
Annoncering
Annoncering

Jamila Hanan: On the 20th March, an attack broke out in the town of Meiktila, which was clearly a staged incidence to trigger a much bigger massacre. My contact in Burma explained the incident: a Buddhist couple went into a Muslim gold shop and there was a dispute over the sale of fake gold. The couple went away and came back with a big crowd who started attacking the shop. We have video footage of the attack that shows the nearly 1,000-strong crowd watching the attackers and cheering them on.Yeah, that sounds pretty premeditated.
Yeah, there are actually officials within the crowd egging them on through loudspeakers. It was very, very organised. A rumour got out that a Buddhist monk was killed, yet no one's seen a dead body anywhere and nobody knows how he was killed or who he was killed by, so that rumour might have been spread to instigate the violence. The Muslim shop owner was arrested, but no monks were arrested, even though they instigated the attack.

Annoncering
Complete mayhem. The Buddhists have been burning down mosques, villages and schools and brutally attacking and slaughtering Muslims. This includes women and children who have been dismembered – their heads chopped off in the street (NSFW photo). Attacks have even started further south in Yangon; they're just spreading like wildfire.And these aren't just a random set of attacks either, right?
No, the attacks are organised – they followed on from propaganda and hate speeches from the monks. The police do nothing to protect the Muslims apart from round them up en masse and put them into containment. They have about 9,000 Muslims in a football stadium near Meiktila, which is essentially a concentration camp. It's not, as some may claim, a refugee camp, because they're not refugees; they are internally displaced people in their own country.

Well, many of the Buddhists in Meiktila helped the Muslims – and not just Rohingya Muslims; the violence has spread to include anyone Muslim now – and risked their lives to do so, so they're now very upset about the situation. They say outsiders came in and they don’t know who they were, but there's been word that these aggressive monks aren’t real monks, that they're people who have become monks very recently and dress up as monks. There are a number of paid killers in there, too.
Annoncering
Well, it's becoming absolutely clear that there's a link to the government because they've done nothing to protect the Muslims. Nothing. They haven't arrested any monks and their pre-planned PR campaign – saying the violence is because of sectarian tension between Muslims and Buddhists, which is a complete lie – both indicate that they're involved and that there's a high level of organisation.

It's about purifying the country and clearing space for the economic development that the Rohingya are blocking. There's a pipeline being built in Sittwe, where many of the Rohingya live, to take oil from the Middle East to China, so they're trying to clear out the Rohingya to make way for the money. They also have this ideology of a pure race and think the Muslims are a threat, so have been using the world's Islamophobia to label the Rohingya as terrorists, even though there's absolutely nothing to suggest that they're extremists or terrorists.So why is the rest of the world not doing anything?
I think the silence from the international community is to do with the oil contracts and other business contracts in the area. Every government wants to be friends with Burma, so they're not going to start challenging their human rights – all they care about are the 30 oil contracts due for tender this month. The Rohingya are just an unfortunate inconvenience for them, but hopefully now we've woken the public up to their plight something will change.
Annoncering
Yeah, entirely through social media. There's a full-blown genocide about to happen unless there's immediate intervention. So what we're trying to do online is create such a big storm that the authorities might just be convinced to pull the plug on it. They might think twice, because we have so much evidence of their involvement now that they might think it's too obvious if they go ahead with it. This is our only chance.Follow Sascha (@SaschaKouvelis) and Jamila (@JamilaHanan) on Twitter.More stuff about Burma and the Rohingya:Anonymous Taught Twitter About the Rohingya GenocideThe Burmese Aren't Very Nice to Rohingya MuslimsThe Student Army of BurmaAung San Suu Kyi Finally Delivered Her Nobel Acceptance Speech