Dear All,

A number of updates to share.

We have uploaded short and snappy interviews with activists and academics working to end the genocide.  They can be viewed at my blog under Activism, Social Media Activism.
They are designed to inform, educate and hopefully trigger solidarity work in support of Rohingya people. 

The interviewed figures are Professor Kyaw Win, the oldest, and still not retired dissident at 84, from Boulder, Colorado (whose anti-dictatorship Burma activism dates back to the 1970's), Harn Yawnghwe of EuroBurma Office/ADDB Inc., Ro Nay San Lwin of Rohingya Blogger site, Ro Hla Kyaw  of European Rohingya Council and Professor Rainer Schulze, founding editor of the journal, The Holocaust in History and Memory, at the University of Essex. 

More interviews will be uploaded once the subtitles are done.  Credits go to our British sister Nargess Moballeghi, a professional interviewer and video-producer from London, who came to the Berlin Conference on Myanmar Genocidein order to film these interviews at our request. 

We have 600 GB of all proceedings of the conference.  They are being edited into panels and stand-alone presentations, and being uploaded to YouTube.   Everything should be up on YouTube by the end of this week.   They will be clustered together in a single place for convenience's sake .

Speaking of the conference that had caused a storm in the Burmese teacup  - while the genocidal regime of SuuKyi-MinAungHlaing was busy holding a press conference in Yangon to discredit the Berlin Conference, making up all kinds of lies about how the government delegation was disinvited from our conference the public mind was filled with rumours that UN Peacekeeping Troops were already pouring into the shores of Bangladesh!     For the conference dropped the non-starter mantra of "voluntary, safe and dignified" return of Rohingyas to Myanmar and openly called for "Protected Return to Protected Homeland", the only viable way for Rohingya to reclaim their birthplace and rebuild their lives.   

No survivors must be forced to live at the mercy of perpetrators. 



Matthew Gindin (in pic with his laptop on), a Canadian journalist, who flew in from Vancouver, British Columbia, published another piece on along th the genocide in Myanmar:  usually his pieces are well-researched and thoughtfully written and inform the Jewish readership. 

Meanwhile Professor C Abrar of the University of Dhaka has penned a piece "Oxford's Neo-Orientalism" for Bangladesh's leading paper The Daily Star, outraged that Oxford University Press is still going ahead with its colonialist choice of a notorious anti-Rohingya White Man as "the expert" to write the reference article for its Asia History on-line educational series. 

Oxford characteristically acting in a recognizably colonial fashion is something that concerns Professor David Palumbo-Liu, holds an endowed chair at Stanford and Vice President of the American Comparative Literature Association.   TruthOut in the USA recently published Palumbo-Liu Who Gets to Write the Encyclopedia? Rohingya "Expert" Denies Genocide .   

Professor Gayatri Spivak, known for her no-nonsense communications, laid bare the shady politics of scholarship - nothing innocent or high class about knowledge production, despite the intellectual class' self-serving pretence to the contrary.  She was quoted in  Palumbo-Liu's aforementioned essay as saying, "European knowledge management authorities subsidize histories that establish a new colonial bias supporting (sometimes unwittingly) Burma's entry into the global scene -- a new stock exchange with immense investments by India, China, and general nation state investors," she said. "Jacques Leider's colonial bias -- masquerading as 'objectivity' --- comes in useful here. This is how historical accounts are put to use in the interests of an economic growth that has little to do with social inclusion."  

Besides the world of ideas, there are quite a few conferences and public fora on Myanmar genocide that are being planned on various continents - Paris, Cologne, Dublin, Belfast, Istanbul, etc. 

The highly respected Indian journalist and citizen activist Tapan Bose in New Delhi is planning an intellectually serious conference "The Rohingya Refugee Crisis: Causes and Consequences: Search for a Durable Solution" in May.   He is seeking support to pay for the airfare of international activists and speakers.  I would be grateful if you are in a position to enable Tapan to pull off a much-needed public forum on the subject in Delhi.   His email is:  bose.tapan@gmail.com 

I am going to be speaking on the Rohingya issue at the international conference in Istanbul devoted to Islamophobia coming up in  a week's time.  I am looking forward to linking up with other academics and activists fighting this new Fascism.  The enemy is GLOBALLY-linked through the structures of the inter-state system, and We the People would be stupid to fight in our little silos.  

The famed Irish peace activist Mairead Maguire (Nobel Peace laureate, 1976) and her colleagues in Belfast are planning a public event on Myanmar genocide and so are the Irish and Sinhalese academics and activists in Dublin - all next month.  

One piece of good news from the chambers of American power:   (US) Lawmakers call for pressure on Myanmar over Pyongyang ties

Finally, I'll leave you with this 5-minutes clip on the scathing overview of Aung San Suu Kyi's visit to Australia.  I am not sure many Myanmar leaders will be trotting the globe as frequently as they used to, considering that the world of citizens now clamour for their heads, figuratively speaking, of course.   

Conversely, governments should start issuing travel advisory to their citizens heading to Suu Kyi's Myanmar - “you are going to a state that is now committing genocide" - as Kyle Matthews of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS) put to it the Jewish Independent.