statista: Venezuela Is Fast Becoming World's Biggest Refugee Crisis

According to UN data, Venezuela is fast becoming the world's biggest refugee crisis. By the end of 2020, 6.5 million Venezuelans are expected to have been forcibly displaced outside of their home country. This is up from just 300,000 in 2017. Syria, the biggest global refugee crisis to date, reached its height in 2018 with 6.7 million displaced people. With resettlement programs ongoing, that number is expected to have been reduced to 5.6 by the end of 2019 and might further fall in 2020.

While the number of Syrian refugees and those in a refugee-like situation had been rising since 2011, Venezuelan refugee numbers jumped up quickly, testing the preparedness of humanitarian organizations in the region.

Brookings Institution, which analyzed the data, notes that compared to the Syrian crisis, the Venezuela refugee situation is severely underfunded, putting the lives of hundred thousands of people at risk because of the lack of food and medical assistance.

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UnHerd: Has Hungary conceived a baby boom?

Both Hitler and Mussolini incentivised childbearing with limited success. In the 1960s Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceaușescu, eager to boost his nation’s demographic heft, removed the availability of contraception overnight. At first there was a sharp increase in the number of babies being born, but before too long people found ways around the system, and by the time of his fall, Ceaușescu’s Romania was not performing much better from a population perspective than most of its neighbours – which is to say, very poorly. [...]

Likewise in nearby Poland, where the current government stands on a pro-traditional-family platform and since 2016 has offered relatively generous child benefits – £100 per month per child – as well as maintaining strict anti-abortion laws. The policy has been credited with helping the ruling Law and Justice party win re-election, but, as in Hungary, the rise in fertility is small and still leaves Poland at barely two-thirds of what would be required for replacement. [...]

For now, two things for sure can be said. First, the best guarantee of avoiding the very lowest fertility rates in developed countries is an acceptance of extra-marital births and assistance to women in combining work and family. Where women get the education to aspire but are not encouraged to combine aspiration with motherhood, they tend to opt for the former, which is why fertility rates are so low in countries with traditional attitudes to women in the workplace, such as Italy and Japan, but higher in places like Scandinavia and France.

Second, much as governments can try their best, the only true guarantee of replacement fertility is a family-oriented and child-loving culture. Societies or ethnic groups wanting to survive and thrive should not just look to their governments for tax breaks and benefits but should look to themselves, their values and attitudes.

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CNN: US condemns Saudi Arabia over religious freedom abuses

The State Department's top official for international religious freedom said Friday that Saudi Arabia continues "to be one of the worst actors in the world on religious persecution" -- a blunt assessment in light of the administration's consistent pro-Saudi policies.[...]

"Freedom of religion is not provided under the law. The government does not allow the public practice of any non-Muslim religion. The law criminalizes 'anyone who challenges, either directly or indirectly, the religion or justice of the King or Crown Prince.' The law criminalizes 'the promotion of atheistic ideologies in any form,' 'any attempt to cast doubt on the fundamentals of Islam,' publications that 'contradict the provisions of Islamic law,' and other acts including non-Islamic public worship, public display of non-Islamic religious symbols, conversion by a Muslim to another religion, and proselytizing by a non-Muslim," it notes.

The report describes discrimination against and abuse of Shiite Muslims, including up to 34 individuals who faced possible execution. Saudi Arabia executed 37 men, the majority of them Shiites, in April 2019. One of them was crucified. Three were minors when the kingdom said they carried out their crimes. [...]

The Chinese government has detained "possibly more than 2 million Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and members of other Muslim groups, mostly Chinese citizens, in specially built or converted detention facilities in Xinjiang and subjected them to forced disappearance, torture, physical abuse, and prolonged detention without trial because of their religion and ethnicity since April 2017," the report notes.

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The Atlantic: Photos: The 15 Tallest Statues in the World

With the unveiling of the Statue of Unity in India today, there is a new name topping the list of the tallest statues in the world. The new monument to Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel stands 597 feet (182 meters) tall, overtaking the previous record holder, the 420-foot (128-meter) Spring Temple Buddha, in China’s Lushan County. Using Wikipedia’s standard of measuring to “the highest part of the human (or animal) figure, but excluding the height of any pedestal,” we present images below of the 15 tallest statues in the world as of today, plus five bonus photos of some more famous—if smaller—colossal monuments.

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The New York Review of Books: The Autocracy App

In Myanmar, hatred whipped up on Facebook Messenger has driven ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. In India, false child abduction rumors on Facebook’s WhatsApp service have incited mobs to lynch innocent victims. In the Philippines, Turkey, and other receding democracies, gangs of “patriotic trolls” use Facebook to spread disinformation and terrorize opponents. And in the United States, the platform’s advertising tools remain conduits for subterranean propaganda.[...]

It’s not just external critics who see something fundamentally amiss at the company. People central to Facebook’s history have lately been expressing remorse over their contributions and warning others to keep their children away from it. Sean Parker, the company’s first president, acknowledged last year that Facebook was designed to cultivate addiction. He explained that the “like” button and other features had been created in response to the question, “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?” Chamath Palihapitiya, a crucial figure in driving Facebook’s growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” over his involvement in developing “tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” Roger McNamee, an early investor and mentor to Zuckerberg, has become a full-time crusader for restraining a platform that he calls “tailor-made for abuse by bad actors.”[...]

As Facebook proved a better tool for autocrats than for revolutionaries, the protest machine became a surveillance and disinformation machine. In Cambodia, Hun Sen’s government has poured money into Facebook advertising to build up an inflated following, while an “experiment” the company performed in six small countries—moving news content out of the primary Newsfeed into a separate “Explore” section—made independent media sources all but invisible. In the Philippines, where the average user spends nearly four hours a day on social media, Rodrigo Duterte’s government has carried out a campaign of legal harassment against the brave news start-up Rappler—which is, of course, mainly distributed via Facebook.[...]

But the Microsoft precedent is not encouraging. After a federal judge found that Microsoft had abused its monopoly and ruled that it should be separated into two companies, the US Court of Appeals overturned the ruling on multiple grounds. The government has brought no comparably ambitious antitrust action against a major technology company in the two decades since. If the Justice Department were to become interested in breaking up Facebook, it would need the FTC to expand its definition of “consumer harm” to explicitly include violations of data privacy.

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IFLScience: Nepal's Tiger Population Doubles Thanks To Dedicated Conservation Work

Once found throughout the Asian continent and several Asian islands, tigers (Panthera tigris) have been wiped out of existence in many regions and are endangered in all their remaining pockets of habitat due to human activities, chiefly deforestation for agriculture and urbanization (more than 40 percent of native tiger ecosystems have been destroyed in the past 20 years alone), depletion of prey species, and poaching.

Per the IUCN Red List, tigers have disappeared from Java, Bali, southwest and central Asia, and from large areas of southeast and eastern Asia over the past 100 years. Currently, tigers inhabit about 7 percent of their former range, with evidence of breeding populations in Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia, Thailand, and potentially China and Myanmar. It is estimated that there were around 100,000 tigers in the wild in the early 1900s; now there are around 3,200 tigers – a figure that encompasses all subspecies.

Nepal’s success provides a model of how other nations can fulfill their pledge to meet the goal of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)’s TX2 project. Launched at the WWF’s 2010 Tiger Summit, TX2 is an ambitious research, conservation, and anti-poaching project aimed at doubling the total tiger population to 6,000 individuals by 2022 – the next Year of the Tiger in the Chinese Zodiac. Nepal and 12 other nations within the species’ range have committed to the plan.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Catastrophe of the Rohingya

In March, the US Holocaust Museum joined several organizations that have taken back humanitarian recognition from Suu Kyi: it revoked its prestigious Elie Wiesel award, stating, “We had hoped that you — as someone we and many others have celebrated for your commitment to human dignity and universal human rights — would have done something to condemn and stop the military’s brutal campaign and to express solidarity with the targeted Rohingya population.” [...]

The UN Secretary General’s Special Envoy on sexual violence Primila Patten of Mauritius has also gone public with her exasperation over Suu Kyi’s refusal to engage substantively on the issue of Burmese military’s systematic sexual violence against literally thousands of Rohingya women and girls – many of whom did not make it to Cox Bazaar’s [in Bangladesh] camps. Suu Kyi should know that inactivity in the face of genocidal actions can carry moral and legal responsibility.” [...]

There are two main reasons behind the genocide: racism and greed. Militant Buddhist groups such as the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party voice the dominant anti-Rohingya sentiment. One of its leaders, U Shwe Mg asserts: “the so-called Rohingya are just illegal immigrants. We allowed them to settle down here because we are generous people and we thought they would just stay a while. But the Bengali had a lot of children, paid Buddhist women to convert to Islam and marry them, stole our land, squeezed our resources, and now they demand equal rights and citizenship. It can’t be.” [...]

Amnesty International has called the system the Rohingya live under “apartheid”: “This system appears designed to make Rohingyas’ lives as hopeless and humiliating as possible.  The security forces’ brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing … is just another manifestation of this appalling attitude.”   [...]

To give a sense of the immensity of this human-made horror, Shirin Ebadi asserted that refugee camps in Syria and Palestine are like “five-star hotels” compared to the refugee sites in Bangladesh.  The present conditions are bad enough, with the monsoon season is fast approaching, disease, hunger, and death will rise exponentially very soon.

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The Atlantic: How the U.S. Became the World’s Largest Food-Aid Donor

Every December, Band Aid’s “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” rings out at malls and holiday parties across the United States and the United Kingdom. But that earworm of a song was actually originally written in response to the devastating famine in Ethiopia in the early 1980s—and it’s far from the famine’s only legacy. Both the hunger and the relief effort were so enormous that they defined a generation, and forced a major reevaluation of how food aid works. After Ethiopia, many countries decided that handing out cash or vouchers was a cheaper, quicker, and more effective way to feed the hungry, as opposed to literally giving food. Experts began to focus on whether the food itself was the right kind—whether it contained the right mix of nutrients to help malnourished kids recover. And an increasing number of governments refocused their aid efforts exclusively on emergency relief, rather than development.

The United States, however, remained committed to giving food as aid. This episode, we talk to Barry Riley, the author of The Political History of American Food Aid: An Uneasy Benevolence, in order to understand why the United States overcame its initial reluctance to feeding the hungry overseas, and explore the impact of its more recent career as the world’s largest food-aid donor. From surplus grain stored in retired battleships to Cold War maneuvers, America’s history has set up its enduring role as the largest provider of food, rather than money. Meanwhile, we check in with the seasoned food-aid professionals Bea Rogers and Patrick Webb at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University to investigate what the latest science can tell us about the best way to feed hungry people.

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The Economist: After two years of civilian rule, Myanmar’s politicians are gloomy

March 30th marked two years since the army ceded power to the NLD. But it left in place a constitution that exempts it from civilian control, puts it in charge of internal security and grants it a quarter of seats in parliament, massively curtailing the new government’s authority. The constitution also deliberately bars Ms Suu Kyi from the presidency, as the parent of foreigners (her children are British citizens). Ms Suu Kyi has at least got around that: she is, in her own words, “above the president”. In late March the placeman she had installed in the presidency announced on Facebook that he was resigning to “take a rest”. Parliament promptly elected a new one, Win Myint, an NLD loyalist like his predecessor. Little will change as a result. Ms Suu Kyi remains firmly in charge.

Some things have improved markedly since the NLD took office. Myanmar has jumped up Transparency International’s corruption index, a survey based on public perceptions. Citizens are also much freer to speak their minds than they used to be. But NLD politicians are novices who struggle to put ideas into practice. Some were first elected in 1990, but were never allowed to take their seats in parliament. Instead, the army put many of them in jail. While Ms Suu Kyi runs the country, a clique of these ageing former political prisoners runs the party. They are not running much. The NLD is more a fan club than a party articulating policies and training future leaders. As a party whip puts it, “NLD minus Aung San Suu Kyi equals nearly zero.” [...]

The NLD is also cutting itself off from people with ideas. Foreign advisers are regarded with growing suspicion because of their complaints about Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority. Parliament is cooking up legislation to curb the activities of the UN and international NGOs. The NLD is even more hostile towards home-grown activists. The government has passed a law making it easier for police to ban protests. Mael Raynaud, a long-term observer of Burmese politics, notes that the NLD’s imprisoned leaders did not witness the blossoming of civil society in the 2000s thanks to a loosening up by the army and in response to a devastating cyclone. Years of repression also fostered paranoia, which has left the NLD prizing loyalty over competence.

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openDemocracy: Why are women joining far-right movements, and why are we so surprised?

The core question posed by such pieces is: Why are women joining far-right movements? But we must also ask: Why are we so surprised? After all, these issues are not new. “What attracts women to far-right movements that appear to denigrate their rights? This question has vexed feminist scholars for decades,” is how one historian put it. [...]

“There’s no reason to expect women to be less bigoted than men,” historian Linda Gordon concluded. Her research into the Klu Klux Klan (KKK) estimated that at least 1.5 million American women were members in the 1920s, including one third of all white Protestant women living in Indiana. [...]

“Fascism’s relationship with women has been neither consistent nor predictable,” is Durham’s conclusion. While men may have been more visible in such movments, large numbers of women also participated as voters, members, fundraisers, marchers, party officials, and more. [...]

“Women's roles in far-right and neo-Nazi groups have in the past been underestimated,” she writes. Reports may focus on movement leadership and parliamentary politics, for instance, or front-line acts of violence, while underplaying the importance of emotional and reproductive labour. When one of the Golden Dawn Girls tells her grandchildren “to go play with guns,” Seth-Smith notes that this is also performing a key role for the party.

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The Atlantic: The Pope's Impossible Choice in Burma

“You don’t counter racism and prejudice by backing down to it,” Mark Farmaner, director of the London-based Burma Campaign U.K. lobby group, told me. “Already nationalists are gloating about the pope not using the word ‘Rohingya.’ His failure to use the word will only embolden those who want to expel all Rohingya from Myanmar.” [...]

An uneasy and often antipathetic relationship between the country’s Buddhist majority and myriad Christian communities has simmered ever since. Three years after the war ended, celebrations over Burma’s independence were marred when Karen National Union, a largely Christian armed force in the country’s west, took up arms against the new government in Rangoon. Civil wars have flared across the country since then, often along ethnic and religious lines. Burma’s postcolonial government, bowing to pressure from an increasingly vocal monastic community, declared Buddhism the state religion in 1961. The outrage this decision provoked among Burma’s Christian minority helped justify a military coup d’état the next year, ushering in nearly five decades of military rule. [...]

Yet the reality for many outside the Buddhist faith is starkly different. Numerous towns across Burma have been rocked by anti-Muslim pogroms in recent years that have left scores dead. More than 100,000 people, overwhelmingly Christian, have been displaced by a six-year civil war in the country’s north; Burma’s military has worked to block humanitarian aid to many of those forced to flee. [...]

It occurs to me that the doctrine of papal infallibility bears uncomfortable similarities to the expectations we place on secular heroes like Suu Kyi. If that’s the case, it follows that the principles by which we judge both should be the same. Pope Francis has now arrived in Bangladesh; he will meet with Rohingya refugees and bear witness to their suffering. Meanwhile, refugees continue to stream across the border. Suu Kyi has yet to mention them by name.

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The Guardian: Pope Francis’s failure to say the word ‘Rohingya’ shows he is no peacemaker

The men who run the Vatican aren’t on the whole risk-takers, which is both why the current pope is a breath of fresh air, and also why he has so many enemies within his own kingdom. But nor are they back-downers: so although the political situation has made the trip more and more dodgy, they ploughed on with it; and the uncomfortable result is that, in the week Oxford announces it is withdrawing the freedom of the city from the Myanmar leader, one of its most prominent alumni, in protest at what is happening to the Rohingya, pictures are beamed around the world of her meeting the pope – and, worse, he has bowed to pressure not to refer to them by name. [...]

The truth is, and this visit has made this abundantly clear, the primary role of the pope is as the leader of the Roman Catholic community. The first people he must protect are his own; which is not unreasonable for any leader. So when his representative in Myanmar, Cardinal Charles Maung Bo, warned him that if he used the word “Rohingya” he might compromise the situation of the country’s tiny Catholic minority, Francis felt he had no option but to back down.

The Catholic church has many strengths, including in its humanitarian work – after all, it has representatives across the planet, and for all the bad apples we’ve become increasingly aware of, there are many good men and women working tirelessly to improve the living conditions of people who live in challenged situations. But it has weaknesses too, including the fact that its leader, while he might look like a world peacemaker, must look out first and foremost for his own people. And that, it seems, is what has had to happen here.

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Quartz: No, Pope Francis wouldn’t say “Rohingya” in Myanmar. Yes, it matters

In address made to Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung Suu Kyi, the country’s diplomatic corps, military officials, and Vatican clergy, the pope offered careful words to argue that religious differences should be a source for unity, not division.

Francis said Myanmar was suffering from civil conflict and hostilities “that have lasted all too long and created deep divisions” and that the Southeast Asian country should respect all religious groups, but never uttered the word “Rohingya.” Tens of thousands of members of the largely Muslim ethnic minority have fled Buddhist-dominated Myanmar for Bangladesh after facing violent retaliation following a militant attack. The exodus has created a humanitarian crisis in both countries. [...]

In Myanmar, using the term implies the speaker sides with the Rohingya and is against the government’s view. Papal advisors had warned him that using the word during his first visit to the country could exacerbate the tense situation and also put the country’s very small Christian population at risk. [...]

It’s not uncommon for the pope to avoid directly criticizing his hosts while making trips abroad. On a recent visit to Egypt, where president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has been accused of human-rights abuses and sharply limiting democracy, Francis spoke of peace and unity and only broadly warned of the “demagogic forms of populism.” [...]

Francis is expected to travel to Bangladesh later this week to meet with Rohingya refugees, which raises more questions about how effective his trip can be. Will a private gathering with a small group present the opportunity to voice condemnation of what some are calling mounting evidence of genocide? And, face to face, will the pope be able to address the Rohingya by their name?

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The Atlantic: 'It's a Mistake to Underestimate China'

But there are few signs that Washington has the political appetite to compete with the kinds of investments China has been making around the world. The most visible aspect of Beijing’s ambition to extend its economic and political influence around the world is the Belt and Road initiative, a massive infrastructure plan that aims to connect China to its Asian neighbors and farther afield. Think of it as a hub-and-spoke model: China, the hub, builds infrastructure in countries around the world, the spokes, in order to facilitate trade. China is building roads, bridges, seaports, and airports in more than 60 countries to facilitate the import of raw material in order to further fuel its own economic growth while it searches for new markets. Unlike the West, China offers cheap loans, doesn’t ask questions about human rights or the environment, and doesn’t export its political ideology. [...]

To be sure, there are challenges to China’s ambition. For one thing, the market logic underpinning some Belt and Road projects is questionable. One example: China’s investment in a Sri Lankan port didn’t get the traffic or cargo it had expected, saddling the Sri Lankan government with massive debt that it had trouble paying off. For another, the reaction to Belt and Road-funded projects isn’t always positive. Vietnam and Burma are good examples. In those countries, China is accused of importing workers, degrading the environment, building shoddy infrastructure, and eroding sovereignty. Meanwhile, regional rivals like India, Japan, and Russia, which fears China’s influence in Central Asia, are wary of Belt and Road. [...]

But, ultimately, Kilman pointed out, “none of these challenges are insurmountable” for China. Indeed, if Beijing has shown one thing, it’s the ability to learn from its mistakes. For instance, while some of its projects may be white elephants, such as the one in Sri Lanka, they serve an important geopolitical goal; following complaints and protests in other countries, China has built local capacity and provided jobs. “Not all of what China is doing is market-driven, but there are infrastructure needs in the Indian Ocean area,” Kliman said. China is meeting those needs.  

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Quartz: Would the world be more peaceful if there were more women leaders?

But these examples are anecdotal because, throughout history, women leaders have been extremely rare. Between 1950 and 2004, according to data compiled by Katherine W. Phillips, professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School, just 48 national leaders across 188 countries—fewer than 4% of all leaders—have been female. They included 18 presidents and 30 prime ministers. Two countries, Ecuador and Madagascar, had a woman leader, each of whom served for a mere two days before being replaced by a man. [...]

The fear of appearing weak affects modern women leaders too, according to Caprioli, perhaps causing them to over-compensate on issues of security and defense. She notes that women who emulate men, such as Thatcher, Meir, and India’s prime minister Indira Gandhi (1980-84)—who claimed to be a ‘biform human being’, neither man nor woman—are more likely to succeed as political leaders. They must also contend with negative stereotypes from male opponents: For example, Yahya Khan, former president of Pakistan (1969-71), said that he would have responded less violently toward Indira Gandhi during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War if India had had a male leader. “If that woman [Gandhi] thinks she can cow me down, I refuse to take it,” he said. [...]

States are also more likely to achieve lasting peace post-conflict when women are invited to the negotiating table. Although the number of women included in peace talks is minuscule (a United Nations study found that just 2.4% of mediators and 9% of negotiators are women, and just 4% of the signatories of 31 peace processes), the inclusion of women can make a profound difference. Peace is more likely to endure: An analysis by the US non-profit Inclusive Security of 182 signed peace agreements between 1989 and 2011 found that an agreement is 35% more likely to last at least 15 years if women are included as negotiators, mediators, and signatories.

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Haaretz: Israel Is Arming Criminals

Despite the UN stating that Myanmar’s army is carrying out “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya Muslim minority, Israel refuses to stop selling arms to the country’s military. Israel is doing so despite the fact that the European Union and the United States have both banned arms sales to Myanmar, making it the only Western nation supplying the country formerly known as Burma with weapons. [...]

In the part of the hearing held behind closed doors, the state’s representatives explained Israel’s relations with Myanmar to the justices. It is unclear why the state is concealing information from its citizens about the factors it uses to conduct trade. Even in the open part of the hearing, the state refused to say that Israel would stop selling weapons to Myanmar. [...]

Lieberman is lying. This is not the first time that Israel has taken such a course of action. It lied when it supported war crimes in Argentina, ignoring the American embargo, and it lied when it armed the Bosnian forces that perpetrated massacres, ignoring a UN embargo. It armed the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina and the Contras in Nicaragua, and it is arming the forces of evil in South Sudan. 

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The New Yorker: What Happened to Myanmar’s Human-Rights Icon?

Recently, I travelled to Myanmar and interviewed dozens of people to assess what had gone wrong. Many of them pointed out that Suu Kyi’s power is sharply limited. She has no authority over the Army, while military officers still control key areas of government and have the power to reverse democratic reforms. Some believe that she has made a political calculation not to risk domestic popularity for the sake of a hated and powerless minority; others regard her as lacking political skills. There are also those who think that she shares the Army’s authoritarian reflexes and the anti-Muslim prejudices of the Buddhist Bamar majority. But almost everyone I talked to expressed surprise at the speed and the scale of her transformation. “We never expected that Aung San Suu Kyi would get us this far,” a former student activist and political prisoner who once served as her bodyguard told me. “But, at the same time, we never expected that Aung San Suu Kyi would have changed so much herself once she got into power.” [...]

Last week, I met with Wai Wai Nu again, but outside Myanmar. She now believed that her people might be facing extinction. She told me she worried that there was a plan to drive the entire Rohingya community from the country. She had been monitoring Burmese social media, and was horrified by what she read. Burmese officials were saying that mass rape couldn’t have occurred because Rohingya women were too filthy. “Because the civilian government is saying these things, people are becoming more and more full of hate,” Wai Wai Nu said. “Before, it was a military dictatorship, so no one believed them when they said awful things. But now it’s the civilian government of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi saying these ignorant things and that legitimizes the hate.”  [...]

Buddhist ultranationalism has eroded the center ground of Burmese politics. In the 2015 elections, the N.L.D., anxious to avoid accusations that it was a “Muslim party,” refused to field a single Muslim candidate. For the first time since independence, no Muslims currently serve in parliament. And Suu Kyi’s government has made no attempt to revoke laws that limit the number of children Muslims can have and that create obstacles for marriages between Muslim men and Buddhist women. [...]

He was right that Suu Kyi has little alternative but to work with the people she once campaigned against. The euphoria that surrounded her ascent obscured how extensive the military’s power remains. The Army controls the ministries for defense, home affairs, and border affairs, and a quarter of the seats in parliament are reserved for men in uniform. Even ministries that are in civilian hands, such as finance, are full of holdovers from the previous regime, and much of the country’s budget is reserved for military use. Myanmar’s constitution, written by the military in 2008, presents additional difficulties. It allows the Army to declare a state of emergency and seize power, and it also contains a clause that makes Suu Kyi ineligible for the Presidency. (Her current official title, State Counsellor, is a workaround.) Suu Kyi wants to amend the Constitution and become President, but this requires military support. Her defenders often cite the precariousness of her constitutional position as a reason for her reluctance to speak out about Army abuses. While pushing the military for constitutional reform, she must also avoid antagonism and a return to military rule. [...]

“Aung San Suu Kyi has the benefit of having become an icon without saying a whole lot,” Kenneth Roth, of Human Rights Watch, told me. “Havel came to his position by saying a lot, by being a moral voice. Aung San Suu Kyi didn’t say much at all. She was a moral symbol, and we read into that symbol certain virtues, which turned out to be wrong when she actually began speaking.” Suu Kyi was not an intellectual, like Havel, or a freedom fighter, like Mandela, or an organizer, like Walesa. And, unlike her father, she did not die before her legend could be tarnished.

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The Atlantic: The Misunderstood Roots of Burma's Rohingya Crisis

Tensions between the Bengali-speaking Muslims and Buddhists in Rakhine state have existed for decades—some would say centuries—but the most significant inflection point came in 1982 when Burma’s junta passed a law that identified 135 ethnicities entitled to citizenship. The Rohingya were not among them, though they had enjoyed equal rights since Burma became independent from British rule in 1948. Almost overnight, they were stripped of their citizenship.

In the years since then, the Rohingya were persecuted, steadily lost their rights, and were the victims of violence. The worst of this violence erupted in 2012 following the rape of a Buddhist woman allegedly by Muslim men. That prompted massive religious violence against the Rohingya, forcing 140,000 of them into camps for internally displaced people. International pressure resulted in the military government agreeing to grant the Rohingya a reduced form of citizenship if they registered themselves as Bengali—not Rohingya. Although many Muslims in Rakhine state were previously indifferent to how they were labeled, the years of oppression, combined with the type of citizenship they were being offered, made the offer unpalatable. [...]

For the Burmese government, the word Rohingya is particularly fraught. This is because if the government acknowledges Rakhine’s Muslims as members of the Rohingya ethnic group, then under the 1982 citizenship law—ironically, the same measure that stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship—the Muslims would be allowed an autonomous area within the country. And therein lies the crux of the problem: The Burmese fear a Rohingya autonomous area along the border with Bangladesh would come at the expense of Rakhine territory. The Burmese military, which has cracked down on Rohingya civilians, views this as a possible staging area for terrorism by groups like ARSA.

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Quartz: Bill Clinton coined a new phrase to describe today’s right-wing populism

“You’re all here because, in one way or another, you intuitively know this. You believe that multiplication is a superior strategy to division. You believe that addition is the superior strategy to subtraction in economics, social inclusion and politics. You believe that there are severe limits on the ability of rising separatist tribalism to solve the problems that [threaten] the opportunities of the modern world.” [...]

Clinton said that separatist tribalism is evident everywhere from the expulsion of the Rohingya in Myanmar, to the estimated 11 million refugees who have fled their homes in Syria since the outbreak of civil war, to the pressures on Jordan and Lebanon regarding their policies in Yemen, and the economic and political crisis rocking Venezuela. [...]

Successful cooperation, he said, depends on “first believing that we can and must every day expand the definition of ‘us’ [and] shrink the definition of ‘them’—and we shouldn’t have to have an earthquake or a hurricane to know that that is what we’re about.”

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openDemocracy: When is a genocide a genocide?

For over 40 years, the Burmese state has been engaged in wholescale persecution of the Rohingya; denial and deprivation of their nationality; denial of their history and identity; restrictions on marriage and children; forced malnutrition and forced labour; restrictions on education, healthcare and movement; arbitrary arrests and killings; all with the cumulative intent of denying their participation in society, driving them out and destroying them. This systemic and structured persecution has been interspersed with waves of acute violence carried out by state and non-state actors alike – in 1978, 1991, 2012, 2015; and has been fuelled by the most vitriolic propaganda campaign which has brainwashed a country into reviling and fearing the most vulnerable and downtrodden among them. [...]

The arbitrary denial and deprivation of Rohingya’s Burmese nationality has played a pivotal role in how they are perceived and treated. Rohingya have faced targeted exclusion and persecution at least since the 1970s; but it was the 1982 citizenship law which entrenched their statelessness. The Rohingya were denied citizenship because they are an unwanted minority. Once made stateless, this was used to reinforce the dominant narrative that they are not from Burma, that they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Their statelessness was drawn on to deny their identity (they are Bengali, there are no Rohingya) and their history. It became the justification for the suffocating restrictions imposed on them. It mattered not, that there was no international law or historical basis for any of this. [...]

There is however, another way of perceiving her. She has not been silent. She has used her voice to stoke hatred against the Rohingya, to ridicule the testimonies of survivors of genocide. To accuse humanitarian actors of colluding with terrorists. To justify the denial of the Rohingya identity. she is only silent in her unwillingness to speak the name ‘Rohingya’. And so, she no longer has any moral authority to speak of. She is a failed leader, who is watching her country burn, her people turn against their neighbours, her military perpetrate the most unspeakable and atrocious crimes and who has taken a calculated and cynical decision to stand with the oppressors.

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