Banner: Left to right: Dr Natalie Brinham, Ko Tinmaung and Dr Maung Zarni. Dr Natalie Brinham, who co-authored The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas, filmed this interview below.

Ko Tinmaung was subjected to ninety-six hours of anti-Muslim racist verbal abuse and bodily harms, (including tasing, slapping, and beatings) on Israel’s “prison ship” and on land in Ashdod. Nothing could have prepared anyone to face the level of Israeli security officials’ gleeful savagery, sadistic cruelty and Nazi-like anti-Muslim racism.

On 26 May, inside Turkeu’s magnificent Süleymaniye Mosque, FORSEA’s Dr Maung Zarni sat down with his Rohingya activist brother and recorded his first-hand experience in the hands of first Israel naval commandos on “a prison boat” and later of the Israeli prison guards in Ashdod, Israel.

The two were in touch until a few hours before the abduction of Ko Tinmaung and his fellow members aboard the vassal Umut, one of 60+ boats that set sail from Turkey towards Gaza as part the Global Sumud Flotilla.

Ko Tinmaung looked a bit frail and was still recovering from his ordeals when the interview took place.

Personal background of a rights activist who believes in and acts on Never Again!

Ko Tinmaung was a child of Rohingya parents who as a young couple from Myanmar, survived the earliest wave of the state-directed genocidal mass deportation of Rohingyas in February 1978. His parents took refugee in adjacent Bangladesh where he was born in the city called Chittagong. He and his widowed mother later resettled as refugees in Toronto, Canada where he grew up and joined Canadian Armed Forces.

 

But as a child of genocide survivors, he took the slogan Never Again! personally and has sought to pursue human rights activism and oppose ALL genocides, by the victims his fellow Rohingyas inside Myanmar or Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.

He was subjected to constant pressure by his superior officers in the service because he has active in raising genocide awareness about the ongoing and slow-burning genocide of his fellow Rohingyas back in his ancestral land of Myanmar where both the state and the society, not just the pariah national military, are soaked in Buddhist Supremacist violent racism, particularly towards the predominantly Muslim Rohingyas.

He finally resigned from his job – and was honourably discharged – in order that he may pursue his human rights activists without having to deal with the constant pressure to stay clear of such citizens’ activism.

Watch the 20-minutes interview with Ko Tinmaung below:

 

Maung Zarni

https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18gM2sL11L/  BREAKING: Israel dismisses IDF top lawyer Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi for leaking video of Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian. Israel minister of defence threatens her with ‘imprisonment for many years” & calls her actions “a grave blood libel against heroic IDF fighters” The victim suffered ruptured intestine, severe injury to anus, lungs & broken ribs. Israelis rioted for right to rape, ministers defended rapists, and one rapist became a TV celebrity. All charges were dropped.
This is Israel.

Posted by Maung Zarni

Dr Maung Zarni is a scholar, educator and human rights activist with 30-years of involvement in Burmese political affairs, Zarni has been denounced as an “enemy of the State” for his opposition to the Myanmar genocide. He is the co-author (with Natalie Brinham) of the pioneering study, "The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas" (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal, Spring 2014) and "Reworking the Colonial-Era Indian Peril: Myanmar’s State-Directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims" (The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Fall/Winter 2017/18).

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