(This July 2 story removes incorrect reference to “Yangon government” in paragraph three. Yangon is not the capital.)
A stranded boat which was used by Rohingya Muslims is seen at the Thande village beach outside Yangon, Myanmar November 16, 2018. REUTERS/Myat Thu Kyaw
GENEVA (Reuters) - Myanmar security forces and insurgents are committing human rights violations against civilians in restive western states that may amount to fresh war crimes, a United Nations investigator said on Tuesday.
A 2017 military crackdown drove more than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee to Bangladesh. U.N. investigators have said that Myanmar’s operation included mass killings, gang rapes and widespread arson and was executed with “genocidal intent”.
THE CHRISTIAN POST
By Samuel Smith,
CP Reporter June 22, 2019
A woman walks among debris after fire destroyed shelters at a camp for internally displaced Rohingya Muslims in the western Rakhine State near Sittwe, Myanmar, on May 3, 2016. | (Photo: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun/Files)
The U.S. State Department released its annual report on international religious freedom on Friday and announced that it will strengthen its office that oversees international religious freedom issues.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave a brief address at a press conference unveiling the report, which serves as a “report card” tracking countries’ progress on religious freedom in 2018.
Pompeo called out countries such as Iran, Russia, Myanmar, and China for their abuses of religious freedom and praised positive steps taken in nations such as Uzbekistan and Pakistan.
“Unfortunately, [2018] was far from perfect,” Pompeo said. “As in previous years, our report exposes a chilling array of abuses committed by oppressive regimes, violent extremist groups, and individual citizens. For all those who run roughshod over religious freedom, I’ll just say this: the United States is watching and you will be held to account.”
“History will not be silent about these abuses,” he added. “But only voices of liberty like ours record it.”
The report is compiled by the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, which is led by Ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback.
The position was created under the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. Religious Freedom activists have long called for the office to be strengthened when it comes to its influence on U.S. foreign policy.
Pompeo announced at the press briefing that he is elevating the Office of International Religious Freedom and Office of the Special Envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism within the State Department.
“Effectively immediately, each of these two offices will report directly to the undersecretary for civilian, security, democracy and human rights,” he explained. “Sam Brownback, the ambassador-at-large for religious freedom, will continue to report directly to me.”
Pompeo added that the reorganization will provide each of those offices with additional staff and resources.
“It will empower them to carry out their important mandates,” he assured.
Speaking about the report, Pompeo noted the progress made by Uzbekistan, which last year was removed from the State Department’s list of “countries of particular concern” for international religious freedom violations, a designation that carries with it the possibility of sanctions.
“For the first time in 13 years, [Uzbekistan] is no longer designated a CPC,” Pompeo said. “This past year, the government released a religious freedom roadmap. Fifteen-hundred religious prisoners have been freed and 16,000 people that were blacklisted for their religious affiliation are now allowed to travel.”
Pompeo also praised Pakistan, which was designated a CPC last year, for the fact that Catholic mother Asia Bibi was acquited by the Pakistan Supreme Court and released from death row after spending about a decade in prison on blasphemy charges.
Pompeo was critical of Iran, which continues to crack down on Baha'is, Christian, and other religious minorities.
Brownback, a former governor of Kansas and U.S. senator, told reporters that Iran “continues to show a blatant disregard for protecting individuals' religious freedom.”
“Iranian religious minorities including Bahaiis, Christians, Jews, Zoarastains, Sunni and Sufi Muslims faced discrimination, harassment, and unjust imprisonment because of their beliefs,” Brownback said. “Their religious books are banned. They are denied access to education and their cemeteries are desecrated.”
“Last year, the Iranian regime violently cracked down on a peaceful protest of Sufi dervishes … in what Human Rights Watch called one of the largest crackdowns on a religious minority in Iran in a decade,” he added.
This year’s report includes a special section on China’s detention of at least 800,000 to possibly over 2 million Uighur Muslims, ethnic Kazakhs, and members of other Muslims groups in the Xinjiang province.
Brownback declared that the detention camps these prisoners are held in are “designed to strip away the culture, identity, and faith of these religious communities.”
“We share reports that others make that Chinese authorities have subjected prisoners of conscience, including Fulan Gong, Uighurs, Tibetan Buddhists, and underground Christians to forcible organ harvesting,” Brownback added. “This should shock everyone’s consciences.”
Brownback has been vocal about his disgust with the Communist Party of China’s disregard for religious freedom, calling it a “war on faith.” Pompeo contended that “the party demands that it alone be called God.”
Brownback said that while religious persecution in China in the past has been more regional, it has become more of a national policy for the Communist Party, leading to increased repression of Christians, the shutting down of churches and the arresting of religious adherents.
“To this, we say to China, you will not win your war on faith,” Brownback declared. “This will have consequences on your standing at home and around the world.”
Brownback also criticized the government in the central American nation of Nicaragua.
“Religious leaders report constant surveillance, intimidation, and threats,” he said. “The national police assault priests in full daylight, revealing the government’s contempt for religious leaders they deem as a threat to their authority.”
In Myanmar, where hundreds of thousands of predominantly Muslim Rohingya have been driven from their homes into neighboring Bangladesh by the military, Brownback assured that more needs to be done to ensure that these Muslim communities are able to return to their homes. “We haven’t seen positive action,” he said. “We do support what the U.N. is doing in Burma in dealing with the Rohingya. The world community has to continue to take note of this and see what it is going to take to get something positive in place.”
Brownback explained that he has worked often with Pakistan in the past. He expressed hope that there will be more progress with the Asian nation on the issue of religious freedom.
In addition to being designated a CPC last year, Pakistan is also ranked by Open Doors USA as the fifth worst nation in the world when it comes to Christian persecution.
Although Pompeo praised Asia Bibi’s release from her blasphemy charge, he emphasized that there are over 40 others who remain jailed for life or face execution on that same charge.
“We hope to get into some key negotiations with Pakistan that will move them forward on protecting their religious minorities,” Brownback said. “We have a keen eye focus on them to help them get off [the CPC list]. But they are going to have to take action themselves.”
Brownback also vowed to continue raising the religious freedom issue with Saudi Arabia, a key trade partner for the U.S. In April, Saudia Arabia executed over 30 Shia Muslims who were convicted of terror and espionage charges through “unfair trials.” According to Human Rights Watch, the mass execution was the largest since January 2016.
“I think there was a lot of hope at first with the change in leadership that things would open up substantially,” Brownback said. “We see actions take place in a positive direction. But they continue to be one of the worst actors in the world on religious persecution.”
Pompeo then criticized Russia over its treatment of Jehovah's Witnesses.
“Jehovah's Witnesses were absurdly branded as terrorists, as authorities confiscated their property and threatened their families,” he said.
The 2019 report’s release precedes the State Department’s second-annual Ministerial on International Religious Freedom, which will be held in July at the State Department's office in Foggy Bottom.
Over 1,000 representatives, activists and religious leaders from across the globe will gather for the three-day event. Brownback declared that this year’s ministerial will be “bigger, broader, and better” than last year’s inaugural ministerial.
“It was truly a show of unity,” Pompeo said. “People of all faiths standing up for the most basic of all human rights.”
Last year’s ministerial inspired similar events to be hosted in Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates.
In Washington, D.C., Brownback said that the International Religious Freedom’s office has increased its engagement with the NGO community and expanded its religious freedom roundtable held every Tuesday on Capitol Hill.“We have supported religious freedom roundtables starting up in other countries around the world,” he said. “A grassroots movement for religious freedom is beginning to take hold around the world."
Exclusive: ‘Serious errors’ found in agencies’ approach to Rohingya crisis in Rakhine
A displaced Rohingya woman and her children at a temporary camp in Rakhine state in December 2018.
Photograph: Nyunt Win/EPA
A damning report by the UN on its own conduct in Myanmar has condemned the organisation’s “obviously dysfunctional performance” over the past decade and concluded there was a systemic failure.
The report, seen by the Guardian before publication, was commissioned by the secretary general, António Guterres, after accusations that the UN system ignored warning signs of escalating violence before an alleged genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority.
Rohingya refugee girls cross a makeshift bamboo bridge at Kutupalong
refugee camp, where they have been living amid uncertainty over their
future after they fled Myanmar to escape violence a year ago, in
Bangladesh on Tuesday, August 28, 2018.
The Rohingya Muslims have faced persecution in Myanmar for decades. And yet no violence in their recent history has compared to that which the Myanmar military inflicted in August 2017. After militants from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army attacked police and army posts in northwestern Rakhine State on August 25, the military responded by killing thousands of Rohingya civilians, raping hundreds of Rohingya women and girls, and burning entire villages to the ground. In the course of a little more than three months, more than 700,000 Rohingya were forced to flee for their lives to Bangladesh. Myanmar authorities claimed they had conducted a “clearance operation” to rid the country of militants. In reality, they were fulfilling a long-standing dream of Myanmar’s Buddhist nationalists: the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims.
New abuses come after government order to “crush” armed group
Military units responsible for past atrocities are committing war
crimes, while deployment of additional units suggests involvement of
senior generals
International community is failing – ICC referral urgently needed
Following a recent investigation in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, Amnesty International has gathered new evidence that the Myanmar military is committing war crimes and other human rights violations. The military operation is ongoing, raising the prospect of additional crimes being committed.
The Kutupalong-Balukhali refugee camp in Bangladesh, more widely known by the anglicised name of its nearest town, Cox’s Bazar, is currently the world’s largest refugee camp. It is thought that over 1 million Rohingya Muslims currently live there, having fled persecution in their native state of Rakhine in Myanmar. Alongside all the well-documented sanitary and hygiene challenges faced by all such densely packed temporary settlements, Cox’s Bazar has the added misfortune of facing its own unique environmental problems. A large portion of the camp lies on previously forested land, which has been cut down in order to build dwellings as the camp has grown. This land is also considerably hilly but is lacking in any rock foundations. As Atiq Rahman, the executive director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS) has said, “In Bangladesh these are not rocky hills, they are soft soil hills.
Aljazeera
12 May 2019 Bangladesh police rescue 23 teenagers from being flown to Malaysia and arrest four human traffickers in a raid in Dhaka.
Concern is increasing about the number of young women being smuggled
across borders to marry Rohingya men abroad [Kaan Bozdogan/Anadolu]
At least 23 teenage Rohingya girls have been rescued after being brought from refugee camps to the capital, Dhaka, to be sent to Malaysia by air, Bangladesh police said on Sunday.
Dhaka police also arrested four human traffickers including a Rohingya couple and recovered more than 50 Bangladeshi passports from them on Saturday.
Company that breaches cellphones says it stopped service to country’s military rulers, but not before two Reuters reporters jailed.
Reuters journalists Kyaw Soe Oo, left, and Wa Lone, are handcuffed as
they are escorted by police out of the court Monday, Sept. 3, 2018, in
Yangon, Myanmar after being sentenced to seven years in prison. (AP
/Thein Zaw)
The military-backed government of Myanmar used Israeli technology to gather evidence that led to the jailing of two Reuters journalists, according to report on Sunday. Police in Myanmar used Petah Tikva-based Cellebrite’s products to breach the journalists’ mobile phones, leading to the imprisonment of Pulitzer Prize-winners Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were sentenced to seven years in prison for violating state secrecy laws, the Washington Post reported.
WASHINGTON -- Despite decades of efforts to combat it, religious persecution continues to be a widespread problem, according to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
In its annual report, released Monday, the independent, bipartisan agency accused 16 nations of engaging in or tolerating "particularly severe religious freedom violations."
The 16 countries with "systematic, ongoing and egregious" religious persecution include 10 already recognized as "countries of particular concern" by the U.S. State Department -- China, Pakistan, Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, Eritrea and Burma, plus two former Soviet states: Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
Young mother Senoura is trying the best she
can to make sure her baby is not malnourished. But with hardly any
money, depending only on food rations, she is worried for her young one.
Every morning, 20-year-old Gulbahar rushes to finish her housework and cook for her family so she can spend more time at the Safe Space for Women and Girls, a women-only space supported by Unicef at the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
The safe space, she says, is more than just a respite from the harsh conditions in the camp (and the tiny shelter she lives in). In that female-only space, Gulbahar is being empowered and equipped with vocational skills that she never thought she’d have the chance to acquire.
Asean report claims 5 lakh refugees to return to Myanmar in 2 years; rights bodies say Myanmar yet to create conditions for their safe return
