by Steven Kiersons, MA | Jun 7, 2015 | Burma, Situations of Concern
At the very end of April 2015, an unspecified number Rohingya Muslims, members of what many have called the “world’s most persecuted people,” began to receive disturbing text messages on their mobile phones. The messages implied that if their home...
by Steven Kiersons, MA | Dec 22, 2014 | Burma, General News, Situations of Concern, Technology
Civil war and ethnic cleansing have marred Burma’s ostensible transformation from Junta to democracy. In Rakhine State, the new era has been heralded by periodic outbreaks of mass violence involving mobs of Buddhist civilians waging pogroms on Muslim Rohingya...
by Steven Kiersons, MA | Oct 6, 2014 | Burma, General News, Situations of Concern
At the end of 1932, genocide began in Ukraine. The Soviet-Russian government had made the decision to subjugate the Ukrainians by starving them. It was not a coincidence that 1932 was also the year that Moscow ceased publishing demographic data. The government was...
by Steven Kiersons, MA | Aug 31, 2014 | Burma, General News, Situations of Concern
August 2014’s Burma update explores the issue of why countries with a history of Western colonial influence are at a higher risk of genocide. The divide-and-rule tactic of all tyrants of previous epochs had required the creation or exploitation of some...
by Steven Kiersons, MA | Aug 5, 2014 | Burma, General News, Situations of Concern
Reports from Burma’s embattled Rakhine State recall some of history’s most heinous crimes. In 2012, a Burmese government official told Dr. Maung Zarni, a persistent gadfly of the military-ruled state: “The bottom line is, we don’t want any more...
by Steven Kiersons, MA | Jul 10, 2014 | Burma, General News, Situations of Concern
On July 2, 2014 a Burmese blogger alleged that two Muslim brothers who own a cafe in Mandalay raped their Buddhist employee. The blog post went viral on Facebook with infamous ethnic-nationalist monk Ashin Wirathu sharing the story on his page. In retaliation to the...
by Steven Kiersons, MA | Jun 2, 2014 | General News
The past month has illustrated the continuance of grave violations of human rights in Burma’s Rakhine State, as seen here on ThreatWiki. The Sentinel Project’s geospatial mapping database recorded appallingly common occurances of violent crimes comitted by...
by Steven Kiersons, MA | May 2, 2014 | General News
Recent analysis conducted for the London Conference on the Destruction of Myanmar’s Rohingya held at the London School of Economics in late April showed that violence often characterized as “communal” by many media outlets is in fact government...
by Steven Kiersons, MA | Apr 15, 2014 | General News
Before he was murdered by the SS in a Riga Ghetto in 1941, Jewish historian Simon Dubnow assigned a mission to the victims and bystanders of genocide: “Write and record!” The witnesses of the holocaust heeded Dubnow; they knew intuitively that the...
by Steven Kiersons, MA | Mar 30, 2014 | General News
Among the most notable developments from Burma in March was news that Nobel-Prize winning Doctors Without Borders, commonly known by its French moniker Medicines Sans Frontiers (MSF), was removed from Burma. After media backlash, MSF was allowed to operate in Burma...
by Steven Kiersons, MA | Jan 18, 2014 | General News
In August 2013, the Sentinel Project published an analysis of patterns of violence against Muslims in Burma entitled “A Formula for Ethnic Cleansing in Burma.” The article described the uncannily systematic means by which the Rohingya were being killed and...
by Steven Kiersons, MA | Jan 1, 2014 | Burma, General News, Situations of Concern, Team Announcements
In the month of December 2013, Reuters revealed shocking details about the system of human trafficking created to handle the expulsion of Rohingya and other Muslims from Burma, also known as Myanmar. The agency discovered that the Thailand government was selling...
