Myanmar is aggressively dealing with the problem of its Muslim invasion by repatriating the invaders. The US and the EU are trying to simultaneously pretend they don’t have problems of their own while condemning Myanmar for solving theirs. History suggests that the Western posturing will not merely prove irrelevant, but foolish and hypocritical to boot.
In the early hours of Aug. 25, groups of Rohingya, led or mobilized by the militant group ARSA, launched attacks on 30 police posts and an army base. The attacks killed 10 police, one soldier and one immigration officer, said Suu Kyi’s office in a statement the same day.
In Myin Hlut, a collection of villages on Maungdaw’s coast, a Rohingya mob attacked a police post with sticks, stones, arrows and Molotov cocktails, said a police officer who repelled the attack with nine other officers. He asked Reuters to withhold his name.
Two police were killed and one injured while repelling the mob, said the officer. “When they tried to break the gate, we started shooting them,” he said. “They dragged away the men who were hit.”
ARSA claimed responsibility on its Twitter account on Aug. 25 for multiple attacks, without mentioning Myin Hlut. The Myanmar government and Amnesty International said ARSA was behind the killing of dozens of Hindu residents from another remote Rakhine village. ARSA denied this. The group did not respond to questions from Reuters….
Sept. 5 was the day Myanmar’s military campaign in Rakhine officially ended, Aung San Suu Kyi said in a speech two weeks later. Yet arson attacks on Rohingya villages continued for weeks, satellite images show. During that period Reuters reporters in Bangladesh saw smoke rising daily from the Myanmar side of the border.
According to one witness – the police officer who survived the attack on his base in Myin Hlut – the 33rd and 99th were among those responsible. After the attack, the police officer told Reuters, he was ordered to join soldiers from the 33rd and 99th on “clearance operations” in now-deserted Rohingya villages. Part of his account was reported by Reuters in February.
Each operation involved five to seven police and at least 20 soldiers, he said. Police surrounded the Rohingya houses while soldiers searched and then set them alight. The houses had leaf roofs and bamboo walls, and burned easily. “There was no need to use fuel,” he said. The officer said the houses were burned “mainly for security reasons,” to stop the Rohingya from returning and launching fresh attacks.
The military has denied burning houses in Rakhine and says Rohingya militants set the homes alight. The police officer described how the 33rd and 99th used arson routinely and systematically. “We’d go to a village and burn it down,” he said. “The next day we’d go to another village. And in the evening we’d go to another village.”
The Myanmar government has clearly learned its lesson well from the EU governments. If someone says something happened, like rapes in Sweden or murders in Germany, simply deny it and don’t include it in the official statistics. Then, obviously, it never happened.
The Asian nations face challenges, but their primary advantage is straightforward. They are still nation-states. The demographically shattered states of the West are going to be increasingly occupied with internal division, until they either break apart or the indentity-group struggles for power are resolved in one way or another.