Are the Rohingya militants responsible for derailing Kofi Annan Commission's recommendations?

There is something else that needs to be called out: the mass media's misframing of Rohingya militants as "jihadists".

Both the realities on the ground and the media narrative covering the realities are quite skewered in favour of the perpetrating Burmese regime's framing. It frames the militant rohingyas as "Jihadists" - a term with a religious connotation as if Rohingyas were religiously motivated along the lines of ISIS. The leader and some rank and files may have been trained in fighting in countries like Pakistan,

but their emergence is not triggered by their extremists interpretations of Islam. By their statements you can definitively tell that they do not want the crippling ghetto-like conditions all Rohingya communities have been forced to live in for almost 40 years.

Their goals are not creating an Islamic state in the predominantly Buddhist country, nor independence from Myanmar. They have made it clear publicly, they want simply what the rest of the public have -

equality before the law, freedom to live in peace, freedom to move about so that they can work, earn a living and feed their children, recognition that they are citizens and they belong in Burma, not in

Bangladesh, whatever the colonial history from 150 years ago.

The least the activists can do on the ground - or internationally - is to correct this narrative.

They are armed with machetes and farm tools, equipped with some mobile phones and use the most primitive type of explosives, which make all this reportage about Rohingyas receiving catches of AK-47s and Saudi money, citing "un-named intelligence sources" utterly non-credible. my own experience with years of dealing with intelligence officials is I take their words with a giant grain of salt: they are simply un-trust worthy, by profession spreaders of misinformation about

target groups.

The western media and government officials (and think tanks) - infested with general Islamophobia - are too quick to frame any Muslim who resists against injustices or fight back any power that subjects their communities to Hell-like conditions as "prospective Jihadist", "jihadist" or "extremist" or "Terrorist".

Suu Kyi's military partners have been attempting to play this "we-are-fighting-the-war-on-terror" game since 2012. Just yesterday, Suu Kyi has just joined this band-wagon when she uses the label "terrorists" to refer to the Rohingya militants and condemns them while she has only defended her father's army against the enormity of allegations of crimes against humanity.

Getting this record straight is one concrete thing activists and Rohingya victims themselves can do.

This is the war that Myanmar - both the army and Suu Kyi's gov - are waging against Rohingyas to further demonize and criminalise them while maintaining the ghettoized conditions on the grounds for more than 1 million Rohingyas.

You lift these conditions, and I guarantee that the Rohingya militancy will immediately stop.

For these young Rohingya men, primitively armed, are not fighting to go to Heaven as Martyrs, they are fighting back because they and their communities are sitting ducks awaiting the next round of mass slaughter.

When these young and 'angry' men - as UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar Professor Yangee Lee put it - fight back the mighty oppressor, Myanmar Tatmadaw, they are making a bad choice, of course, among all bad choices. Do they subject themselves to semi-slavery in the hands of human traffickers, or risk drowning in the high sea? Do they allow themselves and their families to remain in semi-famine conditions? Do they simply lie down and let themselves slaughtered by the organized gangs of racist Rakhine neighbours who want to cleanse the entire N. Rakhine of any and all Rohingya Muslims, with the full backing of the military State? Do they want for UN intervention which will never materialise?

Most everything the world is hearing about all the recent killing spree of civilians in N. Rakhine by "ski-masked gangs" and other stories framed as "terrorist activities" come from the single source: Aung San Suu Kyi's Information Committee. Well, she has become part of the genocidal hell for Rohingyas, covering up and denying the systematic and pervasive rights violations and violence

committed by her father's army.

Finally, Annan, Western Governments (USA, France, UK, etc.) and UN office in Myanmar are too quick to condemn Rohingya militant attacks as "undermining" Kofi Annan's peace and mediation efforts while the very same entities have held their nose on what they know to be at best crimes against humanity and at worst a full-scaled genocide in slow motion which Rohingyas have been subjected to over the last almost 40 years.

Like all previous genocidal cases, wittingly or not these external players are complicit in the verifiably systematic and pervasive attempts by Myanmar to destroy the entire ethnic community.

If there is anyone or group who deserves unequivocal condemnations for the escalation of violence and militancy in N. Rakhine its both the perpetrators and the external enablers which I mentioned above.

Even in Auschwitz and crippling ghettos, Nazi victims and inmates rose up taking as many SS Exterminators as they possibly could with them, knowing full well their eventual fate.

Should we the bystanders condemn the Nazi inmates who attempted to rise up and put the desperate violence of the oppressed on the moral parity with the systematic genocidal violence by the perpetrators?

I for one am NOT prepared to condemn violence across the board, whatever that makes me. I may or I may not chose to resort to violence or militancy were I in Rohingya situation. But I have absolutely no moral authority to condemn them as a privileged man whose family and himself live in comfort and safety.

Above all I respect the dignity and the need for self-respect of even the most wretched among us to decide their own fates, whatever their choice.