From the perennial headlines, the world knows Myanmar’s genocidally persecuted Rohingya people as the “boat people”, a label that was conferred on the Vietnamese refugees who fled the Mekong Delta and other parts of Vietnam carpet-bombed by – who else?!! – the United States in its undeclared and illegal war of aggression in the 1960’s and early 1970’s.
Ko Tinmaung , on the ship. Reading one of Frantz Fanon’s classics, “Black Skin, White Mask”
So, it is heart-warming and inspiring to see the sight of Ko Tinmaung, a Rohingya refugee resettled in Canada, aboard “Umut”, the name of his ship which is sailing now in the Mediterranean Sea and hearing his 20-second video message for the world of concerned citizens, including his fellow Rohingya refugees, a million inside the camps on Bangladeshi soil.
See here on YouTube.
Genocide is an absolute red line for this Rohingya, whether it is directed at his people, Palestinians or Europe’s Jews and other victim populations.
Ko Tinmaung, (far right, with a shoulder bag strapped around) kneeling next to the train track, outside the iconic Nazi SS Administration building), with an international delegation of Rohingya and Myanmar activists as well as scholars from Myanmar, Germany, USA, UK, Japan and Canada at Auschwitz-Birkenau, March 2020, photo in Zarni’s possession)
Ko Tinmaung boarded the vessel at the Turkish port of Marmaris on 16 May. As of 17 May morning, there are 61 boats sailing towards Gaza.
A Rohingya man getting on the activist boat to try to break Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza, Palestine is particularly poignant, considering the frequent and tragic drownings of genocide-fleeing Rohingyas at sea in South and Southeast Asian waters.
Ko Tinmaung knows he faces a different type of risk, namely brutal interception of his boat and being kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli terrorist organization, officially known as Israeli Defence Force. See https://www.palestinechronicle.com/israels-abduction-of-avila-abu-keshek-exposes-zionist-projects-true-face/
Track his boat Umut: https://freedomflotilla.org/ffc-gsf-tracker/
A tale of two genocides: The Jewish Supremacist Israel & Buddhist Supremacist Myanmar
Whatever the policy shortcomings, Rohingya are greatly indebted to successive Bangladeshi governments for opening their borders as their genocidal Myanmar neighbour has, since roughly the time of the Vietnam war in the 1970’s, institutionalized the slow-burning genocidal expulsion of the targeted national minority for want of their fertile land next to Bangladesh along the Bay of Bengal.
In the late 1970’s, the news articles about the earlier waves of Rohingya exodus as the result of violent persecution by the original Myanmar military dictatorship led by the US-backed General Ne Win, drew a parallel between the fleeing Rohingyas and the displaced Palestinians across different Arab countries across West Asia (or what Western imperialists in London call “the Middle East”).
Over the years, the sentiments of solidarity between Rohingyas and Palestinians has developed among grassroots communities.
It is more than coincidental that both peoples are predominantly Muslims, targeted for ethnic cleansing by both Israel and Myanmar.
The late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir characterized the relations between then Burma and Myanmar as “a love affair”.
In this lovely bilateral relations, Myanmar military has received military and intelligence training, purchased Israeli military hardware and surveillance technologies tested in Israel’s killing fields in occupied Palestine. And Myanmar offers the Jewish supremacist state unconditional support and votes at the United Nations as instructed by Tel Aviv.
In 2018, the two genocidal regimes even signed a Memorandum of Understanding whereby their ministries of education – or rather genocidal propaganda – collaborate to ensure their respective histories are whitewashed. That is, no mention of any international crimes each has been perpetrating. And currently, both Israel and Myanmar are awaiting genocide ruling at the International Court of Justice, and their leaders have been issued international arrest warrants.
For Israel’s Hitlerite leaders including Benjamin Netanyahu, the warrants are from the International Criminal Court and for Myanmar genocidal generals, they are from the Argentinian magistrate court, based on the legal principle known as the Universal Jurisdictions ala the American-backed Chilean mass-murderer, General Pinochet case.
Golda Meir was the only female Prime Minister of the Zionist entity, which was implanted as a strategic proxy for Anglo-American imperialist powers in the region that became immensely important after the discovery of oil, besides its trade routes, linking India, Africa and Europe and the Suez Canal.
Meir was herself, the Ukraine-born settler colonizer, originally named Marbovitch. She actively sought to erase the existence of Palestinians as a people, with their own culture, identity, history and intellectual development. In her 400+ page biography Golda Meir peddled this decades-old Zionist lie that “the Arabs” fled needlessly and refused to return to their villages and towns despite public encouragement by the newly established Israel, designed to be the Jewish majority on the 90% Arab Palestinian soil in 1948.
Never mind that David Ben-Gurion, another Tsarist Russia-born settler colonizer with the original name “Grun”, ordered his main instrument of Jewish militia, the Haganah, to, in effect, terrorise the indigenous Palestinian in hundreds of villages and 11 towns and demolish many of them – just so they would not even dream of ever returning.
When Israel military archives were opened and some of the secret orders to the Israel Defence Force troops, were de-classified, it became abundantly clear that one of the common orders was to turn Palestinians and their villages and towns into “dust”.
Ko Tinmaung’s Rohingya people have faced a similar state-orchestrated genocidal erasure, including with the denial of their history and their identity and the systematic and systemic deprivation of their livelihoods.
Like Israel’s thousands of security-check points all over the Occupied Palestine all designed to make life impossible so that Palestinians will chose to leave their land, Myanmar had created and maintained a vast system of “security grids” throughout Rohingya ancestral region. When the rate of Rohingyas fleeing their hell on earth was not fast enough, Myanmar military switched gear and launched its final wave of direct genocidal expulsion and destruction of Rohingya.
The two combined waves of exodus in 2016 and 2017 nearly 900,000 Rohingya – out of a total of 2 million Rohingya in Western Myanmar adjacent to Bangladesh.
In August and September 2017, Myanmar’s largest and most devastating assault on Rohingya population drove over 730,000 Rohingya into Bangladesh – roughly the number of Palestinians who fled Israel’s genocidal terror campaign in 1948, which in fact began in the fall of 1947.
Myanmar military troops demolished with artillery fire and large-scale arson more than 340 Rohingya villages, 1.5 towns – out of the total of 2.5 predominantly Rohingyas towns, with nearly 40,000 residential, cultural, commercial and religious structures in them.
A few years ago, FORSEA’s co-founder Maung Zarni was confronted by a group of several Palestinian security guards who worked at the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem who pointedly asked him if he knew of Rohingyas (and their genocide). They were visibly standoff-ish and even angered that a Myanmar was visiting the Holy site when his own native country was the world’s infamous genocidal perpetrator.
Support for Palestinians among the Rohingya people in refugee camps in Bangladesh and in the diaspora is widespread. Many of the established Rohingya activists in the diaspora remain quiet on Israel’s ongoing Nakba (or genocide against Palestinian people) as Zionist Jews in USA and Canada are among their strongest supporters in the West. But for grassroots Rohingya refugee communities do not feel any constraints to express their heartfelt solidarity with the oppressed, the displaced, the caged and the genocided Palestinians.
FORSEA is very pleased and proud to see a Rohingya refugee man board a vessel with Destination Free Gaza, and we will share the updates of his and his colleagues’ worthwhile voyage From aboard Umut, he and his fellow activists from Sri Lanka, Bahrain, Turkey and Northern California have sent brief recorded messages of solidarity and empathy for the sieged Palestinians in Gaza.
Heed the voices of these courageous international activists and make your own contributions to the global movement to end Israel’s genocide and occupation in Palestine and support the Palestinian liberation struggle. And educate yourself about the history of Palestinian resistance. Watch Ramzy Baroud’s interview on Chris Hedges: https://youtu.be/gSAwYW2sQ3s
Maung Zarni
Visit: Global Sumud Flotilla website: https://globalsumudflotilla.org/
