The world being threaten by Bengali Rohingya terrorist in the
western part of Myanmar Dozens of Rakhine people were killed
amidst the Rohingya terrorist attacks in border town of Maungdaw in
Rakhine State, the western part of Myanmar on Friday. Due to the
violence, hundreds of houses and buildings were burnt down by mobs. The
death toll in the incident has reached 20 to 30 until the night of 8
June and the injured persons nearby villages of Maundaw Township have
been taken to Maungdaw hospital. The onset of the violence on 8 June
was that the Rohingya Muslims who returned from the mosque yesterday
afternoon started throwing the stones to the Rakhine houses and
buildings in Maungdaw Township.
As
the riots could not be controlled, the police forces took security
measures in the town where Muslims are majority and Rakhine people are
minority. Rohingya mobs were setting fire on the nearby villages of
Rakhine ethnics, said a Buddhist monk who resides in Maungdaw Township.
Due to these unrests, the
State-owned media aired the announcement of Section 144 of the Criminal
Procedure Code (Curfew) which states people are not to go outside
between 18:00 pm and 06:00 am in Maungdaw and Buthedaung townships. In
contrary to the reporting of foreign media, the army did not fire at
the mobs, but just warning shots to the riot to help the security
measures of police forces.Among the more than 60 videotapes that the
American cable television network CNN obtained from al-Qaeda's archives
in Afghanistan in August this year, one marked "Burma" (Myanmar)
purports to show Muslim "allies" training in that country. While the
group shown, the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO), was founded by
Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar's Rakhine State and claims to be
fighting for autonomy or independence for its people, the tape was, in
fact, shot in Bangladesh.
The RSO, and
other Rohingya factions, have never had any camps inside Myanmar, only
across the border in Bangladesh. The camp in the video is located near
the town of Ukhia, southeast of Cox's Bazaar, and not all of the RSO's
"fighters" are Rohingyas from Myanmar.
The Rohingyas,
who are Muslims and speak the same language as the population in the
Chittagong area of Bangladesh, are not regarded by the government in
Yangon as an indigenous race. Hundreds of thousands of them fled across
the border to Bangladesh during a crackdown in 1978, and militant
groups soon emerged among the refugees. The UN eventually intervened,
and most of the Rohingyas were repatriated to Myanmar. However, in 1991
and 1992, another wave of 250,000 refugees came across the border, and
while most of them have also been repatriated, more than 20,000 remain
in United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) supervised
camps southeast of Cox's Bazaar. An estimated 100,000 Rohingyas live
outside the UNHCR's camps, and it is among these destitute and
stateless people that various Islamist militant groups have found
fertile ground for recruitment.
The RSO was set
up in the early 1980s when radical elements among the Rohingyas broke
away from the more moderate main grouping, the Rohingya Patriotic Front
(RPF). Led by a medical doctor from Arakan, Muhammad Yunus, it soon
became the main and most militant faction among the Rohingyas in
Bangladesh and on the border. Given its more rigid religious stand, the
RSO soon secured the support of like-minded groups in the Muslim world.
These included the Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh and Pakistan,
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-e-Islami in Afghanistan, Hizb-ul-Mujahideen
(HM) in Jammu and Kashmir, and Angkatan Belia Islam sa-Malaysia (ABIM) -
the Islamic Youth Organization of Malaysia. Afghan instructors have
been seen in some of the RSO camps along the Bangladesh-Burma border,
while nearly 100 RSO rebels were reported to have undergone training in
the Afghan province of Khost with Hizb-e-Islami Mujahideen.
The RSO's main
military camp was located near the hospital that the
Rabitat-al-Aalam-al-Islami had built at Ukhia. At this stage, the RSO
acquired a substantial number of Chinese-made RPG-2 rocket launchers,
light machine-guns, AK-47 assault rifles, claymore mines and explosives
from private arms dealers in the Thai town of Aranyaprathet near the
border with Cambodia, which in the 1980s emerged as a major arms bazaar
for guerrilla movements in the region. These weapons were siphoned off
from Chinese arms shipments to the resistance battling the Vietnamese
army in Cambodia, and sold to any one who wanted, and could afford, to
buy them.
The Bangladeshi
media gave extensive coverage to the RSO buildup along the border, but
it soon became clear that it was not only Rohingyas who were undergoing
training in its camps. Many, it turned out, were members of the Islami
Chhatra Shibir (ICS), the youth organization of Bangladesh's
Jamaat-e-Islami, and came from the University of Chittagong, where a
"campus war" was being fought between Islamist militants and more
moderate student groups. The RSO was, in fact, engaged in little or no
fighting inside Myanmar.
It is unclear when
the now-famous videotape was shot, but it presumably dates from the
early 1990s, since by the late 1990s the RSO's training camps southeast
of Cox's Bazaar were taken over by Bangladeshi Islamist militants.
Bangladesh's main militant outfit, the Hakrat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami
(HuJI), was formed in 1992, allegedly with financial support from Osama
bin Laden himself. HuJI now has an estimated strength of 15,000
followers and is led by Shawkat Osman aka Maulana or Sheikh Farid in
Chittagong. Its members were recruited mainly from students of
Bangladesh's more than 60,000 madrassas (religious schools) and
called themselves the Bangladeshi Taliban. The group has become
notorious for masterminding violent attacks on Bangladesh's Hindu
minority, as well as on moderate Bangladeshi Muslims. In a statement
released by the US State Department on May 21, 2002, HuJI was described
as a terrorist organization with ties to Islamist militants in
Pakistan.
The existence of
firm links between the new Bangladeshi militants and al-Qaeda is
established through Fazlul Rahman, leader of the "Jihad Movement in
Bangladesh" (to which the HuJI belongs), when he signed the official
declaration of jihad against the United States on February 23, 1998.
Other signatories included bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri (leader of the
Jihad Group in Egypt), Rifa'i Ahmad Taha aka Abu-Yasir (Egyptian
Islamic Group) and Sheikh Mir Hamzah (secretary of the
Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan).
HuJI sent its own people, as well as Rohingya recruits, to Afghanistan
to fight for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The Rohingyas, especially, were
given the most dangerous tasks in the battlefield, clearing mines and
portering. According to intelligence sources, Rohingya recruits were
paid 30,000 Bangladeshi taka (US$525) on joining and then 10,000 taka
per month. The families of recruits killed in action were offered
100,000 taka. (While these appear to be small sums in dollar terms, they
are princely amounts in a country where the annual per capita income
works out to a bare $380.) Recruits were taken mostly via Nepal to
Pakistan, where they were trained and sent on to military camps in
Afghanistan. It is not known how many people from this part of
Bangladesh - Rohingyas and others - fought in Afghanistan, but the
number is believed to be quite substantial. Others have gone to Kashmir
and even Chechnya to join forces with Islamist militants there.
In an interview
with the CNN in December 2001, American Taliban fighter John Walker
Lindh relates that the al-Qaeda-directed Ansar (Companions of the
Prophet) Brigades, to which he had belonged in Afghanistan, were
divided along linguistic lines: Bengali, Pakistani (Urdu) and Arabic,
which suggests that the Bengali-speaking component - Bangladeshi and
Rohingya - must have been significant. It is now also becoming clear
that some militants fleeing the American strikes in Afghanistan in late
2001 have ended up in Bangladesh. With the heavy American presence in
Pakistan, many militants who fled Afghanistan in October and November
2001 have found it safer to hide in third countries. In early 2002, a
ship reportedly sailed from Karachi to Chittagong carrying assorted
militants from Afghanistan.
On May 10-11 2002,
nine Islamist fundamentalist groups, including HuJI, met at a camp near
Ukhia South and formed the Bangladesh Islamic Manch (association). The
new umbrella organization includes groups purporting to represent the
Rohingyas and the Muslim Liberation Tigers of Assam (MULTA), a small
group operating in India's northeast. By June, Bangladeshi veterans of
the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan were reported to be training members
of the new alliance in at least two camps in southern Bangladesh.
An internal
document from HuJI lists no less than 19 "training establishments" all
over Bangladesh, but it is uncertain how many of them actually offer
military training. What is certain, however, is that since a new
coalition government led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) took
over in October 2001, Bangladesh's Islamist militants have become more
vocal and active. The coalition includes, for the first time, two
ministers from the Jamaat. The four-party electoral alliance that
brought the new coalition government to power also includes a smaller
Islamic party, the Islamic Oikya Jote, whose chairman, Azizul Huq, is a
member of HuJI's advisory council.
The Bangladeshi
authorities have shown no sign of being willing to crack down on these
groups and their activities. On the contrary, after some adverse
international publicity about the rise of Islamist fundamentalism in
Bangladesh earlier this year, the government cracked down on the most
moderate of the Rohingya factions, the Arakan Rohingya National
Organization (ARNO), in Chittagong and Cox's Bazaar. ARNO has no known
links to al-Qaeda or any of Bangladesh's groups of Islamist militants.
It issued a strong statement condemning the crackdown and
disassociating itself from the militants. The RSO, on the other hand,
was not targeted by the Bangladeshi authorities.
For many years,
Bangladesh was seen as a moderate, even liberal, Muslim country. This
is evidently changing, and the formation of the Bangladesh Islamic
Manch in May this year clearly indicates that cooperation between the
country's Islamist militants is becoming closer. The presence of
trainers from Afghanistan and the arrival of more militants with
al-Qaeda connections, demonstrate their participation in an
international terrorist network.
Note
-http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/DI21Df06.html
-http://www.first-11.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14013&catid=42&Itemid=112
-http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/DI21Df06.html
-http://www.first-11.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=14013&catid=42&Itemid=112
တခ်ိဳ႕ေသာ သတင္း႒ာနေတြမွာ ဘက္လိုက္ ေရးသား ေဖာ္ျပေနၾကတာ
ေတြ႔ျမင္ေနရပါတယ္...။ ထို႔အတြက္ေၾကာင့္ သတင္းမွန္ အတြက္ျပည္ပ သတင္း႒ာနမ်ား
အားျပန္လည္ ကိုးကား ေရးသားႏိုင္ဖို႔ ေဖာ္ျပေပးတဲ့ ကိုေမာင္ေမာင္ဝမ္း...
အားေက်းဇူးတင္ပါသည္
Demowaiyan
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