Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1:27)
Browsing Tags #Justice
The golden rule {or} genocide in Burma?
Genocide {or} “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matt 22:37-40)
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I am sharing this with you. What motivates me to write again is the golden rule. I want to do for children in conflict what I would want done for my own. Simple.
The systematic abuse of Rohingya people in West Burma has gone from bad to worse. Last week the remaining NGO’s who had an MOU with the government were forced to leave the area and fly back to Rangoon. Their buildings, including those belonging to the UN, were destroyed.
The survivors of recent massacres are largely unheard from as there are no observers of their suffering or the outcomes among the survivors. By government mandate, access to the Rohingya is blocked. For this reason there is very little detailed news about what is going on, but the news we get is much worse than anything we have ever heard before.
One of our friends in a large population of refugees sent word yesterday that “…doctors are treating muslim patients very badly now at Sittwe hospital. Most of the patients sent to Sittwe hospital die these days. I am afraid that people’s doubt about rakhine doctors killing muslim patients is true.”
Another friend is trying to help a boy who suffers from diabetes, asthma, and multiple health complications due to sustained denial of adequate food, shelter, and health services. The photos I have show an emaciated boy in the arms of his father, obviously close to death.
We are trying to help him get medical care but where will he get it, even if we can find the money to pay? When he suggested paying a bribe to the police to get him transported to the nearby government hospital, he wrote that it may be the quickest way to end his life, not save it. In his email this morning he wrote: “Also today there was a body returned from Sittwe hospital of a pregnant woman who died while in their care, and the child was lost as well. The injuries on her face suggest very much she was beaten or worse.”
Another friend who lives in the camps wrote yesterday that, “There is no medical care at all for patients. Family members just have to sit and watch the patients dying. It has been more than a week now IDPs are facing food shortage. Many families are starving now.”
Genocide, according the Oxford Dictionaries is “The deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group:a campaign of genocide”
“It has been more than a week now IDPs are facing food shortage. Many families are starving now.”
What I write about today is that. Genocide. The proof is in Burma’s government policy, described in the recent report by Fortify Rights and confirmed by Human Rights Watch, the New York Times, and most of the worlds leading news services; it is in the well documented process of removal of rights and identity of an entire ethnic group; it is in the many violent massacres and riots that have resulted in a massive loss of life.
Why is this not making news headlines? April 7th was the 20th anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, where the world community declared: “this will never happen again”.
It’s happening again.
I beg you to join Partners Relief & Development in our efforts to help the survivors and prevent the slaughter of these wonderful people. Please re post the news as it is released and raise your voice with local and federal politicians. Tweet, post, blog, and in every way spread the word.
And please, if you can, join us by giving funds. Our team is working on aid delivery and other survival enhancing actions now. This costs money.
One generous donor has given a $30,000. matching grant as incentive to help the Rohingya. That means the gift of $30.00 that I just donated turns to $60.00 to help the Rohingya people. Just go to this donation page, click one time gift, and in the drop down menu, select “emergency relief.” All funds donated to this crisis in the month of April will be matched.
I just gave $30.00 so the Rohingya children can experience the freedom and fullness that my daughters have every day. Please join me.
A haunted journal and matched money for Burma.
My journal is haunting me. I peel back the formerly rain soaked pages of 2013 and stories crawl off the page and smash my soul with a steely right hook. The interviews that rumble with life and push at the binding, demanding to be read and considered, are those I wrote down in Sittwe, West Burma, last May.
I took this picture. These are some of the 140,000 refugees in the camp outside of Sittwe, West Burma. Lets help them! A very generous person has agreed to match every dollar given towards emergency relief this month. That means if you donate ten dollars to help with emergency relief, it is matched and becomes $20. Please join us to help the Rohingya, the Kachin, and the other populations in Burma who suffer today. Our help saves lives.
They are a catalog of human injustice and misery. Kyaw Hlaing said,“They killed my father”, Aung Win grieved out loud when he said, “they arrested our 16 year old son, took him away”. Another grieving man said, “they raped my wife”, and others went on reflecting that “we are the lucky ones who survived”, and “we have no hope.”
The interviews were done inside of a detainment camp where 140,000 men, women, and children are forced to eke out survival with almost no help from international aid agencies who are prevented from assistance by the government who calls these 1000 year residents of Burma, “illegal immigrants.”
Our team at Partners Relief & Development ran a clinic for 6 months and crisis management/relief work for a year and a half in that particular camp. Most of the people we helped had their homes burned down, possessions taken from them, and were on the receiving end of every sort of violence, as police and soldiers stirred up ethnic prejudice between them and the majority ethnic people, and turned it into a riot that resulted in hundreds of brutal deaths and the destruction of 5000 houses. Each day our team treated hundreds of suffering children. In many cases the intervention saved lives; in others, our help was physically futile. Children died waiting in line or died while getting treatment from one of our many brave volunteer doctors. Crying with the survivors was all we could do at that point.
Things have gotten worse. The 140,000 people we have concentrated on are still in the same camp, surrounded by barbed wire, with little outside support. Doctors Without Borders was thrown out of Rakhine State three weeks ago, removing what little medical help was available to the victims of terrible violence. The reason? They told the world community that they treated survivors of a massacre that happened in West Burma the preceding week. In other words, the massacre that the government denies having occurred, Doctors Without Borders confirmed.
I received this on Sunday, March 16 from a friend: “I’m getting desperate messages from a dear Rohingya friend whose village is burning down this morning. At the moment his house is still standing but many others are gone. Not sure how many yet. He’s saying 1000 homeless, crying, no food or anything. Another quarter of the village burnt down there a few days ago (that was 130 homes).”
We are still trying to find ways to help them, but being prevented by the same state initiated violence that has killed and displaced thousands of Rohingya villagers in the first place. In fact, the proof of State level collaboration is so compelling, that Fortify Rights International released a report with leaked documents and changed laws by the government to marginalize and strip the Rohingya of their basic rights. Now they are killing them.
Ask yourself: who do you turn to when the police force and army are the ones inciting the riots and in many cases doing the killing? Who tells your story when so much of the media and access to it depends on the power of the perpetrators?
There are millions of people who suffer terrible injustice at the hands of their own government in Burma today. I feel it is my duty and privilege to “do for them as I would have them do for me” and to do more than talk about God’s love, but show it “in action and deed” (1 JN 3:17-18) My journal haunts me, but the one I call Lord convicts and motivates me with a standard of love that cannot stay indifferent to the injustice that is happening to these people.
There are four things we can all do now.
- We have a very generous supporter who has agreed to match every dollar given towards emergency relief this month. That means if you donate ten dollars to help the children in conflict, it is matched and becomes $20. Please join me and give if you are able.
- Pray for Burma.
- Join our team and become a Partners advocate in your city. Click here for details.
- Stand up for the children of Burma by writing your senator and participating in the US Campiagn for Burma’s advocacy efforts.
Our team is working with new networks of people to creatively access the survivors. Thanks for joining us as we seek the freedom and fullness that is ours for the children of Burma.
Burma Army soldiers burned down their village yesterday, killed four with 12 more missing, and took 700 women and children away to an unknown “prison.”
Partners Relief & Development has a team member in Bangladesh right now who is meeting victims of the recent violence against Rohingya people in West Burma. Today he met Aisha,a survivor from yet another destroyed village. This posting describes how his village was attacked and burned down, and how members of his village were lost, killed or taken away, including his two year old daughter.
Aisha heard the military vehicles and then saw large army trucks full of soldiers and extremists who were armed with guns and clubs. They drove into Killadong Majarpara, his village in West Burma and home to 2,500 other Rohingya Muslims. It was 11:00 pm on the 22nd of January. Knowing the multiple and brutal attacks so far, he quickly found his way out of the village to look for a safe place to hide.
This woman’s husband drowned in a pond while trying to escape the police who were torturing him. Now she is destitute with 7 children. This is a common story with the Rohingya people of West Burma. Pray for them and share their story.
While he was running, the mob of soldiers and extremists beat and killed a number of his fellow villagers. Four bodies were found with gunshot wounds and 12 more are missing. The news he heard so far is that 700 women and children were taken in large trucks to a “prison.”
Finding a place in a nearby village he sent for his wife and 7 children. After they were reunited on the 23rd, they and 8 other families paid a boat owner to take them from the shores of Burma, to the Southern-most tip of Bangladesh. Once they were on board, Aisha took inventory. He found his mother, father, wife, and 5 of his children. He counted again and, frantically, a third time. His precious two-year-old daughter was not in the boat. He had no idea where she was.
The boat owner wouldn’t return because of the danger it would put him and the 8 other families in. Aisha sat sobbing on the floor today describing these events to our team leader. He recounted his ordeal, especially the trauma he continues to experience because he had to leave his two-year-old daughter behind.
They were fortunate to make it to the other shore and get away undetected by Bengali authorities, whose policy is to immediately deport them back across the thin strip of ocean that divides Burma from a peninsula of Bangladesh.
He begged for a place to stay in an unregistered camp of refugees numbering at least 100,000 souls outside of Cox’s bazar. With no food, clothes, blankets, or any other life-essential provision, they settled into their square footage of misery. A kind neighbor gave them a piece of plastic to keep the rain off of them.
Our team leader met Aisha today and heard his story. He ended with a description of his village being burned to the ground last night. “How do you know it was your village?” our team leader asked. Aisha replied that he talked to his brother who is still trapped on the Burma side of the border and he confirmed it. “We could see it from here too,” he said. “It’s only 28 kilometers away and it lit the sky.”
Our team leader then asked him if he had any news of his two-year-old daughter. Looking down at the floor, he just said “no.”
Our team leader gave Aisha enough money to get blankets for his family, for his mom and dad, and to buy cooking pots and the basics they will need to survive. He prayed for this Muslim leader. He asked God to bring peace to his country so he can go home, and that, somehow, peace can come to his heart so he can be comforted.
For those of you who support our work with the displaced people of Burma, thank you. Aisha is one of the thousands of people this month who can say they encountered true compassion this month; that a small faith inspired group reached out to them, embracing tremendous risk to find ways to help them and strive for justice.
It is your support that makes our work with victims of war possible. I am deeply grateful for you and offer this story as a reminder to pray, share this story, and give as you feel moved by the same spirit that moves us.
Your brother,
Steve Gumaer
Bloomberg Businessweek: opium production in Burma up 26%. Here’s why.
In Bloomberg Businessweek today, it is reported that Burma’s opium production has increased this year by 26%. They say that the reason for the increase is desperation among poor people. UNODC’s Myanmar Country Manager Jason Eligh is quoted saying, “Opium farmers are not bad people, they are poor people. Money made from poppy cultivation is an essential part of family income.”
True.
Roughly 192,000 households in Myanmar now work in opium production. “Villagers threatened with food insecurity and poverty need sustainable economic alternatives,” says Eligh, “or they will continue, out of desperation, to grow opium as a cash crop.”
True again.
Another reason the articles on my RSS feed this morning give for the rise in production is a rise in demand. They credit “organized crime” for being the culprits who both represent demand and supply the illicit poppie mash by purchasing it for 500 dollars per dry kilogram – a huge incentive to people who can’t keep food on the dinner table, send their children to school, and have lost their possibility to provide for themselves.
Question: who is “organized crime?”
If you answered the Burma Army or the regime itself, you are a smart cookie. Here’s how it goes:
The Burma Army has a policy of self-sufficiency. Each General has to “live off the land.” In Burma that means live off the produce and on the muscle of villagers and tribal people. And the compensation the villagers get for this exchange is their homes burned down, churches desecrated, and their men forced to porter for the regime; they carry their own produce to fortified compounds for the thieves (I mean soldiers) to consume it. Then they kill you after they make you watch them take turns on your wife.
This is life under the black boots; life where the police and military are the criminals and control everything including the judicial system.
There is no private property in Burma. So the farmers who have worked the land for the last thousand years actually only “own” their land based on community arrangement. The central government, so called elected officials, have absolute legal control of the land and the contents of it.
When an energy company eyes a particular river that has not been developed for hydro generation in Kachin or Shan state and offer the “government” to buy this land and develop it, chipping in a few percent of produced electricity to power homes in Burma, they sell it, leaving the villagers in a lurch.
Then they force the people who live there to relocate to a place they have prepared for them. How nice of them, right? Wrong. Many of the villagers see no alternative but to accept the relocation “offer” the soldiers have made. And guess what industry often awaits them at the relocation site? You got it: opium.
Or golf. Yes, you can also be relocated to Shan State to construct a golf course for the criminals (Generals and parliamentarians) who run the opium trade.
It takes decades to cultivate land for rice farming, because it’s all done by hand. Irrigation canals need to be carved out of rocky terrain with primitive tools to draw water from one valley to another. Fertile valleys able to support the growth of hungry communities are where they lived for generations. What I have seen and heard is that relocation sites have neither the water to restart life, nor the good soil needed to sustain it.
The ones who wait it out often relocate after construction has already begun, because of abuse, and the glaring fact that they are standing against an unbeatable foe. Those who hold out until the very end retreat only as the water rises, flooding their precious farms forever.
With gold, tin, jade, and molybdenum: same story. Oil and natural gas: ditto. Poor you who were born where natural resources lay waiting to be gathered, and where your rights as a human being were never recognized.
Another report I received from the Trans National Institute describes the “reform” process in Burma in terms you may appreciate:
“…after over 30 months of the Thein Sein government, political transition continues to be military-dominated and top-down, with essentially the same ruling elite in political and economic authority as under the former State Peace and Development Council (SPDC) regime. Hopes remain that, through political negotiation, democratic reforms will be achieved which lead to just and inclusive solutions. But as the countdown to the 2015 general election begins, concerns are growing that essential reforms will not be delivered.”
My terms are less sophisticated: lies, continued violence, and cunning deception. Thein Sein is a war criminal and his government are using foreign direct investment and development (charity and diplomatic) funds to kill children in Burma. The entire platform of hope is built on broken promises.
How many people have to suffer and die before the promises start coming to pass?
While the diplomatic community twirl that question through the noodles of bureaucracy, Partners Relief & Development will keep starting schools, development projects, clinics, and feeding the masses of displaced people who lack shelter, rice to eat, and sanitation. We will do this because we were asked to by Jesus who himself offered these words as his manifesto:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released,
that the blind will see,
that the oppressed will be set free” (Luke 4:18)
Why I have never thought of selling my daughters
I am so lucky because I am the mother of three beautiful and healthy girls. They are not little girls anymore, but young ladies. This fills me with both pride and a sting of sadness too. The years have passed so quickly and the dress-up parties, the barbies, and the feeding of baby dolls are things of the past. I miss it already. Of course, there is a certain enjoyment in sitting on the coach together with them as they are playing with their iPhones too. It’s just a little, shall we say, different.
I have never thought of selling my daughters into prostitution. Not once. Not even when I have been mad at them. Not even when we have been short of money. I can, in all honesty, say that I have never ever been tempted to sell my girls.
Yesterday I read an article that stayed with…
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After they tortured John, they raped his wife in front of him. Some “laws” must be broken.
When Martin Luther King Jr. dedicated his life to the civil rights movement, things in the USA, especially in the South, got very tense. Many church leaders in the South, largely white middle class and intelligent people, were advising him to bide his time and wait for justice to come instead of making people uncomfortable and endangering lives by sit ins, peaceful protest, marches for peace, and civil disobedience. His actions were carefully crafted to display to the whole world just how unjust the laws and culture of segregation was. Here’s how he answered the pleas to wait:
For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.”
When he was put in jail for 6 days in Birmingham Alabama, for inciting civil unrest, he wrote a letter to the clergy and to those who were supposedly on the side of justice but wanting to preserve the so called peace. When I read his sharp and well-reasoned words, the similarities of his struggle and that of the ethnic minorities in Burma struck me again. Especially now as things appear to be getting better, when in fact things have never been worse for so many (millions of) people in the ethnic states. Just take a look at how the Kachin, Rohigya, Karen, and Chin are doing while the Generals and officials of the Thein Sein regime swim in an influx of direct foreign investment.
When I, or members of my team help the victims of violence and oppression, we have to break “laws.” We have to
“Give justice to the poor and the orphan;
uphold the rights of the oppressed and the destitute.
Rescue the poor and helpless;
deliver them from the grasp of evil people.
cross borders illegally and help people that the world’s hegemony of power say don’t even exist. To that challenge, King Jr.’s logic was motivating for me too:
One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.
My wife and two staff members were detained and interrogated for a day in a neighboring country to Burma, then asked to leave the country and followed until they got on a plane bound for Thailand. Their crime: visiting and helping refugees whose villages had been recently destroyed. So again, returning to my question from yesterday: are we supposed to “keep quiet” about this stuff like we are being told by some of our peers and so many of the major powers at work in Burma today?
“On 2 September 2013, 200 Burma Army soldiers arrived at Nhka Ga village, forcing KIA troops stationed there to decamp. Mr. Lahkyeng Hkaw Tup and Yung Hka Hkyen, both from Nhka Ga village, were tortured and killed by Burma Army troops from IB 137. Reverend Ram Me and 10 villagers were arrested and tortured after being questioned by Burma Army troops. John Seng Awng, son of Nhka Ga Village, was tied up and badly tortured. Burma Army soldiers raped his wife, 29-year-old Nhtung Hkai Nang Htu, right in front of him. They have one child.” FBR
John Seng Awng and his wife matter. They matter enough to sacrifice some of my comfort and freedom so they might have some too. No member of the human family should have to suffer like that, especially under an approved world power that the west does business with as Burma is today. These people need help. We will give them that. They want their stories told and justice to prevail, we will speak for them. Please, I beg you to join us.
At the risk of making this into an epistle, I’ll quote one more piercing work of reason that King Jr. included in his missive.
A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an “I it” relationship for an “I thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful.
So I close another blog episode with a deeper than ever determination to find creative ways to be a true “neighbor” to the people of Burma; to feed the hungry people who are so due to systemic oppression and violence, and to tell their story with as much passion and clarity as I can.
“How long will you hand down unjust decisions
by favoring the wicked?
“Give justice to the poor and the orphan;
uphold the rights of the oppressed and the destitute.
Rescue the poor and helpless;
deliver them from the grasp of evil people.
Psalm 82:2-4
A 15 year old girl is raped by Burma Army soldiers in Kachin state last week: and I am supposed to keep quiet about it?
Academics and diplomats are largely in agreement: they generally say, now is the time to stop criticizing the Regime in Burma; now is the time to focus on the positive steps that have been made and draw a patient breath, believing that a better future stands up to greet the children of current victims of oppression and violence. They promise that at the rate of change we are witnessing, Burma will be the world’s newest democracy in no time.
When I met these siblings they had run with their village friends while being attacked by the Burma Army. They don’t know where their parents are or if they are even alive. Partners provided food, medical care, and helped with shelter for them and their kin. Should we let their story stay untold so the diplomats can toast to peace in Naypyidaw while they sell away the land of the ethnic people whom they are killing?
The business sector points out that we must let “positive economic engagement” work it’s course. It seems we are supposed to reward the regime for change that has been promised and call them peacemakers when they award energy companies and telecom giants access to the “last economic frontier” of 55 million untapped consumers. Positive economic engagement works eventually, they say.
I am expected to ignore the Shan people who have had the land of their forefathers sold out from under them, creating such desperation to keep food on the table that they resort to selling their thirteen year old daughters to the brothels. Read about it here.
Partners Relief & Development is asked to leave the Kachin displaced people alone and stop helping them. We are told that by feeding and helping them as we do, we enable them to stay in camps of displacement, extending the conflict and creating diplomatic tension and drawing out the time needed to gain new freedoms. Where are they supposed to go anyhow? Don’t our critics know that their villages were burned down? Not in 2012 or even 6 months ago. I’m talking about last week and every week leading up to it in 2013. Whole village tracts attacked, destroyed, and now occupied by Burma Army soldiers who eat their crops, kill their animals, and steal their possessions. Oh, and of course, rape their daughters.
I am expected to keep quite the rapes that happened last week; a 15 year old child, gang raped by Burma Army soldiers and a mother. Read the report here. Then keep quiet the fact that the Burma Army is shooting at Karen villagers three days ago in Tha Dah Der during a so called “cease fire.” The torture, the weekly attacks on civilian populations, the burning down of churches and mosques, the ethnic violence that appears to be State initiated in many of the ethnic States, especially against the Rohingya in Rakhine State; these appear as non-issues at the table of diplomacy.
Every single day, people are dying in Burma because of injustice. This is not the sort of thing to wait for the “professionals” to negotiate away and believe it will go away. That logic would never work with me if my family were on the victim end of the violence, nor yours. We don’t wait until a better day dawns to live the golden rule. We do it now.
“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.” Matthew 7:12
Justice requires that the abuse, murder, and lawlessness that persist in Burma today be called out for what it is. It is a moral outrage. To keep silent, while knowing what is happening, is tacit approval of means that will never accomplish ends appropriate to a moral human being.
“He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” Martin Luther King, Jr.
This diplomatic logic, these sophisticated and articulate ways of describing steps towards democracy: I can’t stomach it. Each child that dies in Burma because of injustice is as much a travesty of justice as if it were my own daughter. Don’t tell me to keep quiet. Call me naïve, but our team will keep helping the people the regime is trying to kill. We will keep speaking for those victims of conflict and oppression who don’t have a platform or voice to speak for themselves.
He has shown you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justly,
To love mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God
Micah 6:8
Note, In my original post, I miss-quoted the original report to say that two 15 year olds were raped when it was actaully a 15 year old and 29 year old mother. I apologize. I’ll be more careful with such important facts.
A Hungry Groan in Burma
They cook their rice with fragments of vegetable and meat. They broil this porridge for their hungry children and long for a day when the food on their table satisfies the hungry groan in their stomachs. The families of Burma continue to suffer; the regime acts with brutal impunity and deception. But people think all is well. What to do when they kill the kids we try to feed, rape the girls we try to set free, torture the people who attempt to introduce change, and imprison the noble souls who seek and stand for justice?
Normal Is Over. 