The Reeducation Camps of Xinjiang

The dispatches on the Rohingya have dried up as the repatriation deal between Myanmar and Bangladesh, set to begin last month, stalled out.

Filling the void have been stories of Uighur Muslim internment camps in the restive western Chinese region of Xinjiang. Chris Buckley got things rolling in early September with "China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’" The story's bombshell two-sentence paragraph was

The number of Uighurs, as well as Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities, who have been detained in the camps is unclear. Estimates range from several hundred thousand to perhaps a million, with exile Uighur groups saying the number is even higher.

All qualification was quickly lost and the number of Uighurs detained for reeducation became 1 million. I was walking home from work one night right after the midterm elections and I ran into a guy, an Amazon worker, coming from an anti-Trump rally. We got to talking, and it turned out he was Iranian. I said most people in the United States have not a clue how devastating the Iran-Iraq War was. He said one of Saddam's Scud missiles blew up down the street from his house. While we agreed on a lot, he said he was more frightened of China than an errant U.S. hyper power. He mentioned the 1 million in internment camps in Xinjiang.

Chris Buckley, along with co-author Austin Ramzy, was back at it yesterday with "China’s Detention Camps for Muslims Turn to Forced Labor." The Xinjiang reeducation camps, come to find out, have a forced labor component. Residents graduate from indoctrination to jobs in textile mills, sometimes housed right there at the internment camp.

China is a nation run by the central planning of the Communist Party. The Communist Party has a problem with poverty and underdevelopment in Xinjiang. Xinjiang is also the focus of foreign powers attempting to create separatist problems for China by means of Islam. It is an established pattern for Western intelligence services: Afghanistan, the First and Second Chechen Wars, Libya, Syria, etc. So the Chinese are being proactive. Training and jobs. The refugees fleeing Guatemala and Honduras might very well favor such internment camps in Arizona, California and Texas if it meant permanent residency and stable employment. And what about the opioid killing fields of West Virginia and Ohio?

These stories about the Uighur internment camps of Xinjiang are a good illustration of how the news works a la the Integrity Initiative. Intelligence agencies fronting as NGOs develop and work with "clusters" to spread misinformation.

Battle for Hodeida Resumes

AP has a long report, "Key battle in Yemen’s war risks tipping country into famine," this morning about the U.S.-blessed resumption of the battle for Hodeida:

BAJIL, Yemen (AP) — With American backing, the United Arab Emirates has resumed an all-out offensive aimed at capturing Yemen’s most vital port, Hodeida, where Shiite rebels are digging in to fight to the last man. Thousands of civilians are caught in the middle, trapped by minefields and barrages of mortars and airstrikes.

[snip]

Hodeida’s port literally keeps millions of starving Yemenis alive, as the entry point for 70 percent of food imports and international aid. More than 8 million of Yemen’s nearly 29 million people have no food other than what is provided by world relief agencies, a figure that continues to rapidly rise.

A protracted siege could cut off that lifeline. The battle has already killed hundreds of civilians and forced hundreds of thousands to flee their homes, adding to the more than 2 million Yemenis displaced by the war. Amid the fighting, cholera cases in the area leaped from 497 in June to 1,347 in August, Save the Children reported Tuesday.

[snip]

The battle brings in to sharp relief a question hanging over the war: What will be the shape of Yemen after all the destruction it has wreaked?

Notably absent from the fight to take Hodeida are the forces of Hadi’s government — the government that the coalition says it aims to restore. Several pro-Hadi officials told the AP that the UAE squeezed him out.

“The government knows nothing about what is going on in Hodeida,” one senior official said. “It’s all in the hands of the Emiratis.” He and the other officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivities of relations with the Emirates.

Mistrust runs deep between Hadi’s government and the UAE, which has set up military bases across southern Yemen and controls much of the south through the militias it funds. Some Hadi allies accuse the UAE of seeking to impose its own dominion over Yemen — and see the assault on Hodeida as adding another piece to its hold over the country’s coastline.

Houthi-free southern Yemen has turned into a patchwork of splintered regions under rival militias. Aden, the southern capital, has seen assassinations and street battles between pro-UAE and pro-Hadi militias, as well as increasing crime, robbery and rape.

You will find the AP story in "the newspaper of record" but no original report. The Times has Declan Walsh stationed in Cairo but his last dispatch, "Battle Intensifies for Yemeni Port as Dock Workers Still Unload Aid," on Yemen was published at the end of spring. How many features on the Rohingya -- tales of gang rapes and babies snatched from their mothers breasts to be tossed into a bonfire -- have been published since then? Hannah Beech's output alone numbers half-a-dozen stories, and she has had to cover the Thai underwater cave rescue, various typhoons, earthquakes and tsunamis during the same time period.

It's impossible to avoid the conclusion tweeted by Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif:

US abrogated JCPOA -a multilateral accord enshrined in UNSC Resolution 2231- arguing that it seeks a bilateral treaty with #Iran. Today US withdrew from an actual US-Iran treaty after the ICJ ordered it to stop violating that treaty in sanctioning Iranian people. Outlaw regime.

One wants to recite a prayer: "O outlaw regime. May you be brought low and made to atone for your crimes. Darkness approaches and the earth waits to fold you under its skin."

The Case Against Aung San Suu Kyi?

If you wanted to choose one article to get a handle on the Western campaign against Myanmar Richard Paddock's "From Hero to Pariah, Aung San Suu Kyi Dashes Hopes About Myanmar" would be the way to go. For years democracy advocate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was built up to Gandhi-like status in the West only now to be tarred as another bloodthirsty autocrat similar to an Assad or a Milosevic.

The reason? The massacre of Rohingya in Rakhine State.

Aung San Suu Kyi's position is that Myanmar is dealing with an Islamic insurgency, and the state has a right to defend itself.

A military campaign targeting the Rohingya did take place, and now it is being amplified in the Western press for other reasons. One thing is certain: In the all the coverage of the plight of the Rohingya and their flight to Bangladesh hardly any mention is made of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army. Imagine reporting on the war in Yemen without any mention of the Houthi insurgency.

To give you a sample of Paddock's invective, here he accuses Aung San Suu Kyi of misogyny:

Advocates also say Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi has done little to create opportunities for women, who are largely relegated to a secondary role in the conservative country.

There is only one woman in the cabinet, for example — Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi herself. Women make up just 14 percent of her party’s members of Parliament. The parliamentary committee that handles women’s affairs is headed by a man.

“I’m not sure she believes in gender equality,” said Daw Htar Htar, founder of Akhaya Women, a women’s rights group.

Wow. Only 14%! That must really be horrible, right?

In 2018, 107 (78D, 29R) women hold seats in the United States Congress, comprising 20.0% of the 535 members.

That's according to Rutgers' Center for American Women and Politics.

Bill Richardson Quits Myanmar Advisory Board on Rohingya. Who Cares?

Longtime Democrat politico Bill Richardson quit an advisory board set up by Myanmar to assess the trouble with the Rohingya in Rakhine State. Apparently it was after a spat with Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. According to Hannah Beech and Rick Gladstone in "U.S. Adviser Rebukes Aung San Suu Kyi: ‘I Don’t Want to Be Part of a Whitewash’ ":

“She has developed an arrogance of power,” Mr. Richardson said by telephone during a layover in Tokyo on his way back to New Mexico from Myanmar. “I’ve known her a long time and am fond of her, but she basically is unwilling to listen to bad news, and I don’t want to be part of a whitewash.”

Nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Rakhine State in western Myanmar for Bangladesh over the past five months. Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has declined to speak out forcefully against the Myanmar military’s campaign of execution, rape and arson against the Rohingya, which the United Nations and United States have labeled ethnic cleansing.

Mr. Richardson said that Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi had “exploded” at him when he raised the detention of two Reuters journalists, U Wa Lone and U Kyaw Soe Oo, who are facing up to 14 years in prison under the country’s Official Secrets Act after they began investigating a mass grave of Rohingya in northern Rakhine. 

“Her face was quivering, and if she had been a little closer to me, she might have hit me, she was so furious,” Mr. Richardson said.

Richardson is grandstanding. Clearly he joined the board so he could quit, garner the headlines and discredit Myanmar.

According to the Reuters story, "Richardson quits Myanmar's 'whitewash' Rohingya crisis panel," by Bill Tarrant:

Before Richardson quit the advisory board had 10 members, including five from overseas, chaired by former Thai Deputy Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai.

Richardson, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and energy secretary in the Clinton administration, also had harsh words for Surakiart.

The board chairman, he said, was not “genuinely committed” to implementing recommendations regarding the issues of Rohingya safety, citizenship, peace, stability and development.

“He parroted the dangerous and untrue notion that international NGOs employ radicals and that humanitarian agencies are providing material support to ARSA,” Richardson said, referring to Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army militants. [This is what Richardson is trying to put the kibosh on. This is how the U.S. conducts its secret wars. The U.S. doesn't want this publicly acknowledged.]

Surakiart was traveling with other members of the board in Rakhine and did not respond to requests for comment.

Another board member, former South African Defence Minister Roelof Meyer, told Reuters the visit to Rakhine had been “very constructive”.

“If anybody would say that we are just a rubber stamp or a voice on behalf of the government that would be completely untrue, unfair,” he said. “We haven’t done any recommendations so far.”

Other members of the board, which also includes British doctor and politician Lord Darzi of Denham and speaker of the Swedish parliament Urban Ahlin, were not immediately available for comment.

Richardson said he declined to join the advisory board’s tour of a new repatriation camp in Rakhine State on Wednesday, instead traveling to Yangon.

Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army

There was a rare story yesterday -- see Richard Paddock's "Rohingya Militants in Myanmar Claim Responsibility for Attack" -- about the Rohingya insurgent group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), whose attacks on police stations in Rakhine State, Myanmar, last August elicited the Burmese crackdown that sent hundreds of thousands fleeing across the border to Bangladesh.

The plight of the Rohingya has been humanitarian crisis #1 for the mainstream Western press. One would think the war in Yemen would merit the kind of consistent front-page coverage garnered by the Rohingya refugees, but such has not been the case. Yemen receives a fraction of the attention paid to the Rohingya.

Paddock's story, which reports on an ambush by ARSA against Burmese government security forces, is rare in that it actually refers to the armed insurgency. Overwhelmingly, mainstream Western press focuses on the suffering of uprooted Rohingya villagers, their rape and murder, presenting a situation familiar to readers who for years have been exposed to the reporting on Syria; there, it is evil dictator Bashar al-Assad who apparently lives only to gas, murder and torture his own people.

To quote Paddock's story in full:

BANGKOK — A resistance group in Myanmar claimed responsibility on Sunday for an ambush of government forces in Rakhine State that left three people wounded, saying it had no choice but to defend the Rohingya from “state-sponsored terrorism.”

In a statement posted on Twitter, Atta Ullah, who identifies himself as commander of the rebel group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, said the attack on Friday morning in Maungdaw had been staged in response to efforts by Myanmar’s security forces to drive the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in a Buddhist-majority country, from the area.

Mr. Atta Ullah accused government forces of continuing to kill civilians, rape women and destroy villages in a campaign of genocide.

More than 650,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since the Myanmar military began its campaign in late August, joining roughly 87,000 who had fled earlier. Survivors have given consistent, harrowing accounts of gang rapes, torture, random killings and the destruction of villages.

The campaign against the Rohingya has been called “ethnic cleansing” by the United States and the United Nations.

“Thousands of Rohingya are still fleeing to escape from endless inhumane persecutions of the Burmese terrorist army,” Mr. Atta Ullah said.

Two security officers and a driver were injured in the ambush on Friday, according to a post on the Facebook page of Senior Gnl. Min Aung Hlaing, Myanmar’s military chief. Ten members of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA, took part in the attack, the post said.

The rebel group, which is known locally as Harakah al-Yaqin, or the Faith Movement, is a small, underequipped group that has struggled to mount significant military operations. But it has claimed responsibility for a few deadly attacks on Myanmar’s security forces, including in August.

Richard Horsey, an independent analyst in Yangon, the economic capital Myanmar, said that while the group is small and poorly armed, its actions provoke major responses from the government.

“It’s uncertain whether they have the capacity to sustain an insurgency, but even occasional small attacks like this will have a big political impact in Myanmar,” he said.

Small operations by the group against security forces in August prompted brutal retaliation from government forces, which in turn contributed to the mass exodus of Rohingya from Rakhine.

The international aid group Doctors Without Borders estimated last month that at least 6,700 Rohingya, including 730 young children, had met with violent deaths in the month after the military campaign began in August.

General Min Aung Hlaing, the country’s most powerful figure, has denied that the army committed atrocities against the Rohingya. In November, the military released the results of an internal inquiry that cleared all soldiers in Rakhine of any misconduct. Not a single innocent civilian had been raped or killed by the security forces, the report said.

The government has refused to grant access to the region to independent observers including United Nations officials, aid groups, representatives of foreign governments and journalists.

The government of Myanmar, also known as Burma, has denied most Rohingya citizenship and considers them to be “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh, factors that complicate their status and their ability to be recognized as refugees or to apply for asylum.

U Zaw Htay, a former army major who serves as a spokesman for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s top civilian leader, said the ambush on Friday had been intended to derail the repatriation of Rohingya under an agreement between Myanmar and Bangladesh.

“We will start the repatriation process on Jan. 23,” he said. “That’s why ARSA carried out a terrorist attack on Jan. 5, just to delay the repatriation process.”

U Win Myat Aye, the minister of social welfare and resettlement, said that refugees would have the choice of living at a temporary center while their homes are being rebuilt, or of returning to their villages to help rebuild the housing themselves, with the government bearing the construction costs.

The relocation center is expected to accommodate up to 30,000 people in tents from Belgium and China, he said.

“After the construction of their original place is done, they can live in their own place and they can work freely as before,” he said.

Despite such assurances, it is unclear how many Rohingya will want to return home given the violent campaign of the past few months.

In his statement, Mr. Atta Ullah said ARSA had “no other option but to combat ‘Burmese state-sponsored terrorism’ against the Rohingya population for the purpose of defending, salvaging and protecting the Rohingya community.”

Mr. Horsey, who has closely followed the group, said the rare statement from the rebel leader was a bid to position the organization as a political representative of the Rohingya.

“We declare, loud and clear, that we will continue our legitimate struggles in hand-in-hand cooperation with the civilized international community until all our demands are fulfilled,” Mr. Atta Ullah said. “Rohingya people must be consulted in all decision-making that affects their humanitarian needs and political future.”

Attah Ullah was raised and educated in Saudi Arabia, which is where funding for ARSA is said to originate. ARSA fighters are said to have received training in Libya. ARSA is the only Rohingya insurgent group to issue communiques in fluent English. ARSA is the only Islamist Rohingya insurgent group. It certainly points to a U.S. intelligence operation.

Paddock never lists ARSA demands (which don't seem to be explicitly separatist and can be found on the Rohingya Blogger website), but at least he mentions the repatriation agreement between Bangladesh and Myanmar; that hardly ever receives any press in the West.

The Rohingya and the U.S. Pivot to Asia

"How the Rohingya Escaped" tops the online edition of The New York Times this morning. It is a marvel of multimedia storytelling. The Times has pulled out all the stops since late last summer documenting the purge of the Rohingya, a Muslim-majority people, from Rakhine State, Myanmar. The Myanmar military is said to be engaged in genocide. 

All the familiar stories of babies brutally murdered and women gang raped have been given prominent placement in the Western media.

The volume of stories should give a seasoned news consumer pause; after all, there are numerous hot spots around the globe where ethnic cleansing goes almost without mention. Then there is the emphasis on violent rape and baby murder. Combine those two together and you are usually talking about propaganda meant to alter geopolitical boundaries. Think Kosovo and Iraq.

My guess is that it is part of the U.S. pivot to Asia.