June 7, 2015 | Steven Kiersons, MA

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 region, Rakhine State, were made independent from Burma, the long-running state policy of discrimination and…

December 22, 2014 | Steven Kiersons, MA

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 villagers and forcing them into Rakhine State’s nightmarish network of concentration camps, barbed-wire-enclosed IDP camps where the inmates are not allowed to…

October 6, 2014 | Steven Kiersons, MA

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 determined not only to exterminate Ukrainians, but to erase the very record of their existence:…

August 31, 2014 | Steven Kiersons, MA

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 specific conflict between warring tribes or groups of men. The novel invention…

August 5, 2014 | Steven Kiersons, MA

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 Mus [Muslims] in our country. But we can’t possibly kill them all.” If there were one phrase…

July 10, 2014 | Steven Kiersons, MA

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 unverified allegations of rape, the extremist organization “Race and Faith Defense League” initiated a violent response with…

June 2, 2014 | Steven Kiersons, MA

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 government agencies against the Rohingya, many of which are concentrated in the border municipality of Maung Daw. A border clash…

May 2, 2014 | Steven Kiersons, MA

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 planned and coordinated. The History of Sentinel Project Mapping in Burma: In the spring of 2013, the…

April 15, 2014 | Steven Kiersons, MA

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 comissions assigned to investigate genocide after the conclusion of the Second World War…

March 30, 2014 | Steven Kiersons, MA

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 but not in Rakhine state, the locus of persecution and violence against the region’s…