Girl collects water at a camp for displaced Rohingya in Burma's Rakhine state. Amid all the celebration of Burma's opening, the regime has increased pressure on minority peoples such as the Shan and Rohingya, with attacks on villages and many thousands displaced. Writer Burkely Hermann sees the hand of the regime behind the supposedly spontaneous Buddhist attacks on the Muslim Rohingya. Arguing that the government covets their lands for hydrocarbon development, Hermann calls the cleansing of the Rohingya a "petroleum-induced genocide"—and charges that multinational corporations seeking to get in on Burma's new oil rush are complicit.

Photo: Evangelos Petratos EU/ECHO, January 2013, via Flickr

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