Another Genocide?
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Thursday, May 18, 2006
A report from Mizzima (a Burmese expat news website), and picked up by India Defence, suggests to me that Indian troops are possibly cooperating in this conflict.
And a little more detail with some background: Chron: Myanmar Troops Widen Offensive.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Union-Tribune: Myanmar acknowledges attacking Karen ethnic area.
How much of calling an event a 'genocide' is a boggling, a failure of our sensibilities at sickening brutality, and an attempt to clear our minds by attaching to the monstrosity of the Nazi extermination of the Jews?
Categorically, the Holocaust fits the term without any question whatsoever. No sensible person denies it - Germany and Germans do not deny it. What about the Armenian massacre, extermination, now called a genocide by an act of the Canadian Parliament but still denied by the Turks? the killing fields of Pol Pot? the Hutu/Tutsi slaughter in Rwanda? the Janjaweed atrocities in Darfur? Other histories come to my mind: the Japanese intrusion into China before the second world war? Von Trotha in South Africa? The Canadian Residential Schools for the children of our aborigines?
I hesitate to quibble over terminology. The recent treaty in Darfur came about in large part it seems because America and George Bush himself decided to call it genocide and then moved strongly on the diplomatic front. The UN is now mobilizing a peacekeeping force but both the treaty and the arrival on the ground of UN troops remain dubitable. If stretching words is what it takes then let us stretch them - I guess I will leave the dictionary part of it there for now.
Tags: Genocide, Myanmar, Burma, Karen, India.
Thursday, May 18, 2006
A report from Mizzima (a Burmese expat news website), and picked up by India Defence, suggests to me that Indian troops are possibly cooperating in this conflict.
And a little more detail with some background: Chron: Myanmar Troops Widen Offensive.
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
Union-Tribune: Myanmar acknowledges attacking Karen ethnic area.How much of calling an event a 'genocide' is a boggling, a failure of our sensibilities at sickening brutality, and an attempt to clear our minds by attaching to the monstrosity of the Nazi extermination of the Jews?
Categorically, the Holocaust fits the term without any question whatsoever. No sensible person denies it - Germany and Germans do not deny it. What about the Armenian massacre, extermination, now called a genocide by an act of the Canadian Parliament but still denied by the Turks? the killing fields of Pol Pot? the Hutu/Tutsi slaughter in Rwanda? the Janjaweed atrocities in Darfur? Other histories come to my mind: the Japanese intrusion into China before the second world war? Von Trotha in South Africa? The Canadian Residential Schools for the children of our aborigines?
I hesitate to quibble over terminology. The recent treaty in Darfur came about in large part it seems because America and George Bush himself decided to call it genocide and then moved strongly on the diplomatic front. The UN is now mobilizing a peacekeeping force but both the treaty and the arrival on the ground of UN troops remain dubitable. If stretching words is what it takes then let us stretch them - I guess I will leave the dictionary part of it there for now.
Tags: Genocide, Myanmar, Burma, Karen, India.
