Rohingya in Peril: Crisis in Myanmar

The Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies (MIGS) at Concordia University, in partnership with the Burma Task Force Canada, are organizing an event to explore the ongoing crisis in Myanmar/Burma. Since August over a half a million Rohingya people have been forced to flee violence and seek protection in Bangladesh. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has called it a “textbook case of ethnic cleansing”. Guest Speaker, Dr. Maung Zarni Dr. Zarni has been a human rights activist for nearly 30 years and is a regular commentator on BBC News and Al-Jazeera on the Myanmar Crisis. For his opposition to the Myanmar genocide, the Burmese government has denounced him as “national traitor” and “enemy of the State”. He is a non-resident fellow with the (Genocide) Documentation Center – Cambodia, The Sleuk Rith Institute, specializing in racism and genocides. He has written extensively on democratization, Islamophobia and Rohingya genocide in his native country of Burma, and served as a member of the Panel of Judges at the Permanent Peoples Tribunal on Sri Lanka (2013) & initiated the PPT on Myanmar the same year. He has held teaching, research, leadership or visiting fellowships at the London School of Economics, Oxford University, Harvard University, UCL-Institute of Education, Georgetown University, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He founded the internet-based Free Burma Coalition in 1995, and led the grassroots campaign until 2004. For his contributions to the interfaith human rights activism worldwide the Parliament of the World’s Religions honoured him with its bi-annual “Cultivation of Harmony Award” in 2015.