By Maung Zarni
(First published in the author's website Zarni's Blog on Saturday, May 18, 2013)
IT's official now!
The new Myanmar has a registered Nazi party. And it's called the Rakhine National Development Party (RNDP).
I just finished reading "Toe-tet-yay" or Progress, the official publication of the RNDP Information and Research Department, Volume 2, No. 12, 2012.
Naypyidaw has apparently incubated this party while Aung San Suu Kyi has wined and dined publicly with the leaders of the RNDP such as its Chairman MP Dr Aye Maung, a vet.
Nominally separate branches of the State - Presidency of Thein Sein, the Parliament, and the Judiciary - all tolerate, nay, tacitly back, both the neo-Nazi Buddhist movement known as "969" led by fascist monks such as Wirathu (45) and the RNDP led by Aung Maung, himself a Bangladesh-born Rakhine.
In contrast, the State in Myanmar recently sentenced a Muslim customer who peeled a 969 sticker off the mirror at a street vendor with his motorcycle key to 2 years imprisonment for 'insult to religion'. Never mind that 969 with its racist, hate-soaked messages isn't about Buddhism, but about the rising Burmese strain of Ku Klux Klan. . Worse, the Thein Sein administration in Naypyidaw has chosen not to bring to justice anyone who participated in the broad-day light slaughter10 Muslim pilgrims in public space in southern Rakhine town of Taung-gok in early June 2012.
With this type of blatant impunity and neo-Nazi biases, it is little wonder that the Rakhine National Development Party (RNDP) openly subscribes to Neo-Nazism, claiming Rakhine and Burma to be a "Buddhist state".
Its official journal "Toe-Tet-Yay" (or Progress) is littered with the word "beasts", reference to all Muslims of Myanmar who are supposedly empathetic to the Rohingya cause. In media interviews after interviews, as well as in the Parliamentary discussions, the RNDP leaders publicly have with discernible admiration talked about how the Rakhine patriots should look to Israel and its apartheid, colonial state vis-a-vis the Palestinians as a model to handle their enemies - "Bangali", whom they consider neither humans nor ethnic group.
Progress's editorial (Volume 2, number 12, November 2012) endorsed the horrendous view - that Hitler may be a monster for Jews; he was the Hero for the Germans. This is the view that my Germans in their right mind would find extremely repulsive and difficult to sympathize.
This homegrown Nazi party of the Rakhines calls for the national level authorities in Naypyidaw not to yield to any international pressure in dealing with the "Bengali 'viruses', to borrow a typical Rakhine reference to the Rohingya, decisively. They mean to implement forcibly the racist 1982 Citizenship Act designed to exclude any Rohingya who didn't have any documentation to prove that their ancestry has been in Burma before the first British defeat of the Burmese feudal kingdom in 1824. (Incidentally, printing machines arrived in the palm-leaf society of feudal pre-colonial Burma only around the mid-19th century, and even then it was thanks to the Christian missionaries. By this standard, 99% of the 'pure-blooded' Burmese would be rendered ineligible for citizenship.)
(First published in the author's website Zarni's Blog on Saturday, May 18, 2013)
After having barked human rights and genuine democratization in Burma since the end of the Cold War, the west-led "international community" has of late come to play the role of "genocide enablers". That is, from the United States to the European Union, from Britain to Japan, the Paris Club and the ADB, not to mention the "Burma-pernicious" International Crisis Group, as Australian economic adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi, Sean Turnell put it wryly.
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| A Truck with Nazi and Hitler Signs is driving around Mrauk U Township to celebrate the coming Buddhist New year; April 16, 2012; Arakan state, Burma. (Photo courtesy: Sophie Ansel, France. Published with permission. For more pictures, click here.) |
IT's official now!
The new Myanmar has a registered Nazi party. And it's called the Rakhine National Development Party (RNDP).
I just finished reading "Toe-tet-yay" or Progress, the official publication of the RNDP Information and Research Department, Volume 2, No. 12, 2012.
Naypyidaw has apparently incubated this party while Aung San Suu Kyi has wined and dined publicly with the leaders of the RNDP such as its Chairman MP Dr Aye Maung, a vet.
Nominally separate branches of the State - Presidency of Thein Sein, the Parliament, and the Judiciary - all tolerate, nay, tacitly back, both the neo-Nazi Buddhist movement known as "969" led by fascist monks such as Wirathu (45) and the RNDP led by Aung Maung, himself a Bangladesh-born Rakhine.
 |
| A house being burned during the riots during the 2012 Rakhine State Riots (Photo by: Hmuu Zaw; source: Wikimedia Commo |
In contrast, the State in Myanmar recently sentenced a Muslim customer who peeled a 969 sticker off the mirror at a street vendor with his motorcycle key to 2 years imprisonment for 'insult to religion'. Never mind that 969 with its racist, hate-soaked messages isn't about Buddhism, but about the rising Burmese strain of Ku Klux Klan. . Worse, the Thein Sein administration in Naypyidaw has chosen not to bring to justice anyone who participated in the broad-day light slaughter10 Muslim pilgrims in public space in southern Rakhine town of Taung-gok in early June 2012.
With this type of blatant impunity and neo-Nazi biases, it is little wonder that the Rakhine National Development Party (RNDP) openly subscribes to Neo-Nazism, claiming Rakhine and Burma to be a "Buddhist state".
Its official journal "Toe-Tet-Yay" (or Progress) is littered with the word "beasts", reference to all Muslims of Myanmar who are supposedly empathetic to the Rohingya cause. In media interviews after interviews, as well as in the Parliamentary discussions, the RNDP leaders publicly have with discernible admiration talked about how the Rakhine patriots should look to Israel and its apartheid, colonial state vis-a-vis the Palestinians as a model to handle their enemies - "Bangali", whom they consider neither humans nor ethnic group.
Progress's editorial (Volume 2, number 12, November 2012) endorsed the horrendous view - that Hitler may be a monster for Jews; he was the Hero for the Germans. This is the view that my Germans in their right mind would find extremely repulsive and difficult to sympathize.
This homegrown Nazi party of the Rakhines calls for the national level authorities in Naypyidaw not to yield to any international pressure in dealing with the "Bengali 'viruses', to borrow a typical Rakhine reference to the Rohingya, decisively. They mean to implement forcibly the racist 1982 Citizenship Act designed to exclude any Rohingya who didn't have any documentation to prove that their ancestry has been in Burma before the first British defeat of the Burmese feudal kingdom in 1824. (Incidentally, printing machines arrived in the palm-leaf society of feudal pre-colonial Burma only around the mid-19th century, and even then it was thanks to the Christian missionaries. By this standard, 99% of the 'pure-blooded' Burmese would be rendered ineligible for citizenship.)
