Don’t Ignore the Brutal Civil War in Burma

It is a bad cliché, of several decades’ vintage, to say that a given civil war is ‘complex’. Normally, this is a dodge on the foreign correspondent’s part. He either wishes to hide his lack of knowledge from you, or to pretend that without him holding the reader’s hand, they could never hope to understand the story.   

Burma’s Rohingya Genocide

When Ronan Lee heard that Myanmar’s military was in the process of overthrowing the civilian elements of the country’s government, including state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, he felt a particular disappointment and concern distinct from others’ worries about the state of Burmese democracy. He felt ‘concerned about what it meant for Myanmar and the aspirations of its young people, and for the Rohingya whose situation is always worse when the military have power.’

The Genocide Convention May Hinder Rather Than Help Victims

Each year we mark Holocaust Memorial Day, an anniversary that has increasingly become a rallying point against genocide in the abstract as well as in the specific. This year, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, and a number of other faith and interfaith organisations used the occasion to decry China’s ongoing genocide against the Uighur minority, who have been confined in their millions in re-education-cum-work camps, forcibly sterilised, and impressed into a system of slave labour for which we have increasingly incontrovertible evidence.

The Trump Administration’s Parting Blows

As you will likely have gleaned from other sources, Joe Biden is now the president of the United States. He has begun his time in office, as presidents are wont to do, by making a show of being busy and in charge. Biden spent the first few hours at his desk undoing all the work of his predecessor that could be undone by executive order.

Britain’s New Sanctions Regime

Minor excitement in the diplomatic world as the British government announced that it would, for the first time, issue direct sanctions against human rights-transgressing countries without doing so under the auspices of the European Union, NATO, or the United Nations.

Unhidden Genocide

Review – The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide by Azeem Ibrahim

This book was published more than a year ago, but it is only now that its true relevance has been demonstrated in the face of world events.