#Myanmar riots | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

argyrocratie · 5 months ago

Text

Hein:(...)By the way, I remember you had a direct confrontation with far-right ultranationalist political Buddhist organisation called “Patriotic Association of Myanmar” which we call “Ma Ba Tha”. You were modelling with Buddhist monk uniform with punk fashion. That triggered them. Can you please share us more about it since it was never recorded properly by the mainstream media locally and internationally? Kyaw Kyaw: That’s a long story. I will have to explain since their existence as a grassroot movement called 969 movement around 2012. As you know, an Arakanese Buddhist woman called Ms. Thidar Htwe was raped by three youth rapists who happened to be from Muslim Rohingya community. They somehow dragged the whole identity instead of focusing on the individuals and the whole Arakan-Rohingya riot happened in Arakan. We produced a song called “Fuck Religious War” and stayed against this fear mongering politics of both Buddhist nationalists and Islamists. However, the riot spread to the whole nation. The whole Buddhist community stood in solidarity with the Buddhist Arakanese population against Rohingya people and in broader Muslim population. A lot of racism, xenophobia and fear mongering politics happened on both sides. That later escalate into broader anti-Muslim bigotry racist politics with 969 movement. As soon as we notice the grassroot involvement and influential status of 969 movement, we, Rebel Riot, created a new song called “Stop Racism, against 969, Fuck Fascist Monks” against the 969 movement solely.

(...)

But that incident you mentioned was around 2017. The 969 movement reached its peak at 2014-2015 until they decided to go after NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi. After that, they sort out become weaker. Our Rebel Riot band was invited to Thailand for a tour around 2017. We were requested by an alternative photographer for a blasphemous but yet interfaith photo. It was called “Sons of Anarchy”. We dressed as Buddha (a monk), Jesus and Shiva in Punk outfits. The main message of the photo we intended to offer was that “the religious leaders are having fun together and get along with each other, but yet the followers are killing each other”. We posted the photos on our official page and even mentioned Venerable Wirathu and assaulted him on Facebook. That backfired us. The next day, our post was shared by tens of thousands of people. Win Ko Ko Latt, an ultranationalist grassroot organiser of 969 movement reposted the photos and started to organise a movement against us. Even his post was shared by thousands of people. I had to edit the post to look more appropriated. We received a lot of death threats again. They targeted against me specifically since I was the one who dressed as Buddha (a monk). DVB reached out to me amidst the whole controversary.

(...)

969 movement somehow managed to propagate me as an enemy of the whole Buddhism to all the people. For all of our social movements, Food not Bombs Yangon, Books not Bombs, and Free Shop, we are dealing day to day basis with the grassroot people which includes religious people, I got worried that they might also attack the social movement for my involvement of the photo shooting. I reached out to Win Ko Ko Latt, surprisingly he was humble and deleted his post as per my request. We mutually agreed to meet and discuss the details to solve the controversy. When I arrive to their headquarters of Patriotic Association of Myanmar at Insein, there were a lot of monks in the room, just like how we used to sit in the internet café. Seems like they’ve some sort IT related operations going on. I told them that I want to solve the conflict mutually as I didn’t really want the grassroot especially the working-class people to hate us. Since they are the people, we always encounter and organise at our social movements. Win Ko Ko Latt on behalf of the Patriotic Association of Myanmar promised us that they will meet with us peacefully and solve it properly in front of the media, etc.

At first, I was thinking of how I would dispute their points and so on as if I’m Socrates or Castro or something. I was hoping of a civic debate and even planned to justify my actions with my understanding of Buddhism. In reality, once we arrived at their place, there are hundreds of 969 supporters waiting for us at the monastery. They surrounded us while we’re talking to their leaders. Since before we started, they demanded us to apologise in front of all their supporters and they were no media except the right-leaned pro-969 media. We tried to push back but since we were outnumbered as a few of us from Rebel Riot went there. One of the monks from the Patriotic Association of Myanmar told us that their Theravada Buddhism is currently challenged by internal threats like us (those who were born as Buddhists) and external threats like Muslims and Christians. I response back that in my understanding of Buddhism, the internal threats are not people, but greed, anger, and ignorance. They started shouting at us, demanding us to sign of apology letter, and so on. Those friends who came along with me, also insisted me to sign the apology letter since we were outnumbered and some of them even had weapons with them. They never gave me a chance to speak anymore after my response. Finally, I had to sign for an apology letter, just to survive there. I cried like a kid after all the incident as I felt ashamed becoming a tool for their propaganda machinery. They put those photos across all their media and celebrated as if they have won a battle against us, the progressive social movements. Hein: So, they demanded apology from you not to sue you under blasphemy law? Given their influence around that time, that would be a terrible experience for you. Being targeted by the nation-wide influential far-right ultranationalist political organisation is apparently not favourable. But I think it was a milestone of your activism. The more important question is that did you find leftists in general and anarchists from Burma showing solidarity with you? I’m pretty sure global punk scene will show unconditional solidarity with you. However, what about local anarchists and leftists in general? Did they show solidarity with you in face of the nation-wide influential far-right ultranationalist political organisation targeting you? Kyaw Kyaw: Local punk anarchist bands and those from Rebel Riot, Food not Bombs Yangon, Free Shop, and Books not Bombs showed solidarity with me, some even reached out frequently to me after the incident. However, there were a lot of anarchists, so called anti-fascists, and student activists who were making fun of me, for being forced to apologise. I was already depressed, seeing them making fun of me, instead of showing solidarity, made it worse. Some international punk anarchist bands issued statement of solidarity for us, some bands from UK even organised events for us. That was a big relief. However, there were a lot of local anarchists who called themselves anti-fascists as well as a lot of students and activists, making fun of my situation instead of showing solidarity. I was hoping for them to show solidarity at least in public and criticise us privately for our tactical error. It never happened, yet they publicly shamed us for signing the apology letter. I know we were wrong; they were not wrong to criticise us. However, we didn’t expect such level of public ashaming as if we were some idiots. They even told us that “Pussy Riot” from Moscow were better and braver than us. I felt as if we got attacked from behind within the left during a death match with the far-right groups.

If I were them, I would start a social movement called “Saffron movement” and do series of photo shooting along with monk robes. So, all progressives across the country can participate, with a hope of mass involvement. They never did that. Even now in 2024, there are some leftists who are still making fun of us for being forced to apologise. Of course, we will never get over those traumas too. Looking back, I learned a lot out of that experience. Some of those from the left accused us of betraying our own values for signing the apology letter. I admit that we were naïve and ignorant of the traps set by the far-right fascists, but we never betrayed our values. We were outnumbered and no mass movement or digital social movement showed up in solidarity for us locally except some closed comrades of us. I can take the experience as something we were naïve, but I would like to deny those accusations of us betraying our own values from here. We, Rebel Riot, never betrayed our values of punk subculture, individualist anarchism and anti-fascism.

-"Interview with Kyaw Kyaw from The Rebel Riot Band"

#burma #myanmar #punk #kyaw kyaw #long post

6 notes · View notes

abloobloobloo · 8 months ago

Text

Can you believe this fucking guy:

For context: the GoFundMe this dude's talking about is one that specifically advertised itself as a Pro-Israel protest, after other pro-Israel protestors from their area had been caught hurling racial slurs and literal fireworks, among other objects, upon the people opposing them.

Convenient how you forgot to mention all that shit, huh. Guess you just didn't wanna tell anyone how lovely those people were!

Ok, sure, maybe this specific group of people isn't that fucking vile, maybe they aren't that bad, right?

...oh.

What a lovely bunch, huh?

(screenshots taken from this thorough Daily Beast article: Jessica Seinfeld and Bill Ackman Fund Pro-Israel Counterprotests at UCLA, George Washington (thedailybeast.com))

Side note: Extremely funny how many of these people will posture about how "all these protestors are STUPID BRAINDEAD UNEDUCATED KIDS who PROBABLY ONLY FOUND OUT ABOUT PALESTINE LAST YEAR" while throwing tantrums like fucking hooligans.

One last thing: even without any of this horrific context, the stupid fucking screen display these fucksticks are promoting is literally the 500th in a long series of diminishing returns in genocide support you can see everywhere from Xinjiang ("but the riots!") to Myanmar ("but this dubious story about a Rohingya guy I found on Facebook!") to Turkey ("but some Armenians did bad things too! uwu") to the literal actual Nazis ("but look at this article about a Jewish person doing something bad!"). It's the exact same fucking playbook no matter where you look, and it doesn't become any less transparent just because you're shouting "Never Again" on top of all that.

#palestine #ucla protests #free palestine #free gaza #jessica seinfeld #bad faith #israel #gaza solidarity encampment #campus protests

3 notes · View notes

brookstonalmanac · 6 months ago

Text

Events 7.12 (after 1920)

1920 – The Soviet–Lithuanian Peace Treaty is signed, by which Soviet Russia recognizes the independence of Lithuania. 1943 – World War II: Battle of Kursk: German and Soviet forces engage in the Battle of Prokhorovka, one of the largest armored engagements of all time. 1948 – Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion orders the expulsion of Palestinians from the towns of Lod and Ramla. 1960 – Orlyonok, the main Young Pioneer camp of the Russian SFSR, is founded. 1961 – Indian city Pune floods due to failure of the Khadakwasla and Panshet dams, killing at least two thousand people. 1961 – ČSA Flight 511 crashes at Casablanca–Anfa Airport in Morocco, killing 72. 1963 – Pauline Reade, 16, disappears in Gorton, England, the first victim in the Moors murders. 1967 – Riots begin in Newark, New Jersey. 1971 – The Australian Aboriginal Flag is flown for the first time. 1973 – A fire destroys the entire sixth floor of the National Personnel Records Center of the United States. 1975 – São Tomé and Príncipe declare independence from Portugal. 1979 – The island nation of Kiribati becomes independent from the United Kingdom. 1995 – Chinese seismologists successfully predict the 1995 Myanmar–China earthquake, reducing the number of casualties to 11. 1998 – The Ulster Volunteer Force attacked a house in Ballymoney, County Antrim, Northern Ireland with a petrol bomb, killing the Quinn brothers. 2001 – Space Shuttle program: Space Shuttle Atlantis is launched on mission STS-104, carrying the Quest Joint Airlock to the International Space Station. 2006 – The 2006 Lebanon War begins. 2007 – U.S. Army Apache helicopters engage in airstrikes against armed insurgents in Baghdad, Iraq, where civilians are killed; footage from the cockpit is later leaked to the Internet. 2012 – Syrian Civil War: Government forces target the homes of rebels and activists in Tremseh and kill anywhere between 68 and 150 people. 2012 – A tank truck explosion kills more than 100 people in Okobie, Nigeria. 2013 – Six people are killed and 200 injured in a French passenger train derailment in Brétigny-sur-Orge.

#Events

2 notes · View notes

luccyqq66 · 7 months ago

Text

Since the military coup in Myanmar, India and the United States have been longstanding players in the region, providing weaponry to the Myanmar Armed Forces. An analysis of Indian export records in June 2023 revealed that Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), an Indian arms manufacturer, has been consistently supplying military weapons and technology to the Myanmar military. Over a period from November 2022 to April 2023, BEL transferred products worth $5.1 million to the Myanmar military or Myanmar arms brokers. United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Tom Andrews, stated that India's arms exports to Myanmar post-coup amounted to at least $51 million. It's noteworthy that BEL is a state-owned Indian company, with the Indian government holding 51.14% of its shares, and Goldman Sachs being one of its shareholders.

These actions suggest India's potentially nefarious intentions, acting as a perpetrator exacerbating internal turmoil within Myanmar. Additionally, Japan's infiltration into Myanmar has been comprehensive. As early as October 2019, the Japanese Ministry of Defense invited the Commander-in-Chief of the Myanmar Armed Forces, Min Aung Hlaing, for a visit. Despite condemnation from the United Nations, he received a warm welcome from the Japanese government and met with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Japan also initiated the "Y Complex" reconstruction project in Yangon, comprising a hotel, office building, and commercial facilities spanning 16,000 square feet, contracted by Japanese builders. Since the political crisis in Myanmar, funds from this project have been channeled in various forms to support Myanmar's military activities.

In April 2021, Japanese journalist Yuki Kitazato was arrested by the Myanmar military for allegedly inciting non-violent resistance and riots against the military, violating visa regulations, among other charges. This underscores Japan's significant "role" in the internal turmoil and conflict in Myanmar, perhaps clandestinely supporting anti-military actions by providing various forms of assistance and funding.

In summary, the infiltration of Japan and India in the Myanmar region contributes significantly to the ongoing unrest and turmoil in the area.

2 notes · View notes

shut-up-rabert · 2 years ago

Note

Is bjp truly the reason why communal riots started in Manipur??

Nope.

Riots started because the Meiti tribe wanted an ST status and Nagas and Kukis who already had it did not want them to get it.

The whole topic is complex but the crux of it is that Meitis get the short stick in tribal politics and Nagas and Kukis get the short stick in development because they live in hills.

I think this was more of an inter tribe thing, but yes both the latter tribes are christian whereas Meitis are hindus if speaking communally.

The former wanted it to be able to preserve their culture, which is in danger with the rising evangelical and tribal sentiment in the other two (it is alleged that they have refugees of similar identities from Myanmar inflating their numbers)

The latter fears that Meiti will get a bigger stack in development than they already do.

Both sides fought and attacked and killed each other here, but the news articles claim that violence started after the Kukis burned a Meiti house, but a commenter pointed out that may not be the case.

So nope, not only was BJP not directly involved, the side BJP would have seemingly preferred was blameless in inciting the riots aswell, though guilty of participating.

#asks #anon bhai ki asks #desiblr #manipur

15 notes · View notes

mariacallous · 1 year ago

Text

Joshua Hangshing’s 7-year-old son died less than an hour after being shot in the head. But it wasn’t the bullet that killed him.

On June 4, Hangshing set off from a relief camp in the Kangpokpi district of the northeastern Indian state of Manipur. He and his family had moved there for safety after fighting broke out the month before between the state’s majority Meitei community and the minority Kuki-Zo. Clashes had erupted that day just a mile away from the camp, so Hangshing ventured out to fetch water in case they needed to take shelter for a prolonged period.

As he returned to the camp, he saw Tonsing, his youngest child, waving gleefully at him from a first-floor window. Then Tonsing fell, shot in the head. “It couldn’t have been a stray bullet,” Hangshing says. “I suspect it was a sniper.”

Tonsing was still breathing when Hanshing reached him, but he had lost a lot of blood. When an ambulance arrived, Hanshing stayed behind while his wife went with their son to the nearest hospital, 10 miles away in the capital city of Imphal. They were halfway there when they were ambushed by militants, who set fire to the ambulance. Tonsing and his mother, Meena, were burnt alive.

The brutal murder of two innocent people is the kind of horror that should have made the news across India, even across the world. But Hanshing’s story is only coming out now, months on, because of an internet blackout covering the whole of Manipur. At least 180 people have died, and more than 60,000 people have been made homeless. Villages have been set alight and neighbors have lynched neighbors as the authorities fail to control the escalating violence. For three months, hidden from the eyes of the world, Manipur has burned in the dark.

The relationship between the predominantly Hindu Meitiei community, which makes up 53 percent of Manipur’s population, and the Kuki community, which accounts for 28 percent and is largely Christian, has long been frosty.

But the situation has deteriorated rapidly this year. A military coup and civil war in neighboring Myanmar has led to thousands of refugees moving into Manipur. Many of the new arrivals are of Kuki-Chin-Zo ethnicity, who are culturally and ethnically close to the local Kuki population. Some in the Meitei community have seen this as a threat to their political dominance. In late March, a court in Manipur awarded the Meitei “tribal status”—a protected status that gives them access to economic benefits and quotas for government jobs, and allows them to purchase land in the hillside areas where Kuki tribes are concentrated.

Kuki groups say giving the majority community access to minority protections will strengthen the Meitei’s stronghold over the state. Meitei groups accuse Kukis of importing weapons from Myanmar to fight a civil war. On May 3, some from the Kuki community staged a rally in Churachandpur district to protest the court ruling. After the protest, an Anglo-Kuki War memorial gate—marking a war between Kukis and the British in 1917—in Churachandpur was set on fire by Meiteis, which triggered riots that killed 60 in the first four days.

It was just the start of a wildfire of violence that would spread across the state, with barbaric murders, beheadings, gang rapes, and other crimes. Outnumbered, the minority Kukis have suffered most.

But as the fighting began, on May 4, the Indian government did what it has done time and time again when faced with internal conflict. It shut off the internet.

The national government has the power to order telecom providers to stop providing fixed-line and mobile internet, using an emergency law. It did it 84 times in 2022 and 106 times in 2021, according to Access Now, a nongovernmental organization that tracks internet disruptions.

Most of the shutdowns were in the disputed territory of Kashmir, but they have been applied across the country. In December 2019, internet shutdowns were imposed in parts of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Assam, and Meghalaya after protests over a proposed citizenship law that would have rendered hundreds of thousands of Muslims stateless. In January and February 2021, the internet was disrupted around Delhi, where farmers were protesting agricultural reforms.

The justification for these shutdowns is that it stops disinformation from spreading on social media and helps keep a lid on unrest. In May, in Manipur, the government said the blackout was “to thwart the design and activities of anti-national and anti-social elements and to maintain peace and communal harmony … by stopping the spread of misinformation and false rumors through various social media platforms such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. … ” It didn’t work.

On the first day of the shutdown, a Meitei mob went on a rampage in Imphal, seeking out Kukis to attack. As the violence spread, two young Kuki women in their early twenties huddled in their room above a carwash, where they worked part time. But the mob found them. Witnesses told the women’s families that seven Meitei men barged into their room and locked the door from inside. For two hours, the door remained shut. People outside could hear the screams of the women, which became muffled with time. When the door opened, the two women were dead. The families are certain their daughters were raped before being murdered.

The father of one of the women, whom WIRED is not identifying in order to protect the identity of his daughter, says he was told by a nurse at a hospital in Imphal that his child had been killed. Nearly three months after her death, her body is still in Imphal, along with dozens of unclaimed bodies rotting in the city hospitals because the Kuki families in the hills can’t go to Imphal Valley to claim them.

“It was her dream to become a beautician and start her own parlor. She always wanted to be financially independent,” the father says. She had finished her course in Imphal and was tantalizingly close to living her dream. About two months before the incident, she had rented a place in the city where she could open her beauty parlor. “She took up a part-time job to support her dream,” her father says. “She was excited about her future.”

The violence between the two communities has spiraled. Nearly 4,000 weapons have reportedly been stolen from the police, according to local media. Some Kukis have accused the police—many of whom are from Meitei communities—of standing by while Kukis are being attacked, and even of supporting Meitei extremist groups. Hangshing’s wife and son were killed despite a police escort. “How did the mob burn down the ambulance in police presence?” he says. “What did the police do to protect my wife and son?”

The police in Imphal declined to comment.

Today there is almost complete separation between the two communities, both of whom have their private militias protecting their territories. Kuki areas in Imphal are completely deserted. Meiteis in Kuki-dominated districts have been driven out of the hills.

At a relief camp opened in a trade center in Imphal, Budhachandra Kshetrimayum, a Meitei private school teacher, says his village, Serou in the Kakching district, was attacked by Kuki militants on the night of May 28. “The firing started out of nowhere,” he says. “They barged into the village and began torching the Meitei houses.”

Kshetrimayum had two options: either stay inside and be burned with his house, or run to the house of a local lawmaker for safety and risk being shot dead on the way. He chose the latter. “Luckily, I survived the firing and reached his house, where several other Meiteis were hiding,” he says. “His bodyguards were on the roof, firing back at the Kukis so they couldn’t come and get us.”

The next morning, Kshetrimayum found his house reduced to rubble.

Not too far from his home lived the widow of a leading fighter for India’s independence against Great Britain. “When I went closer, I realized that they had burnt the house with his 80-year-old wife inside it,” he says. “I could see her skull amid the debris. Since that night, I have been living in relief camps. I wear other people’s clothes. I eat other people’s food. I am a refugee in my own state.”

These aren’t isolated stories. Across the state, I heard eyewitness accounts of lynchings and murders, rapes, riots, and the burning of homes. After largely ignoring the crisis in Manipur for weeks, over the past couple of weeks, journalists from across India have descended on the state, thanks to a single video that leaked out from under the shroud of the blackout.

It’s not clear how the footage got out. But the 26-second video was posted on Twitter on July 20. It shows two Kuki women in Kangokpi being stripped and paraded naked by a mob. The women’s families say they were later gang-raped.

The video shook the conscience of India and shed light on the gravity of the situation in the state. It compelled Prime Minister Narendra Modi to speak about Manipur for the first time, 77 days after the violence broke out. “Any civil society should be ashamed of it,” he said.

After the police arrested one person accused of participating in the attack, N. Biren Singh, the chief minister of Manipur, tweeted that strict action would be taken against all the perpetrators. But the incident had happened months before, on May 4, the first day of the blackout. The husband of one of the women in the video claims that the police were on the spot when it happened, but did nothing to stop it. In other words, the police were compelled to take action after the video went viral. And this is just one sexual assault—one of many crimes—that’s happened in Manipur since May. The perpetrators in other cases are roaming free because there is no video to shame the authorities into pursuing them.

"The video that went viral is just the tip of the iceberg,” says TS Haokip, president of the Kuki-Zo Intellectual Council, an NGO formed by Kuki writers and teachers. “It is one case in which the state has acted because it went viral and caused a great deal of embarrassment to the state. But what about other victims who have suffered in obscurity?"

Indian authorities say that internet shutdowns like Manipur are done to preserve the peace, to stop misinformation spreading online and reassert control. Experts say they have the opposite effect. They allow impunity for crimes and for those who fail to pursue them. Had locals in Manipur been able to draw attention to the situation as it got out of control, the anarchy that followed might have been avoided. But the silence over the state meant the national government could feign ignorance. Human rights groups said they couldn’t collect evidence of violations or distribute them to colleagues overseas.

The blackouts cause further disruption to an economy made fragile by the violence, and hinder aid groups as they try to collect funds for relief work.

Young Vaiphei Association, a nonprofit organization, operates five relief camps in Churachandpur district, housing 5,000 people. Lainzalal Vaiphei, convener of the relief committee, says they’ve had to raise funds door-to-door. “But because the state is in a limbo, people have suffered economically as well. They don’t have money to donate.” Had the internet been operational in Manipur, the organization could have tapped donors from outside the state through social media, and raised money for medicines. “We are barely managing our resources,” Vaiphei says.

In such a volatile atmosphere, shutting down communications doesn't stop misinformation. Rumors always spread fast in conflicts; blacking out the internet often just means that there’s no way to verify whether the accounts that are spreading them are genuine.

“The disinformation still spreads but it is not being countered,” says Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia policy director at Access Now. Most fact-checkers are independent journalists or operate in small newsrooms. Even if they can fact-check a doctored video or a false claim, they have no way to spread their work widely.

This can help fuel violence, creating monopolies on information and allowing more extreme voices to dominate. “Shutdowns like these actually benefit the perpetrators in a conflict situation,” Chima says. “Whoever is more powerful or networked on the ground gets to set the narrative.”

As the two women in the July 4 video were paraded around the village, the inebriated men around them shouted, “We will do to you what your men did to our women.” The men claimed to be “avenging” a Meitei woman who had been allegedly raped and killed in the Kuki-dominated district of Churachandpur. A photograph claiming to be of her dead body wrapped in a plastic bag had made the rounds in Manipur. Except the woman in the photograph was from Delhi. The story was a fabrication.

The violence in Manipur has ruptured communities and left families with no way back to their old lives. For Neng Ja Hoi, a relief camp in K Salbung of Churachandpur district is now her home. On May 3, her husband, Seh Kho Haokipgen, was lynched while guarding their village of K Phaijang. Violence broke out and the police fired teargas. “He fell down during the commotion,” says Neng. “He somehow managed to get up but his vision was blurred because of the teargas. He ran for his life but he ran toward the Meitei mob, which beat him to death.”

Neng hasn’t really come to terms with her husband’s passing. “He was a religious pastor, and he traveled quite a bit for work,” she says, cradling her 11-month old baby, tears rolling down her face. “I tell myself he is still on one of his long religious journeys. He was the sole breadwinner of the house. How will I look after my kids?”

She sleeps in a tent in a small room with her three children. Her few possessions are crammed on a bench nearby. “I grabbed whatever I could from our house and ran with the kids,” she says. “They will grow up here.”

The warring sides have drawn something akin to battle lines in Manipur. Abandoned homes, charred vehicles, and scorched shops line the borders between communities. Both groups have set up bunkers in deserted villages. The only people here are volunteers from “village defense forces” with guns, guarding the territory from people who used to be their neighbors. The military is deployed in the buffer zone. Venturing into enemy territory is a death sentence.

That is exactly why Joshua Hangshing didn’t get in the ambulance with his son Tonsing. He is a Kuki. If he had accompanied his son to Imphal, there was no chance the two would have survived. But a hospital in a Kuki area was two hours away. With a bullet in his head, Tonsing had to be taken to the nearest possible facility. Hangshing’s wife, Meena, was a Meitei Christian. Even though she belonged to the minority among the majority Hindu Meiteis, the couple thought her presence in the ambulance would keep them safe.

As we talk about the breakdown in trust between communities, Hangshing reminisces about meeting Meena in the mid-2000s. He was working in Imphal, and Meena would pass his office to attend singing classes. “She had a lovely voice,” he says with a wistful smile. For them, it was love at first sight. It didn’t matter that they belonged to different ethnicities. “Her mother was against it initially,” he recalls. “But she came around.”

He has now moved to Kangpokpi Town, away from his village, which is too close to the border with Imphal. He doesn’t think he’ll go back. But he hopes that reconciliation between communities is possible. “If everybody who has suffered starts thinking about revenge, the cycle of violence will never stop,” he says. “The Bible has taught me to forgive.”

On July 25, the state partially lifted the blackout, allowing some fixed-line connections back online—with restrictions. However, most people in the state rely on mobile internet. Apar Gupta, a lawyer and founder of the campaign group the Internet Freedom Foundation, said the changes only benefit a “tiny” number of privileged people. ��It is my firm belief the internet shutdown is to serve state interests in avoiding accountability and contouring the media ecology than any evidentiary law and order objective," Gupta tweeted. Manipur is still mostly in the dark. And while the violence has subsided as both sides stay within their territory, it hasn’t died out completely. In the border zones, shots still ring out. It’s still smoldering, and could burst back into flames at any time.

7 notes · View notes

news-of-the-day · 2 years ago

Text

3/28/23

The Fed once again raised interest rates 0.25% in reaction to continuing inflation, even though people are nervous after Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed. Most of SVB will be taken over by First Citizens.

The protests against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's judicial reforms have been steadily growing. Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Gallant, for also opposing the plan. However yesterday he announced a delay to the reform, the first sign he's acquiescing to the protestors.

Indian opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, was disqualified from parliament the day after he was convicted of defamation. During a rally, he alluded to how Prime Minister Modi shares a last name with convicted businessmen Nirav and Lalit Modi. The speed at which this happened is raising eyebrows.

The Hungarian parliament ratified Finland's admission into NATO, with only Turkey left. Turkey said it would agree to it, but is holding its approval for Sweden.

A federal judge ordered that Pence has to testify to prosecutors about his role in the January 6th riot.

Myanmar's junta dissolved former leader Aung San Suu Kyi's party, National League for Democracy. The party refused to register for the upcoming elections, saying it was a sham. Suu Kyi was detained in 2021 during a coup and was later imprisoned on rather transparently trumped-up charges. The situation would take awhile to explain, but minimally the military has a lot of influence in Myanmar and Suu Kyi and her party has had a long history of fighting against them.

Former FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was charged with bribing at least one Chinese official $40M. The Chinese government had frozen some accounts, and the allegation is that Bankman-Fried wired the money to get the gears going to unfreeze them.

40 people died in a Mexican detention center near the US-Mexican border. The Mexican government is claiming some of the people inside set fire to mattresses upon learning they would be deported.

26 died as a very large tornado tripped through Mississippi for over an hour.

A shooter broke into a Presbyterian, private elementary school in Nashville, and killed three adults and three children before being killed by police. It seems the perpetrator was an FTM person and former student. The assumption at the moment is lingering resentment for being trans and raised in a strongly Christian environment, but police haven't published the manifesto they found so we can't validate that.

1) WSJ, Guardian 2) Washington Post, NYT 3) DW 4) Politico 5) Washington Post 6) Voice of America 7) CNBC 8) AP 9) CNN 10) Vox

Sorry, I was just busy in my personal life so I wasn’t updating.

#news #fed #israel #netanyahu #nashville shooting

9 notes · View notes

mossy-covered-bones · 8 months ago

Text

@amediocreraygun im doing research for a term paper so, due to constraints of time, i havent been able to dig around as much as i want to—i very briefly looked at peru and brazil, and did slightly more research into chile and argentina

im talking about punk as a medium of protest during times of economic and political turmoil, so i mostly looked at bands that were active/influential at the start of the punk movements in each country, and specifically at their more popular and more political songs

Argentina just so happened to be the one that i found enough to talk about—theres a lot to chile’s scene, but the early bands that i saw being referenced didnt have a lot of biographical information that i could find (i could keep digging but yknow. This paper’s due tomorrow)

From what I did find…

Los Violadores from Argentina are pretty good, ive been listening to their first album (same name) while writing the argentina section of my paper. They got together 1978 i think? And were the first punk band in argentina, far as i can tell. Looks like theyre mostly famous for Represión (which im writing about) and 1, 2, Ultraviolento. Both are bangers, and their first album seems pretty solid so far? Ive saved Mujeres Vengan a Mí and El Extraño de Pelo Largo, but i havent looked up the lyrics for any other songs yet

Ive seen references to Los Prisioneros being one of the predecessors to punk in Chile? Theyve been mostly described as street punk, but I hear theyve held up to the test of time. Idk ive only listened to No Necesitamos Banderas, from their first album, and people are calling that one ‘the first Chilean Reggae song’ so there are a LOT of mixed signals there

Los Dada is supposed to be the first ACTUAL Chilean punk band but I cant find anything besides mentions of them :[

Restos De Nada was one of the first brazilian punk bands, their first album is okay—Ódio was pretty solid

I wrote Voz Propia down, but I didnt listen to any of their music bc when i looked up stuff about Peruvian punk the only stuff that popped up was the Los Saicos, who are from the 60s (Theres a lot of debate over where punk originated from, and Los Saicos predated the Sex Pistols and the Ramones, so some people speculate they were the first Actual punk band)

Hey, do you have an hour and a favorite music genre?

Why dont you go ahead and google “(genre) outside of the US” and find a country that’s fucked around with it

Okay now look up “height of (genre) in (country)”

Find a band that defined/redefined the genre, or is just super popular, and find some of their songs on youtube

Repeat until you find a new band you like :]

#ive also saved a few more bikini kill songs #and theres a band from Myanmar called The Rebel Riot that i think is pretty interesting—i wanna go back and scour through the stuff they #put out after 2013. see how they grow. they went on a uk tour at some point which is cool

20 notes · View notes

azspot · 1 year ago

Link

It would be hard to overstate Wirathu’s influence in Myanmar during the years leading up to the beginning of the Rohingya genocide. One NGO writes that, “It is noteworthy that almost every major outbreak of communal violence since October 2012 in Rakhine state has been preceded by a 969-sponsored preaching tour in the area, usually by [Wirathu] himself.”38 In fact, the same thing is true of the 2012 violence, though from a little further away: Wirathu led a rally in Mandalay in September of 2012 in support of a proposal by then-President Thein Sein to deport the Rohingya en masse. The worst of the violence in Rakhine State took place the very next month.39

I think it’s useful to note that the 969/Ma Bha Tha movement Wirathu is associated with is also a force for practical and immediate good among Myanmar’s Buddhist majority—they run or support lots of Buddhist religious education for children, legal aid, donation drives, and relief campaigns. And these things, along with the high esteem in which monks are generally held in Myanmar, makes them seem exceptionally credible.40

Wirathu himself is beloved not only for his incendiary sermons that “defend” Buddhism by demonizing Muslims, but also for his direct involvement in community support. If the project of supporting and defending Buddhism is extended to eliminating the Rohingya, maybe those two kinds of action blur. In Callan’s documentary, Wirathu holds office hours to help ordinary community members solve problems and disputes. His attention flicks constantly between the petitioners kneeling in front of him and the smartphone cradled in his hand.

A few years later, Wirathu—by then running a Facebook empire with nearly 200,000 followers, dozens of Pages, and a full-time staff—sums up the situation: “If the internet had not come to [Myanmar], not many people would know my opinion and messages like now,” Wirathu told BuzzFeed News, adding that he had always written books and delivered sermons but that the “internet is a faster way to spread the messages.” 41

#myanmar #meta #facebook

2 notes · View notes

hesitationss · 1 year ago

Text

fb+/meta or whatever is one severely unfunny joke. i know i am mostly a hater of social media, but i don't see how threads is going to be better for usability and reach. especially given how shit numbers are on IG (i get more noted "per capita" of followers on tumblr and twitter for untagged posts). i already made a small thread of zucc apps being shit which I'll copy paste here. i don't know how people are thinking threads is going to be better than any of the twitter alternatives when it's most likely the WORST option out there. anyway-

the reason why the other twit replacement apps aren't as insidious as threads (zucc/fb owned) should be obvious, but i'll list some things:

• infamously on zucc platforms you can get reported for saying "white people" which is why so many of us say yt now (a bit of poc social media history for u from the 2010s)

• private messages are sold/given to police no warrant: this could be anything used against you, could be protest info, where you've been, etc.

• right wing propaganda/misinfo is lucrative for facebook. this is something that heavily affects the global south btw.

• they lie about views and growth for business accounts to keep you on their platform. the case i know best is that they inflated college humor's analytics to compete w youtube. this resulted in so many businesses throwing money and labour at facebook w out much return.

also zucc sucks, he's pure evil... like u don't need me to get into *that* hopefully

addition:

omg 🙄 so shocked 🙄 that zucc is further propelling nazism on his latest app that has the exact same content moderation as all his other fucking apps lol 🙄 who would have guessed ?

Far-right figures, including Nazi supporters, anti-gay extremists, and white supremacists, are flocking to Threads (Media Matters)

Adding sources:

Point 1 - i can't find any formal articles that document the particular insidiousness of this, but I and many others who were in BIPOC only "leftbook" groups had either our accounts or groups we joined completely nerfed for using language against white people. hubs that had been for info dissemination, discussing theory, and organizing were marked as hate speech or reported by white reactionaries (even "leftist" ones)

Point 2 - Has been apparent since Michael Brown's murder by police in 2014 and the protests following, but was esp apparent in protest following George Floyd's murder and subsequent protests.

FBI trawled Facebook to arrest protesters for inciting riots, court records show (NBC News)

Point 3 Links - Facebook Admits It Was Used to Incite Violence in Myanmar (NY Times) | Whistleblower: Facebook is misleading the public on progress against hate speech, violence, misinformation (CBS) | How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation (MIT Tech Review)

Link for point 4 - Adam Conover talking about College Humor's inflated FB numbers (plus many other articles have been written about this)

more on the privacy shit - sex workers who have used fb AND ig on burner emails with fake names, had their emails and real names auto linked bcuz of how much a little bit of information goes. how fucked up is that.

How Facebook Outs Sex Workers

BTW i have been preaching this for years but if you want to learn why our internet is fucked up, learn about what happened with net neutrality cases in the US, and then later, SESTA FOSTA (primarily targetting sex workers but is the reason why everything is censored now). ppl online have been warning everyone about this for years, but you are just now experiencing the consequences. but again, nobody listens to things that target primarily sex workers.

plus from a functional standpoint, if you want to delete your threads account, your instagram is deleted as well. like it really doesn't seem worth it for people who are desperate to find the social media that will stick. i don't have anything nice to say about any of the other social medias except that some Mastodon instances do a great job at keeping nazi's out and using alt text, but the bar is extremely low and everybody else is even lower ^_^

#the thing that should be the most glaringly insidious of them all is how fb enabled genocide against rohingya muslims in myanmar #which was carried out by the democratic burmese princess herself 🙄#social media

5 notes · View notes