Day: November 14, 2017

By Maung Zarni and Natalie Brinham | Published by Middle East Institute on November 14, 2017 Sectarian-based conflicts — or at any rate, spasms of intercommunal violence characterized as such — are certainly not new. Nor is Iraq or, for that matter, the Middle East as a whole, the only locus of conflict depicted as being sectarian in nature, as the disturbing events in Burma/Myanmar, as well as in the Central African Repubic (CAR) and Nigeria clearly illustrate. With increasing frequency, media accounts of the civil war in Syria describe it in sectarian terms and report that the violence there

By Krithika Varagur | Published by The Atlantic on November 14, 2017 The sheer number of Rohingya Muslims fleeing genocide in Burma—over 10,000 per day since late August—has become too huge to ignore. It’s the reason why U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will visit Burma on Wednesday. In his briefings on the crisis, Tillerson will likely encounter another question of numbers: the claim, voiced often by Burmese officials and hardline Buddhist monks, that Rohingya Muslim “overpopulation” threatens their country’s Buddhist majority. “The population growth of Rohingya Muslims is 10 times higher than that of the Rakhine [Buddhists],” said Win