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Suspending disbelief: Against the distraction of a new Cold War

Burma

"When I cried they beat me. I had already decided that I would die there."

Mohamed Hassan did not weep. He vomited instead as the body of a fellow prisoner, whose throat had been cut by rod-brandishing guards, was dragged out into a remote part of the Thai jungle.

A Rohingya from the semi-sovereign state of Rakhine in Burma*, Hassan had fled the to-and-fro religious violence in the capital Sittwe. Bound for Malaysia, Hassan was apprehended in Thailand and held in captivity in over-crowded and piss-flecked ‘processing camps’. As Reuters revealed in December last year, this ‘process’ involved no granting of asylum. His price was US$350, and for this princely sum Hassan was palmed off to people-smugglers who marched him and thousands of others deep into the wilderness.

Hassan was lucky to have a brother who could pay off his captors. For many others, more than a year had been endured in the forest with little food, under a constant cloud of violence no more merciful than what they had fled from. Some were removed and made to work for little pay. Most festered.

Thailand, threatened with comparison to North Korea and Iran for secretly encouraging such activity, began a frenzied campaign to ‘liberate’ the camps early this year. It only forced the smugglers to work harder and with more urgent brutality, shifting their operations into Malaysia.

Some captors were Rohingya themselves. "It feels worse when those from Rakhine (state) hurt us,” one escaped man told Reuters, “they are our own people.”

The Burmese military junta, painting its scarred face with the same bright colours as Aung San Suu Kyi, once suppressed all ethnicities with equal malice and might. Now, license is being granted to the Buddhists in Rakhine to massacre their co-religionists.

"Don't kill them here," yelled one monk on March 21st last year as a mob goaded and lashed out at a group of Muslim students in Meiktila, central Burma.

"Their ghosts will haunt this place. Kill them up on the road."

36 Muslims, mostly teenagers, were stabbed, bludgeoned, and buried on that day as the police stood by with their arms folded. Stories emerged of similar complicity throughout the supposedly reformed nation – but no ministers visited to decry the massacres, or the displacement of 140,000 people to squalid and flooded camps where they still reside to this day.

The brave doctors of Medecins Sans Frontieres were banned from administering essential aid in the area in February. But of course! Why should anyone help the wounded and destitute if the government decides that this is their lot in life?
In a few weeks’ time, census officials will likely glance over the 1 million Rohingya resigned to ghettos and backwater villages in Burma – the first stock take since the military grasped for the lustre of democracy.

A man named Eindarit was viciously beaten a few days ago by traffickers, Agence France-Presse said. He had tried to leave a state where no guarantee of his people’s national identity has ever existed.

"He was cut with knives on his head and hands and beaten with a pipe," a retired police officer said. "We are labeled 'Bengali, Bengali' all the time. Evidence that we were born here, that we have been staying here, is crucial to us.”

*‘Burma’ has been chosen here instead of ‘Myanmar’. The later revision was imposed by the military junta who claimed power in 1962. Opponents against the regime refer to Burma, and so I will adopt the same.


Central African Republic

“They brought the bodies over there, and dug a large hole,” Sonya Infana, a resident of Boyali in the Central African Republic, tells the Washington Post.

“They threw the bodies inside.”

Underneath a mound of blood-red earth lies the bodies of a truck-load of Muslims who had fled violence in the anarchic nation’s capital, Bangui. They had been hacked to death by a gang of ‘anti-balaka’ – Christian militias seeking vicious reprisals against Muslim residents for their bloodthirsty rebellion against the government.

“Fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” the Book of Leviticus reads. “The one who has inflicted the injury must suffer the same injury.”

“We prescribed for them a life for a life, an eye for an eye,” the Qur’an opines in return, “an equal wound for a wound.”

Fearing these wounds, more than 650,000 people have fled the Republic. Some were able to escape under the armed cover of French and African Union troops. Others were left to their own means – the force supposedly there to keep them safe spread far too thinly across a scorched earth. They leave behind thousands of dead bodies. Untold thousands.

What are these disenfranchised people fleeing to? Another decade in a closed camp before the humiliating inanity of dysentery takes hold? Children brought low by the polio virus that could have been vanquished if it were not for the vandalism of their fellow Muslims? Another horde of rampaging ‘freedom fighters’ and sectarian bullies across the border?

United Nations Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon has called for the deployment of almost 12,000 soldiers to bring order and protect civilians in the area. But what good are troops when an entire people has already been mutilated, buried in small mounds and mass graves equally, driven from their ancestral homes? While it was only threatened against Christians in the last half-decade, Muslims have been carved from the land altogether.

Prior to December last year, more than 130,000 Muslims were living in Bangui.

As of March 2014, there are fewer than 900.

Two weeks ago, a “severely-malnourished” 25-year-old woman named Halima told Human Rights Watch that her husband and father-in-law had been killed. Her three children had vanished. When a convoy evacuated the Muslims of Bossemptele, she tried and failed to climb aboard a truck.

“No one was there to help me,” she said.

“I was calling after them to take me, but they left without me.”


Syria

“We thought if we don’t die from the chemical weapons, we’re going to die with the shelling, and if we’re not going to die with the shelling, the regime will break in and slaughter us all.”

23 year-old Ameenah Sawwan was living in the Syrian capital of Damascus when Sarin gas was unleashed across the pock-marked suburb of Moadamiya in August of last year.

Sarin, a poison developed during WWII, is a concentrated pesticide that renders its victims exactly as would be expected; shutting down and hyper-stimulating organs simultaneously. Mucous bubbles, bile and vomit comes up, muscles spasm, breath escapes lungs and refuses to return. Victims shit themselves. Pests, indeed.

They were no rats, though – they were civilians. 80 of them in Ameenah’s neighbourhood, around 1,700 across the Ghouta area. Ostensibly targeting ‘terrorists’, the government forces killed only 50 rebel with their transparent cloud of hell - the rest were non-combatants.

Ameenah told MSNBC about friends raped before the very eyes of their families. The regime does “things that I never wish would happen,” she says, “even to my enemy.”

Before the civil war between Bashar al-Assad’s government forces and rebels, and an outside invasion by jihadists from Iran and Lebanon, a drive between Moadamiya and the township of Yarmouk might have taken half an hour. Now, it traverses rubble and fighters – utter desolation in the heart of a once-thriving city.

Yarmouk was once a destination for Palestinian refugees (historic and contemporary) – driven from their homes by the bulldozers and American-supplied rifles of the Israeli ‘Defence’ Force. They numbered around 180,000, according to Amnesty International, and lived alongside several hundred thousand Syrians.

It is now the site of a new Sarajevo – hemmed in by regime, rebel, and jihad fighters, cut off from all aid. Shelled around the clock, homes and businesses are now ancient ruins.

Barely a fraction of that population remains and most are young children or elderly. All are starving.

“You died for the sake of bringing hibiscus leaves for your brothers and sisters,” a grieving father said as the dead body of his teenage son lay before him, shot through by a sniper as he was pulling weeds from a field. There was no ceasefire to do some casual gardening – the boy was looking for food.

A meal every 30 hours is optimistic, according to one Yarmouk resident. Children born under this hellish siege are often passed on to other lactating women because their mothers are too malnourished to nurse.

Only two doctors remain at the Palestine Hospital. Generators have no fuel to run on. Ambulances and medical supplies are ripped from the hands of nurses by the varying foot soldiers of this perverse three-way struggle for God and country.

There will be only bones remaining in this shell of a nation if the illegal rampaging continues.

More than 100,000 Syrians and foreigners are dead. 9 million have been displaced.

But perhaps displaced is the wrong verb. Ripped from their roots, perhaps? Forced out and evicted, left no choice whatsoever but to flee under fear of starvation, torture, forced disappearance, rape, and near-inevitable death?

Rami Nasir, a 30-year-old father, was held by the regime in a stronghold town and beaten viciously for eight months. One piece of bread a day, two visits to the bathroom allowed. Constant ‘interrogation’ with pipes, sticks, lit cigarettes.

“The scars are still carved on my body. I thought: it is better to sign whatever he says, just to put an end to the beating.”

He escaped, though. Unlike the 11,000 others killed in regime custody within the last three years.

“I could not shut my eyes for a single minute at night,” Farouq Al-Habieb told the Guardian. “The place was filled with screams of pain and torture. People were pleading with the guards to disentangle their arms – to be able to stand on their toes and avoid getting dislocated shoulders.”

While being transferred from one military facility to another, Farouq asked a guard where he was being taken.

“We are going to dance together,” the guard laughed.


Ukraine

And all the while, the Western media eye is squinting at Ukraine’s misshapen and wounded appendage.

The tiny peninsula of Crimea was re-gifted to the Ukrainians in the 1950s by Khrushchev, as if the population were a mediocre Christmas present for one’s second cousin.

Vladimir Putin won’t let this affront stand. Using the very same slur of fascism leveled against him, the Russian dictator defied and slandered the will of proud, revolutionary Ukrainians and annexed a relatively peaceful territory with both the Kalashnikov, and the illusion of a ballot box.

Under the banner of truce between Ukrainian and Russian defense ministries, a rigged referendum decided the fate of 3 million people with no consultation yesterday. Denied entry to Crimea, the observers of the OSCE were pelted with rubber bullets. The European Union, instrumental in ending the pitched battles one month ago in Kiev, joins the United States and the United Kingdom in declaring the ‘vote’ illegal.

One week ago, North Korean dictator Kim Jun-un announced a democratic confirmation of his deified power. The turnout was complete, the votes all in favour of ‘The Great Successor’. Russia’s enforced liberty runs perilously close to this model of absolute cynicism.

There is a central and bitter irony to this gloomy, though almost-bloodless affair.

A few shots were fired as a warning when Yuli Mamchur marched a brigade of 300 Ukrainian troops right to the very toes of the Russians. “The Americans are on our side,” one soldier hollered. “The world is on our side!”

The cameras and microphones of foreign press snatched up every word between the unarmed commander and rifle-toting Russian opposite.

This near-smothering media attention focused on Crimea has probably arrested the tensions, halting an eventual slide into yet another conflict between East and West. In post-revolution Ukraine, citizens might yet be spared another dose of Soviet-style subjugation.

The allure of a new Cold War and the cock-swinging posturing of two age-old superpowers has sadly distracted from the horrors listed above, horrors that are visited upon millions at this very moment.

Far from forming a cohesive fighting unit of their own, the quilted and coiffed wire reporters, the grizzled and bespectacled foreign desk editors, and the belching disinformation disseminators have provided a critical mass that remains almost wholly uncritical.

Dimiter Kenarov, writing in Foreign Policy, skewers the belligerence of so many pen-and-pad-toting “journalists reporting from Crimea, [who] are at times complicit in that theater by pretending we are covering a real event -- as problematic as the term ‘real’ is -- rather than a staged one.”

“The British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” Kenarov goes on to say, “once called this condition ‘suspension of disbelief’: the ability of a person to suspend judgment about the implausibility of a given narrative in order to participate more fully in its magic.”

The gnarled and betrayed fingers of the oppressed are still scratching at the cutting-room doors of major media outlets, but the editors are turning their backs on sympathy and decency, indulging the “magic” of history repeating itself.

As has been seen in Ukraine, the dictatophone and camera lens can be pivoted and molded into an observant and unified glare – however unreliable it might be. In Burma, the Central African Republic, Syria, and many other plagued regions and nations, this weight of attention is sorely needed.

This prompts a rather simple question: if a congealed and ruddy media can seemingly halt an escalation and apprehend the goose-stepping jackboot, then what wonders could a hyper-critical and insightful press gang achieve?

Follow James on Twitter: @James_ARobins