Cardinal Pell’s court hearing weighs evidence for abuse allegations

CNA Staff, Oct 17, 2020 / 06:01 am (CNA).- United Nations officials in Burma said Wednesday that earlier this month, two boys were killed amid crossfire between the Tatmadaw, the country’s military, and the Arakan Army, an ethnic Buddhist separatist group.

The UN Country Taskforce on Monitoring and Reporting on Grave Violations against Children in Myanmar said Oct. 14 that on Oct. 5 “two boys were killed in Buthidaung Township, Rakhine State, in crossfire between the Tatmadaw and the Arakan Army. This occurred after the children, as part of a group of 15 local farmers, were alleged to all have been forced to walk in front of a Tatmadaw unit to ensure the path towards a military camp was clear of landmines and to protect the soldiers from potential enemy fire.”

“On the way, fighting broke out between the Tatmadaw and the Arakan Army, after which the two boys were found dead with gunshot wounds.”

The Tatmadaw had been censured internationaly the for the recruitment of minors, but had been delisted within the last year.

“We call for a full, transparent, and expedited  investigation of the incident and for anyone responsible for the use and for the killing of the children to be held accountable,” the CTFMR stated.

The taskforce added, “We are also deeply concerned about the alarming increase of reports of killings and injuries of children in Myanmar. More than 100 children were killed or maimed in conflict during the first three months of 2020, amounting to more than half of the total number in 2019, and significantly surpassing the total number of child casualties in 2018.”

The Tatmadaw have been fighting the Arakan Army since at least 2018.

The Arakan Army wants self-determination for the Rakhine people, a Buddhist ethnic group who live largely in Rakhine state and who constitute as much as 6 percent of Burma’s population.

In April Pyae Sone Win Maung was killed while driving a UN vehicle in Rakhine state. He was collecting Covid-19 samples for the World Health Organization. Both the Tatmadaw and the Arakan Army denied involvement.

In October 2019, Cardinal Charles Maung Bo of Yangon lamented that “not a single day passes without the heart wrenching news of innocent civilians being displaced or killed or maimed by the ongoing conflict in Lashio, other Northern regions and Rakhine State.”

Beginning in late 2016 the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group who have mostly occupied Rakhine state, faced a sharp increase in state-sponsored violence in their homeland. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced, and the military has been accused of conducting numerous human violations such as rape and murder.

Despite widespread use of the word Rohingya in the international community, the term is controversial within Burma. The Burmese government refuses to use the term, and considers them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. They have been denied citizenship and numerous other rights since a controversial law was enacted in 1982.

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Ambulances are seen outside the church premises with gathered people and security personnel following a blast at the St. Anthony’s Shrine in Kochchikade, Colombo on April 21, 2019. / ISHARA S. K

CNA Staff, Apr 21, 2021 / 18:00 pm (CNA).

Numerous religious leaders gathered in Sri Lanka to mark the second anniversary of the 2019 Easter Sunday suicide bombings and to pray for an end to religious extremism. 

Cardinal Malcolm Ranjith, the archbishop of Colombo, spoke at St. Anthony’s Shrine, along with Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim leaders. The service included prayers and two minutes of silence in remembrance of the dead.

Ranjith challenged the country’s Muslim communities to reject extremism and help Catholics identify those behind the 2019 bombings, which killed 269 people at two Catholic churches, a protestant church, and three hotels. 

“[B]e brave enough to reject extremism. You fully understand that there is no connection with religion and teachings to murder,” he said, according to the Associated Press. 

“We are surprised that even after two years, answers to the questions of who and why and what of these attacks have not been found by the relevant authorities.”

St. Anthony’s Shrine was the location of the first bomb explosion during Easter Sunday Mass two years ago. The attacks are believed to have been carried out by two local radical Islamist groups who had pledged allegiance to ISIS.

Muslim cleric Hassan Moulan also spoke at the service, the Associated Press reported. He said the Islamic faith does not justify crime and said Mulsims around the world condemned the attack. He added that to distance the suicide bombers who carried out the attacks from the religion of Islam, the the Sri Lanka Muslim community has not permitted their bodies to be buried in its cemeteries. 

Following the bombings, then-President Maithripala Sirisena created a five-person commission to investigate the attacks. The commission’s final report was presented to current President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in February 2021.

Rajapaksa then appointed a new six-member committee to study the report but did not share the report with the Church or with the attorney general.

The refusal to release the contents of the report has led to criticism, with fears that corruption or negligence have prevented the prosecution of collaborators in the attack. The study committee is composed only of government ministers who are members of the ruling coalition.

In October 2020, five of seven suspects arrested in connection with the attacks were released by the government, on the stated grounds of lack of evidence.

At that time, Ranjith said security officials had confirmed to him that there was sufficient evidence against many of the suspects who had been arrested. The cardinal, along with friends and family of the victims, have said they fear the release of the suspects meant corruption, or a lack of a thorough investigation, on the part of the Sri Lankan Criminal Investigation Department.

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Urumqi, China, Nov 18, 2019 / 05:01 pm (CNA).- The Chinese government is defending its policy of mass detention and re-education of Muslims in the country’s northwest as an appropriate measure against terrorism, following a New York Times report that showed the direct involvement of senior government officials in ordering the policy.

Geng Shuang, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, criticized the newspaper’s report Nov. 18, saying it smeared China’s efforts against extremism, but not disputing the authenticity of the leaked documents, The Times reported Monday.

The Xinjiang government said the earlier Times article was “completely fabricated by hostile forces at home and abroad … America’s New York Times has again fabricated and concocted fake news about Xinjiang. This is nothing more than getting up to its old tricks, and is completely unworthy of refutation. This despicable conduct will surely be met with the contempt of wiser minds in the international community.”

The Times reports that Chinese President Xi Jinping laid the groundwork for the development of the mass detentions in a series of private speeches to officials in 2014 in which he called for “absolutely no mercy” toward ‘terrorists’.

In Urumqi on April 30, 2014, Xi said that “the psychological impact of extremist religious thought on people must never be underestimated. People who are captured by religious extremism — male or female, old or young — have their consciences destroyed, lose their humanity and murder without blinking an eye.”

In another speech in Xinjiang, Xi stated: “There must be effective educational remolding and transformation of criminals … even after these people are released, their education and transformation must continue.”

According to the Times, 403 pages of documents, nearly half of which were speeches from Xi and other leaders, were leaked to it “by a member of the Chinese political establishment who … expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Mr. Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.”

Among the documents, the Times said, are a model script for officials encountering returning university students who ask what has happened to their disappeared family members.

In the script from officials in Turpan, 120 miles southeast of Urumqi, the students were to be told that if their family members “don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism … No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”

The students would be told to “treasure this chance for free education that the party and government has provided to thoroughly eradicate erroneous thinking, and also learn Chinese and job skills,” which “offers a great foundation for a happy life for your family.”

If the students asked if their relatives had committed any crime, they were to be told that while they hadn’t, “it is just that their thinking has been infected by unhealthy thoughts … freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health.”

The documents also detail the government’s reaction to officials deemed to be inadequately zealous in the repression of the Uighurs.

Wang Yongzhi was appointed to run Yarkant county, 830 miles southwest of Urumqi, in 2014. Wang had detention facilities built which housed 20,000 people, but expressed misgivings about the policy, and released some 7,000 internees. After that, he was “detained, stripped of power and prosecuted” in 2017, according to the Times.

Xinjiang has experienced some terrorist attacks, including a massive knife attack at a train station in 2014 in which 31 people were killed and 141 wounded, but the Chinese government has repressed reports about the extent of the attacks, the Times reports.

The main victims of the Chinese crackdown on Muslims in the region are an ethnic group called the Uighurs. An estimated 1 million Uighurs have been detained in re-education camps in Xinjiang in the past three years, as part of a widespread effort by the government to “Sinicize” religion in the country.

Inside the camps they are reportedly subjected to forced labor, torture, and political indoctrination. Outside the camps, Uighurs are monitored by pervasive police forces and facial recognition technology.

The Chinese government at one time denied the camps even existed, but has since shifted to defending its actions as a reasonable response to a national security threat.

Government officials from the region said in July that the area’s re-education camps for Muslims have been successful, with most of those held having been reintegrated into Chinese society.

Uighurs can be arrested and detained under vague anti-terrorism laws. Violence in the region escalated in the 1990s and again in 2008.

During a Sept. 23 UN event on religious freedom, US vice president Mike Pence mentioned that “the Communist Party in China has arrested Christian pastors, banned the sale of Bibles, demolished churches, and imprisoned more than a million Uighurs in the Muslim population,” and a fact sheet issued by the White House said the administration “is deeply concerned” for the interned Uighurs.

And the US State Department hosted a panel on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly Sept. 24 to draw attention to the “human rights crisis in Xinjiang,” where partipants heard first-hand accounts of repression of Muslim groups in Xinjiang.

John Sullivan, deputy secretary of state, said at the panel that “The UN must seek the immediate, unhindered, and unmonitored access to Xinjiang for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The United Nations, including its member states, have a responsibility to stand up for the human rights of people everywhere, including Muslims in Xinjiang. We urge the UN to investigate and closely monitor China’s rights abuses, including the repression of religious freedom and belief.”

“We cannot be the only guardians of the truth nor the only members of the international community to call out China and demand that they stop,” Sullivan stated.

Pakistan is among the few Muslim-majority countries to have warned against the escalating persecution of the Uighurs.

The US Commerce Department in October added 28 Chinese organizations to a blacklist barring them from buying products from US companies, saying they cooperate in the detention and repression of the Uighurs.

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