray the events as a peaceful uprising (much like 2011), and a recently released CIA document revealed that the numbers of causalities in those events was extremely exaggerated. Mohamad Saeed Ramadan Al Bouti, back then a young Muslim scholar, took the other side. The Brotherhood accused Al Bouti of taking the side of the regime for beneficial purposes, but he explained several times that the disagreement with the Brotherhood was on the doctrine itself, not on politics. Since then. Al Bouti became the icon of Shami Islam. He was given all the support by the Syrian regime to spread his version of moderate and fraternal Islam, to the extent that he used to appear on the national TV confronting secular researchers, like the televised debate with Dr. Tayeb Tizini in 1990. He also engaged in several debates with secular Syrian researcher Nabeel Fayyad. Those debates took the form of a book for a book, where Fayyad would write a book
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criticizing Islam, give it to Al Bouti in person, then Al Bouti would write a book in answer to that book*. Therefore, Al Bouti was an example of a moderate scholar, who accepted criticism, and answered discussion with more discussion. He is known for never calling anyone infidel, and never claiming the right to judge people’s rights of life and freedom. This does not go well with the Salafi doctrine that calls for purification of Muslim society by getting rid of all infidels. Infidels here referring not only to non-Muslims, but also to any who disagrees with Salafism. The Syrian “Revolution”: A movement supported by Salafi scholars Since the events started in Syria, Salafi scholars played an important role in calling for people to revolt. They played on the sectarian string, and incited people to support the “revolution” with money and weapons. The most important Salafi roles came from Al Qaradawi, who has a carte blanche on Aljazeera, and a Syrian Shiekh named Adnan Al Arour. Both A Qaradawi and Al Arour attacked Al Bouti several times.
A R T I C L E S On March 21st, coinciding with Nowruz day, a national Kurdish holiday, Sheikh Mohamad Saeed Ramadan Al Bouti (of Kurdish origin) was assassinated in his mosque, with 42 of his students. His death was celebrated by many revolutionary pages Moreover, They are now threatening Al Bouti’s son, Tawfeek. To us in Syria Tribune, this is not an incident related to the Syrian crisis only. This commemorates a long struggle between Al Bouti and the Wahhabi scholars, and between the damascene version of moderate Islam and extremism. * Fayyad wrote his book “Hiwarat” (Dialogues) in answer to Al Bouti’s book “Hazihi Moshkilatohom” (These are Their Problems). On his Facebook page, Fayyad testified that he took the book to Al Bouti before publishing it, but Al Bouti refused to read it before it was published, so it would not look like censorship. 22 March, 2013 Source: www.syria-tribune.com
COMMERCIAL COLONISATION OF AFRICA: THE NEW WILD WEST (PART I) By Graham Peebles rhetoric, remains more or less the same.
Dancing to the tune of their corporate benefactors, governments of the ruling G8 countries are enacting complex agriculture agreements delivering large tracts of prime cut African soil into the portfolios of their multinational bedmates. Desperate for foreign investment, countries throughout Africa are at the mercy of their new colonial masters – national and international agrochemical corporations, fighting for land, water and control of the world’s food supplies. Driven overwhelmingly by
self-interest and profit, the current crop of ‘investors’ differ little from their colonial ancestors. The means may have changed, but the aim – to rape and pillage, no matter the sincere sounding
Regarded by her northern guides as agriculturally underperforming, SubSaharan Africa is seen as The African Centre for Biosafety (ACB), as a “new frontier”, a place to “make profits, with an eye on land, food and biofuels in particular”. Africa, then, is the new Wild West; smallholder farmers and indigenous people are the natives Indians, the multi nationals and their democratically elected representatives
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continued from page 10 – or salesmen - the settlers. Various initiatives offering what is, indisputably much needed ‘support and investment’ are flowing north to south. Key amongst these is The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa (NAFSNA), designed by the governments of the eight richest economies, for some of the poorest countries in the world. The New Alliance was born out of the G8 summit in May 2012 at Camp David and, according to, War on Want (WoW), “has been modelled on the ‘new vision’ of private investment in agriculture developed by management consultants McKinsey in conjunction with the ABCD group of leading grain traders (ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus) and other multinational agribusiness companies.” It has been written in honourable terms to sit comfortably within the Africa Union’s Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Programme (CAADP), bestowing an aura of international credibility. The New Alliance… in land and seed appropriation At first glance, The New Alliance, with its altruistically-gilded aims, appears to be a worthy development. Who amongst us could argue with the intention as reported by the United Nations (UN), to “achieve sustained and inclusive agricultural growth and raise 50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years”. The means to achieving this noble quest however, are skewed, ignoring the rights and needs of small-holder farmers and the wishes of local people – who are not consulted during the heady negotiations with government officials local and national, and the multi zillion $ corporations who are swarming to buy their ancestral land. Alliance contracts and deals-done favour wealthy investors, revealing the
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underlying, unjust G8 initiatives objective, to “open up African agriculture to multinational agribusiness companies by means of national ‘cooperation frameworks’ between African governments, donors and private sector investors”.
of which were “ignored in the agreements with the G8”, deals “between African governments and private companies were facilitated by the World Economic Forum”, behind, The Guardian reportS, “firmly closed doors.”
Poverty reduction (the principal stated aim of the Alliance), will be achieved we are told, not by rational methods of sharing and re-distribution, but by USAID “aligning the commitments of Africa’s leadership to drive effective country plans and policies for food security”. ‘Plans and policies’, drafted no doubt in the hallowed meeting rooms of those driving the ‘New Alliance’: the G8 governments and their cohorts including The World Bank and, pulling the policy strings, the agriculture companies sitting behind them, nestling alongside the pharmaceutical giants and the arms industry magnates. With African governments anxious to eat at the head table, or at least be invited into the cocktail chamber they have little choice but to sign up to such unbalanced ‘plans and policies’.
Conditional to investment promised by The New Alliance, African leaders, USAID tell us are ‘committed’ – ‘forced’ may be a better word - “to refine [government] policies in order to improve investment opportunities”. In plain English, African countries are required to change their trade and agriculture laws to include ending the free distribution of seeds, relax the tax system and national export controls and open the doors for profit repatriation (allowing the money as well as the crops to be exported). In Mozambique, as elsewhere across the continent, local farmers have been evicted from their land under land sales agreements, and The Guardian (10/06/2013) reports, “is now obliged to write new laws promoting what its agreement calls “partnerships” of this kind”. A polluted term, disguising the real relationship between African governments and the multi-national ‘investors’, which is closer to master and maid than equal collaborators.
To date, nine African countries (from a continent of 54 nation states), have committed to The New Alliance. First to sign up were, Tanzania, Ghana and the West’s favoured ally in the region, Ethiopia – where wide ranging human rights violations, including forced displacement and rapes have reportedly accompanied land sales, and where over 250,000 people in Gambella have been forced into the Orwellian sounding ‘Villagization Programmes’. Then came Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Cote d’Ivoire, followed by Benin, Malawi, and Nigeria. It is an agreement dripping with strings that promise to entangle the innocent and uninformed. After “wide-ranging consultations on land and farming”, with officials from potential partner countries, the results
27 June, 2013 Part II of this article will be published in the September 2013 issue of the JUST Commentary. Graham Peebles is Director of The Create Trust, www.thecreatetrust.org, A UK registered charity. Running education and social development programmes, supporting fundamental Social change and the human rights of individuals in acute need. Source: countercurrents.org
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