Maung Zarni, UK-exiled Burmese dissident, scholar, rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, discusses his role within the Jury in the Permanent Peoples Tribunal on Sri Lanka, observing the similarities between the use of starvation perpetrated in Sri Lanka against the Tamil minority and the exercise of starvation used against Palestinians in Gaza. Zarni also discusses his participation in two separate delegations to Gaza and the West Bank (August 2024 and January 2025) witnessing first-hand Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, as he elaborates the freedom he and other members of the delegation had to roam and to discover—unscheduled and unchoregraphed visits—the reality of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza and of Israelis living in Israel. Zarni describes the myriad human rights violations, starvation, and conditions of genocide in Gaza, in addition to attesting to the violent attacks by settlers and the threat of genocide already in vigour in the West Bank. Interrogating a vast system of colonial occupation and repression exercised by the state of Israel against Palestinians for the past 78 years, Zarni notes how this is a “collective genocide” whereby many countries and their politicians are “directly participating in Israel’s genocide” through political, military, and economic contributions. Zarni discusses how people need to be educated about genocide, especially “when it is done by our own country, in our own name,” as he connects his work in educating the Cambodians about the “Killing Fields” and their own history of genocide at the hands of the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979. Maintaining that this genocide is “far worse than what was happening in Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe,” Zarni remarks how “the entire ecosystem of corporate and public legacy media is performing” what the Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under Joseph Goebbels did to create the political ethos to destroy European Jewry.
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