Backs Against The Wall

Rohingya Ghettos Now Face Liquidation
(Part of The Darkness Visible series)

Burmese Police Carrying Out The Liquidations

In Warsaw the ghettos were liquidated as concentrations camps large enough to hold the population of Warsaw's ghetto came online. These death camps were meant to be slaughter houses for the Jews trapped in the Polish city's worse slum. There was no sense of hope for the Jews in Warsaw's ghetto when the SS came that day.

In Myanmar there is no sense of hope as the Burmese police and military start the next stage of ethnic cleansing. This is the stage of genocide where the targeted minority is no longer allowed to die slowly in disease ridden slums. This is the stage of genocide where the target population is taken away and butchered like animals. The murders no longer view any of the targeted population as human.

Rohingya have been fleeing the ghettos ahead of the approach of military personnel. Their constant trickle across the border into Bangladesh has led to violent conflict with the Bengali military. And now the Bengali government has created a "crisis" in which to scapegoat the Rohingya.

A Bengali Buddhist shrine was recently attacked and burnt. Nobody has been able to confirm that the shrine was attacked by ethnic Rohingya. The fact that the Buddhist were shot seems to blatantly rule out the Rohingya due to the fact the Rohingya have no access to firearms. But the "crisis still stands. And the border with Myanmar is now being shutdown as the Bengali military attempts to plug the porous borderland.

In doing this the Bengali government has allowed its military forces to no longer exercise any sense of restraint in firing upon Rohingya attempting to cross over from Myanmar. It is expected that the Rohingya already in Bangladesh will soon be deported back over the border and forced back into the conflict in the Rakhine region of Myanmar. It is unknown as of now just how many Rohingya have been slaughtered by the Bengali police and military as the UN does not venture beyond the refugee camps.

The jungle is now the only friend to the Rohingya. Their lives will now become that of total exclusion. They will have no access to water or food. If they are to have any form of shelter then they will have to build it. And even in the jungle the Rohingya will have to fear attacks by the Rakhine Buddhist and the Myanmar military.

But before some can make it to the jungle they will first have to suffer through the hellish liquidations Myanmar's military are currently carrying out. This is what liquidation looks like...

There is nothing democratic about this. No Rohingya gets a say in where they will end up or what will happen to them along the way. They simply are left at the mercy of their attackers. All will have to pray and fight just to live another day. And all this just because of their ethnicity and religion.

In Krakow the liquidation of the ghetto came without warning. A concentration camp was already up and running on the edge of Krakow. It would become a processing station for the Jews in Krakow's ghetto as they moved on to Auschwitz. Liquidation of Krakow's ghetto was quick and very violent. The SS wanted the Jews of Krakow gone almost over night.

In Myanmar the liquidations are rather quick and very grotesquely violent. It appears that the Burmese want the Rohingya to be gone into this long dark night. The only problem for the Rohingya is that there seems to be nowhere left to go. The Rohingya now find themselves with their backs' against the wall.

Scream... lift you voice and scream for those who are dieing.

Welcome To The Ghetto

Banished To The Slums
(Part of The Darkness Visible series) 

Myanmar Government Now Establishing Ghettos For Rohingya

In Sittwe, Myanmar the Burmese government has now established a policy of forced segregation in which the Rohingya are being forced into ghettos. The Rakhine Buddhist are now the only ones allowed to enter the market areas in Sittwe and other cities and larger villages in the Rakhine region of Myanmar. Rohingya who had their own businesses in this region are now banned from working. Rohingya who had homes in Sittwe are now homeless and forced to walk the alleyways of the ghettos. Not one Rohingya dares leave the ghettos in fear that they will be attacked. Sittwe is now in a full fledged stage of ethnic cleansing.

In 1992 the Serbian militias set up concentration camps and ghettos where the Bosniaks were forced to live in constant fear. These sorts of open air prisons are meant to force the prisoners to live like animals. For the oppressors on the outside these camps are designed to give the image that the prisoners are not human. And for the community as a whole... this sort of segregation will leave scars that even time can not truly heal.

For my ancestors the ghettos were a way of life that still lives in the backs of our minds. To a degree the memory of these places still lives on even in generations who never knew what the ghettos were actually like. This is how time fails to wipe the slate clean. This is why the ghetto is such an effective tool of war.

Myanmar police and military have been known to use these ghettos to round up Rohingya women to gang rape or use as sexual slaves. Once again this mirrors how the Serbian militias used this tactic. It shows how the Junta is creating a step by step version of ethnic cleansing. This is exactly the style of genocide that appeared in Bosnia. It is the method the Nazis used in Eastern Europe. And it is how the Russians exercised their segregation and pogroms before the Holocaust.

Food and Clean Water are Scarce in the Ghetto

Death has a way of lingering in camps like these. Frail bodies haunt the shadows as helplessness creeps around every corner. A sense of timelessness falls over a person who lives in these conditions. There is nothing to mark the passing of time anyhow. There are no meals to speak of. There are no jobs to get up in the morning and go off to do. There is no reason to go to bed when your stomach is aching and your body is hurting. And there is no way of quenching your thirst without inviting death from disease or infection. 

No human being should ever have to live like this. Nobody should ever have to wait for death to come for them as they live with the fading hope of having a life worth living. Yet this is what the world has left for the Rohingya. This is the life Myanmar has cursed an entire ethnicity with. 

For those who make it to UN sponsored camps life isn't much better. They have already passed through the hell of war. They have been hunted like a dog as they ran through the flames. And now they must live in a ghetto full of pale canvas tents and meager rations. 

So how can you help end this ethnic cleansing campaign? How can you do anything that might end the United States support for Myanmar's genocidal campaign against the Rohingya?

The easiest way to take action is to first contact your Representative in Congress. All you have to do is search by zip code on the following page:

http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/

Once you have found your Representative you can go to their web page and email them. In your own words you can express how you have read about the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and you want the United States to come out on the world stage and condemn it. Tell your Representative that you want the United States to take any actions necessary to force Myanmar to end the ethnic cleansing and stop the genocide of the Rohingya Muslims. 

If you do not want to take this action you can "Scream" with us. To do this you can simply press the "share" button down below. By posting these articles on your FaceBook and Twitter you raise your voice with us and help spread the word about this horrific tragedy. And that alone is a simple step you can take that honestly and rapidly helps end the silence surrounding this genocide.

Fighting Back

(Picture above is of a Romani girl who fled to Canada, the scars on her chest were put there during a racial attack she suffered in the Czech Republic)
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Tensions Rising in Czech Republic
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The old phrase "out of sight, out of mind" seems to be proving itself wrong once again in the Czech Republic. As the government encourages the forcible moving of Roma families from all over the country to the Sluknov foothills area. This move is just the start of a new wave of ghettoizing the Roma minority in the Czech Republic. A system of social exclusion that is now spawning the need for state intervention through violent reactions to a system the government created.
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But before I get at the reason for the violence let me first explain the attacks a little further.
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Tensions appear to have begun growing as the waves of new Roma families began to appear in the Sluknov area. Racial tensions then continued to grow as the "majority population" began to organize anti-Roma events in protest of the continued arrival of Roma (who didn't want to be in the Slukov area anyhow). And yet nothing was really going too awfully wrong till about a week ago.
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That is when the racial tensions flared up (literally) when Molotovs began to fly. Attacks on Roma families began to be reported as the far-right continued to organize. Families that had been removed from areas of the Czech Republic where they had been victimized were now being attacked in Northern Bohemia.
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However it wasn't till a couple days ago that the Roma began to fight back. That was when a racial attack surpassed all others in its shear brutality. A delivery van driver was reported to have rapidly accelerated as he drove over a five year old Roma boy. The majority population however seems to have united behind the delivery driver as they continue to blame the dead boy for the racial attack that ended his life.
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This is what led to the attacks on the "majority" by the minority population. Roma have finally stomached enough violence to be ready to unleash some of their own. And thus you end up with attacks like the one a day ago when twenty Roma attacked four "majority population" men.
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The attack was brutal in nature and ended up with one of the victims in the hospital with broken bones. The Romani had attacked the four men outside and then broken in their door to attack the four men in their home. They had even used clubs of some sort in the attack on the "majority".
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So how does this sort of issue arise so quickly?
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Well first of all it has been an issue that has been bubbling to the surface for some time now. It began way back in 1989 when the economy in the Czech Republic sort of crashed. Roma who had worked just like everyone else in the economy were the first to be given the pink slips. As a result they were forced out of the productive society and into the world of welfare.
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For two generations now the Roma have been doing anything they can to get back on their feet. This would have been easier had the Czech government not taken the actions it did earlier this year. Now we are witnessing how that second generation, a generation that no longer remembers what it is to work for a living, reacts to being forced into a ghetto lifestyle.
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Earlier this year the Czech government took actions it claims are to reduce the debt of government by cutting its expenditures. It is choosing to do this by cutting the Romani people out of the welfare state it created three decades ago. It is not however choosing to find ways to put these people back to work. It is not attempting to find ways to grow its taxable population by decreasing its welfare population through honest labor.
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Like the rioters in London these Romani are people who know a life that the state has provided for them. Every attempt to break free from this sort of indentured servitude proves unsuccessful for most Roma. Even a college education proves useless when the "majority population" seems unshakable in their resolve to exclude the Roma. They are after all the first to loose their jobs and the last to be hired back into the work force.
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Thus we have a situation that seems tailor made for the Czech government. A situation where only the strong arm of the law can solve the issue at hand. And that always makes people like me a little worried.
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In both the past and present the Czech government has shown an over willingness to ghettoize the Roma. The Czech government seems to have a love affair with forcing the Roma out of secular society. And this recent out break of racial violence (violence that the Czech government should had seen coming with the current rise of far-right rhetoric) forces a situation which only the law can handle.
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We will have to wait to see what happens but in my humble opinion this problem has no happy ending. Violence begets violence. And the result of this violent outbreak can only serve to fuel the flames of the fascist movement in Eastern Europe.
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Source Documents (Note that not all sources used are listed)
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Prague Monitor
http://praguemonitor.com/2011/08/22/romani-group-reportedly-attacks-four-men-north-bohemia
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Romea.cz
http://www.romea.cz/english/index.php?id=detail&detail=2007_2725
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http://www.romea.cz/english/index.php?id=detail&detail=2007_2714
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http://www.romea.cz/english/index.php?id=detail&detail=2007_2711
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http://www.romea.cz/english/index.php?id=detail&detail=2007_2727
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http://www.romea.cz/english/index.php?id=detail&detail=2007_2706
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CBC News Canada
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/story/2009/06/25/roma-czech-asylum062509.html

Romanian Ghettos

The Call for Roma "Segregation"
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It is hard to imagine any modern state using ghettos as a method of control or in the name of "safety" these days. After the lessons learned in Warsaw it seems unthinkable that any politician in any European country would think this was a good idea. But it is happening once again. And the idea is spreading slowly but surely.
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In February of 2010 The Times on London reported that a Slovak town had begun building a 2.2 meter tall wall that was meant to segregate the two-thirds of the town's population. That wall still is in use today. And the Roma are still being segregated in Bulgaria as this article is being written.
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Just as they were in 2010 the walls are still being constructed. The ghettos are still being assembled. And the Roma are now being forced out of "civilized society".
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Their neighbors claim the isolation is for their own protection. A slogan used before. A message proclaimed by similar socialist societies of the past.
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Today the Romanians join the ranks of the Eastern Europeans willing to use ghettos to isolate the Romani population. In Baia Mare, a city in northwestern Romania, the locals are ready to build a concrete wall that will encircle the Roma area of town. This is an area the Roma were "deported" to and are now being held captive in. And once again the isolated area soon to be walled off is being said to be "for the Romas' protection".
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In past articles I have asked without remorse what would happen if places like Auschwitz were allowed to come back online. Today it seems that the old death camps are not far from the current issues facing the Roma population. Like under the old socialist of the past, the Roma of Romania now face a society that is willing to surrender its own humanity for a vain promise of "safety". And the promise of "safety" once again is not being promised to the Roma themselves.
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The governor of the city claims the deportations of the Roma outside the city limits was a necessary step to rid the city of its' "poverty hotbeds". In a way he was correct. However now the countryside just beyond the city has an issue with forced poverty. It also has an issue with sanitation since the Romani ghetto was built right next to the city's water treatment facility.
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In post World War One Germany the Roma faced similar "concentration" sites. The Nazi regime felt it was somehow fitting to place Roma ghettos near waste sites. This increased the probability of disease or death due to exposure. The Romanian governor has chosen a similar site for similar reasons.
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So the question is this... how much more will the European Union tolerate? How much more human rights violations will they stomach happening right on their door step? And are we seeing the buildup to another genocide on European soil?
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Some Source Documents Not Listed.
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The Sofia Echo
http://sofiaecho.com/2010/02/18/860356_slovak-town-raises-concrete-wall-around-roma-ghetto-report
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SETimes.com
"Roma Community Segregation Still Plaguing Romania"
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