March 6, 2021 Share
Myanmar’s security forces have killed scores of demonstrators protesting a coup. The new junta has jailed journalists and anyone else capable of exposing the violence. It has done away with even limited legal protections. The outside world has responded so far with tough words, a smattering of sanctions and little else.
The slide from a nascent democracy to yet another coup, as rapid as it has been brutal, opens up a grim possibility: As bad as it looks in Myanmar now, if the country’s long history of violent military rule is any guide, things could get worse.
[AFP]
Seeing the violence against civilians in Myanmar in the wake of that country’s coup, Rohingya refugees sheltering in southeastern Bangladesh say their own experience has been validated now that the general Burmese population is experiencing the brutality of its military.
Refugee leaders who spoke to BenarNews expressed solidarity with Myanmar protesters, as well as bitterness that they did not receive the same in 2017, when a brutal military crackdown on their community caused 740,000 of the stateless Muslim minority to flee to Bangladesh.
“At that time, if everyone had joined the movement to stop the atrocities against the Rohingya, then they would not have had to join this protest movement,” Muhib Ullah, chairman of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, told BenarNews from the Kutupalong refugee camp this week.
AFP
Seeing the violence against civilians in Myanmar in the wake of that country’s coup, Rohingya refugees sheltering in southeastern Bangladesh say their own experience has been validated now that the general Burmese population is experiencing the brutality of its military.
Refugee leaders who spoke to BenarNews expressed solidarity with Myanmar protesters, as well as bitterness that they did not receive the same in 2017, when a brutal military crackdown on their community caused 740,000 of the stateless Muslim minority to flee to Bangladesh.
“At that time, if everyone had joined the movement to stop the atrocities against the Rohingya, then they would not have had to join this protest movement,” Muhib Ullah, chairman of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service, from the Kutupalong refugee camp this week.
Security forces in Myanmar again used force Saturday to disperse anti-coup protesters, a day after a U.N. special envoy urged the Security Council to take action to quell junta violence that this past week left more than 50 peaceful demonstrators dead and scores injured.