UN staff members detained and charged in Myanmar: UNHCR

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UN staff members detained and charged in Myanmar: UNHCR

July 13, 2012 10:41:31 am

[JURIST] Spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) [official website] Melissa Fleming on Friday reported that 10 UN staff and aid workers have been arrested in the northwestern Rakhine state of Myanmar [BBC backgrounder; JURIST news archive] and three of them are facing unknown criminal charges. All of the three charged [Reuters report] are Myanmar nationals working for the UNHCR while four of the 10 arrested are working for Doctors Without Borders or Medecins Sans Frontieres [advocacy websites]. It was reported that UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres [official profile] tried, while on a five-day trip to Southeast Asia [press release], to persuade the local authorities to release the UN staff members without success. The spokeswoman for UNHCR declined to give further comments. The area where the 10 UN workers were arrested has been subject to continued violence between the Rohingya Muslim minority [BBC backgrounder] and majority Buddhists, resulting in at least 80 deaths.

During the five-day visit which included visits to Thailand and Myanmar, Guterres told [mission briefing] Myanmar President Thein Sein [BBC profile; official website, in Burmese] and other officials that the UN body will support the countries’ attempt to build peace between the two religious groups, especially in the southeastern and western parts of the nation. He also noted that the UNCHR will continue its humanitarian assistance to both groups without discrimination. The violence in Myanmar has become an international concern. In June, Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website] urged [JURIST report] the Chinese government to provide basic food and shelter needs to refugees from Myanmar after finding refugee abuse. Earlier in June, HRW also called on [JURIST report] Bangladesh to open its borders to Myanmar refugees a day after it demanded Myanmar ensure the safety of communities in the Arakan State subject to the violence between Arakan Buddhists and ethnic Rohingya Muslims. In March, HRW reported [JURIST report] that violence and rights abuses continue in Myanmar’s northern state of Kachin due to the conflict between Myanmar’s armed forces and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) [BBC backgrounder]. During the same month, Tomas Ojea Quintana [official profile], the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar urged [JURIST report] the country to ensure the protection of human rights. In November, Human rights group Partners Relief and Development [advocacy website] issued [JURIST report] a report [text, PDF, graphic content] which alleged that the army may be committing war crimes including torture and forced labor against ethnic communities in Kachin state.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.