Headline Oct. 23/ ''' *MUSLIMS O'' MYANMAR* '''

''' *MUSLIMS O'' MYANMAR* '''

''THEY JUST KICKED THEM OFF AND KILLED THEM. They chopped people, they shot people, they raped us, they left us senseless.''

EVERYDAY EVIDENCE OF MASSACRES grows in Myanmar  : It is just so normal to throw angelic babies/future students into fire. But let me begin at the beginning..................... 

RAJUMA  -grew up in a rice farming hamlet called Tula Toll, and said the place had never ever known peace.

The two main ethnic groups in her village, the Buddhist Rakhines and the Muslim were like two planes drawn to never touch. They followed different religions, spoke different languages, ate different foods and have always distrusted each other.

A community of Buddhists lived just a few minutes from Rajuma's house, but she had never spoken with any of them. 

''They hate us,'' she said...............

Hundreds of women stood in the in the river, held at a gunpoint, ordered not to move.

A pack of soldiers stepped toward a petite young woman with light brown eyes and delicate cheekbones. Her name was Rajuma, and she was standing chest-high in the water- Clutching her baby son, while her village in Myanmar burned totally down behind her.

''YOU,'' the soldiers said, pointing at her. She froze. 

''YOU!''..............She squeezed her baby tighter.

In the next violent blur of moments, the soldiers clubbed Rajuma in the face, tore her screaming child out of her arm and hurled him into fire. She was then dragged into a house and gang-raped.

*By the time the day was over, she was running through a field naked and covered in blood. Alone, she had lost her son, her mother, her two sisters and her younger brother, all wiped out in front of her eyes, she says.

Rajuma is a Rohingya Muslim,  one of the most persecuted ethnic groups on earth, and she now spends her days drifting through refugee camp in Bangladesh in a daze.

She relayed her story to me during a recent sporting trip, I made to camps, where hundreds of thousands Rohingya like her have rushed for safety.

Her deeply disturbing account of what happened in her village, in late August, was corroborated by dozens of other survivors, whom I spoke with at length, and by human rights groups gathering evidence of atrocities.

Survivors said they saw government soldiers stabbing babies, cutting of boys heads. gang-raping girls, shooting 40-millimeter grenades into houses, burning entire families to death, and rounding up dozens of unarmed male villagers and summarily executing them.

Much of the violence was flamboyantly brutal, intimate and personal  -the kind of that is detonated by a long, bitter history of ethnic hatred.

''People were holding the soldiers' feet, begging for their lives,'' Rajuma said. ''But they didn't stop, they just kicked them off and killed them. They chopped people, they shot people, they raped us,  they left us senseless.''

Human Rights investigators said that Myanmar's military killed more than 1,000 civilians in the state of Rakhine, and possibly as many as 5,000 though it will be hard to ever know because Myanmar is not allowing the United Nations or anyone else into the affected areas.

Peter Bouckaert, a veteran investigator with Human Rights Watch, said there was growing evidence of organized massacres, like the one Rajuma survived, in which government soldiers methodically slaughtered more than 100 civilians in a single location. He called them crimes against humanity.

ON Wednesday last, the United Nations human rights office said the government troops had targeted  ''houses, fields, food-stocks, crops, live-stock and even trees,'' ''making it almost impossible'' for the Rohingya to return home.

Myanmar's army has claimed it was responding to an attack by Rohingya militants on Aug 25 and targeted only the insurgents.

But according to dozens of witnesses, almost all the people killed were unarmed villagers, and many had their hands bound.

Satellite imagery has revealed 288 separate villages burned, some down to the last post.

Human Rights groups said the government troops had one goal : to erase entire  Rohingya communities. the unsparing destruction drove more than half a million people into Bangladesh in recent weeks.

UNITED NATIONS officials called the campaign against Rohingya ..a ''textbook example'' of ethnic cleansing. 

Nearly, each night here in coastal Bangladesh, up the Bay of Bengal, from Myanmar, bodies wash up in the brown foamy brown tide  -children, men old women who tried to escape on leaking boats, their faces bloated from seawater.

Rajuma barely made it to Bangladesh, escaping on a small wooden boat a few weeks ago. 

She cannot read or write. She does not have a single piece of paper to prove who she is or that she was born in Myanmar.

This maybe a problem if she applies for refugee status in Bangladesh, which has been reluctant to give it, or even tries to go home to Myanmar. She thinks she is around 20, but she could pass for 14   -painfully thin, with wrists that look as if they could easily break.

AZEEM IBRAHIM, a Scottish academic who recently wrote a book on the Rohingya, explained that much of the animosity could be traced back to World War II-

When the Rohingya fought on the British side and many Buddhists in Rakhine fought for the occupying Japanese. Both sides massacred civilians.

After the Allies won, the Rohingya hoped to win independence or join East Pakistan [today's Bangladesh] which was also majority Muslim and ethnically similar to Rohingya.

But the British, eager to appease Myanmar's Buddhist majority, decreed that the Rohingya areas would become part of newly independent Myanmar [then called Burma], setting the Rohingya up for decades of discrimination.

The Sadness, and  the Shame of the world, and that of the  World Students Society, continues, as I thank author Azeem Ibrahim, and researcher author Jeffrey Gettleman.

With respectful dedication to the Rohingya Muslims, the Secretary General of the United Nations, and the Leaders, Students, Professors and Teachers of the free world. 

See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW!  -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' GeoPolitics '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless