A World on Fire in Myanmar
September 27, 2018 - FAMILY RESEARCH COUNCIL
They had just gotten married two years ago, Abul says. Although they weren’t rich, he had a small business and made enough money selling betel leaves to provide for them and his family. But their peaceful life came to a horrifying halt when a group of Burmese military men ambushed their village.
“When they came,” he says, “I ran to a nearby hill.” He watched, crying, as they took his wife from the house and raped her. “I watched them do whatever they wanted to her.” Afterword, he saw her and 20 other women forced into a home and burned alive.
“The world went dark for me,” he tells people. “I was so inconsolable that other people from my village had to carry me to Bangladesh. I don’t even remember the journey.”
Their faces, haunted by things they’ve seen and heard, all tell the same stories. There are thousands of them, mothers who will never get the image out of their heads of the charred remains of their children -- or the wives, whose husbands were chased into the woods by gunfire and never came back. Even in Bangladesh, the only nearby refuge, there is no food.
One woman talks about having to walk over dead bodies just to reach the border. Entire families are huddling under small sheets of plastic, most fighting sickness.
It’s no wonder that people all around the world are sounding the alarm for the Rohingya. For the last several months, the massacres have almost become too much to bear. Entire villages are gone – along with everything and everyone in them.
“And what was once a close-knit community, with generations of history in Myanmar, is now scattered across the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh.”
Here in Washington, D.C., leaders on both sides of the aisle are desperate to do something about it. In yesterday’s House Foreign Affairs Committee, Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and ranking Democrat Eliot Engel (N.Y.) urged the Trump administration to take one final step and call the killings what they are: genocide.
“I want to commend the administration for speaking out against these atrocities,” Rep. Royce said. “But I encourage the administration to go further -- this is more than just a ‘textbook example of ethnic cleansing,’” he continued.
“To all who have met with Rohingya refugees, who have heard these accounts, it is clear that these crimes amount to genocide.” By labeling it as such, America would be able to “rally a strong international commitment to fully fund the latest appeal for humanitarian assistance,” Rep. Engel points out.
Of course, the State Department has been monitoring the situation closely for months. Just this week, Secretary Mike Pompeo’s agency released a new report condemning the attacks against the Rohingya.
“Based on interviews with more than 1,000 of those refugees, State Department investigators found that ‘a vast majority’ of them ‘experienced or directly witnessed extreme violence,’ including rampant killings and systemic rapes. The Burmese military was behind the attacks ‘in most cases,’ the report found, and they ‘targeted civilians indiscriminately and often with extreme brutality.’”
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), where I now serve as a member, has strongly condemned the attacks on civilians by security forces in Burma.
Calling it a “staggering humanitarian disaster,” we have urged world leaders to act and hold the Burmese militants responsible. Just this past April, we listed Burma in our 2018 annual report as Country of Particular Concern. The U.S. has -- and should -- continue to do its part in holding these radicals accountable.
Tony Perkins' Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.
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