Responses by the United States to Attacks on the Rohingya in Burma

2018 ◽  
Vol 112 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-326

On November 22, 2017, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson released a statement addressing attacks on the Rohingya population in Burma: [T]he key test of any democracy is how it treats its most vulnerable and marginalized populations, such as the ethnic Rohingya and other minority populations. Burma's government and security forces must respect the human rights of all persons within its borders, and hold accountable those who fail to do so.… .These abuses by some among the Burmese military, security forces, and local vigilantes have caused tremendous suffering and forced hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children to flee their homes in Burma to seek refuge in Bangladesh. After a careful and thorough analysis of available facts, it is clear that the situation in northern Rakhine state constitutes ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya.

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-105
Author(s):  
Mehmet Kalyoncu

Uzbek president Islam Karimov has gotten away relatively easily with hisbrutal suppression of the Andijon uprising (May 13-14, 2005), in which thestate security forces opened fire on protesters and killed about 700 of them.Despite the fact that this book was written before this event, ShahramAkbarzadeh’s Uzbekistan and the United States: Authoritarianism,Islamism & Washington’s Security Agenda articulates quite well howKarimov came to the point where he could find the courage to becomeincreasingly authoritarian despite Uzbekistan’s bad record of human rightsabuses and failed democratic reforms. The author argues that Karimov’salready existing authoritarianism has intensified and yet has been relativelyignored as a result of his close cooperation with the United States in theAmerican-led “war-on-terror.” He argues that the common threat of Islamist extremism has brought the United States and Uzbekistan togetherand has become a pretext for the latter to continue its repressive policies,which have caused Uzbekistan’s human rights and democratization recordsto falter even further.Akbarzadeh takes the reader through a series of sociopolitical transformationsby which Karimov has sought to consolidate his power. Theseinclude the domestic restructuring of the Uzbek political system in the post-Soviet era; regional alignments and power struggles, most notably againstRussia; and, finally, Tashkent’s long-sought bilateral relations with theUnited States, which gained a whole new dimension after 9/11 and throughoutthe American-led “war on terror.” The author concludes that the cooperationbetween Tashkent and Washington in the fight against Islamistextremism and, consequently, the latter’s downplaying its concerns aboutdemocratic reforms in Uzbekistan, would only encourage Karimov to bemore repressive and less accountable toward the citizens of Uzbekistan.The book contributes to the understanding of political developments in thenewly independent states by probing the interaction between Uzbek domesticpolitics and the international political and security agendas ...


2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 56-71
Author(s):  
Nienke van der Have

The initiative for a European Union (EU) human rights sanctions regime that targets individual human rights offenders builds upon an interesting trend set by the United States’ Magnitsky Act. It has the potential to contribute to the development of international law and allow states and the EU to take on a more progressive attitude in relation to gross human rights violations committed worldwide. As an EU-wide initiative, it also has the opportunity to break with the muddled past and set a positive example. To do so, there are several important factors to consider related to the conceptual aim of the regime, its demarcation and potential effectiveness in practice.


1985 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Buergenthal

The American Convention on Human Rights entered into force in 1978. To date, 18 OAS member states, out of 31, have ratified it. Included among the states parties to the Convention are all the Central American Republics as well as Panama, Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. The five Andean Pact nations have ratified, as have Jamaica, Barbados and Grenada. Argentina is the latest state to become a party; it did so on September 5, 1984, and thus became the first and, to date, only Southern Cone country to do so. The others—Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay—have not ratified; nor have Brazil, the United States, Suriname and a number of English-speaking Caribbean states.


Author(s):  
Stuart Rees

This chapter assesses four ways cruelties have been formed and fomented in policies. It moves from cruelty as a deliberate motive to situations where it looks as though the architects of policies enabled cruelties to take place but did not direct them. Then come the denials and deception: who could possibly think that countries such as the United States, Russia, Israel, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Iran, or Myanmar would indulge in human rights abuses such as collective punishments, ethnic cleansing, floggings, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, targeted killings, and executions? Finally, there is collusion. Alliances are made with countries which commit cruelties but their allies behave as though this is nothing to do with them. When the United States ignores Israeli cruelty to Palestinian children, that is collusion. The European Union and the United Nations may also collude by silence which encourages perpetrators.


Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith

Coherence of place often exists alongside irregularities in time in cycles, and chapter three turns to cycles linked by temporal markers. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) follows a linear chronology and describes the exploration, conquest, and repopulation of Mars by humans. Conversely, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984) jumps back and forth across time to narrate the lives of interconnected families in the western United States. Bradbury’s cycle invokes a confluence of historical forces—time as value-laden, work as a calling, and travel as necessitating standardized time—and contextualizes them in relation to anxieties about the space race. Erdrich’s cycle invokes broader, oppositional conceptions of time—as recursive and arbitrary and as causal and meaningful—to depict time as implicated in an entire system of measurement that made possible the destruction and exploitation of the Chippewa people. Both volumes understand the United States to be preoccupied with imperialist impulses. Even as they critique such projects, they also point to the tenacity with which individuals encounter these systems, and they do so by creating “interstitial temporalities,” which allow them to navigate time at the crossroads of language and culture.


2004 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-165

By late August, the crisis that had been brewing between the prime minister and president came to a head; Abbas's government, though backed by the United States, had been undermined during its four months in office by deterioration on the ground and continuing tensions with Arafat, which centered in particular on control of the Palestinian security forces. Abbas's letter of resignation, published in al-Hayat on 9 September, was translated in Mideast Mirror the same day.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 130-134

This section, updated regularly on the blog Palestine Square, covers popular conversations related to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict during the quarter 16 November 2017 to 15 February 2018: #JerusalemIstheCapitalofPalestine went viral after U.S. president Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and announced his intention to move the U.S. embassy there from Tel Aviv. The arrest of Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi for slapping an Israeli soldier also prompted a viral campaign under the hashtag #FreeAhed. A smaller campaign protested the exclusion of Palestinian human rights from the agenda of the annual Creating Change conference organized by the US-based National LGBTQ Task Force in Washington. And, UNRWA publicized its emergency funding appeal, following the decision of the United States to slash funding to the organization, with the hashtag #DignityIsPriceless.


2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 70-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Gallagher

Public opinion in the United States and elsewhere celebrated the liberation of Afghan women following the defeat of the Taliban government. The United States promised to stay in Afghanistan and foster security, economic development, and human rights for all, especially women. After years of funding various anti- Soviet Mujahidin warlords, the United States had agreed to help reconstruct the country once before in 1992, when the Soviet-backed government fell, but had lost interest when the warlords began to fight among themselves. This time, however, it was going to be different. To date, however, conditions have not improved for most Afghan women and reconstruction has barely begun. How did this happen? This article explores media presentations of Afghan women and then compares them with recent reports from human rights organizations and other eyewitness accounts. It argues that the media depictions were built on earlier conceptions of Muslim societies and allowed us to adopt a romantic view that disguised or covered up the more complex historical context of Afghan history and American involvement in it. We allowed ourselves to believe that Afghans were exotic characters who were modernizing or progressing toward a western way of life, despite the temporary setback imposed by the Taliban government. In Afghanistan, however, there was a new trope: the feminist Afghan woman activist. Images of prominent Afghan women sans burqa were much favored by the mass media and American policymakers. The result, however, was not a new focus on funding feminist political organizations or making women’s rights a foreign policy priority; rather, it was an unwillingness to fulfill obligations incurred during decades of American-funded mujahidin warfare, to face the existence of deteriorating conditions for women, resumed opium cultivation, and a resurgent Taliban, or to commit to a multilateral approach that would bring in the funds and expertise needed to sustain a long-term process of reconstruction.


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