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Groton Daily Independent
Thursday, Dec. 21, 2017 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 165 ~ 22 of 44
The AP details the names, ages and professions of 82 people, most of them men and boys from Maung Nu and Hpaung Taw Pyin, who family members say were killed.
They are farmers and students, carpenters, businessmen and teachers. The youngest is seven years old; the oldest, 95.
According to Arof, the village administrator, at least 200 more remain missing and are feared dead.
Most of the survivors struggle to understand why so many of their neighbors were slaughtered. Arof said the army falsely believed they were supporting the insurgency, but something much deeper had driven the killing. The massacres reported since August have stood out for their high casualty toll, their ferocity, and the methodical way in which they were carried out.
“You have to understand ... they hate us,” Arof said. “This didn’t only happen in our village, it happened everywhere.”
In the end, Duza was one of the luckiest survivors.
After weeks spent imagining another life without a family, he found a newly-arrived refugee with a Myanmar phone and asked to use it.
He dialed his wife Habiba’s number. A young girl answered.
He could barely believe it. It was his 14-year-old daughter, Taslima.
As tears welled in his eyes, Duza asked about the rest of his family. “Are they with you? Are they alive?” “Yes papa! Yes!” Taslima replied. “We’re here! Everybody is ne.”
Duza’s family had been elsewhere in the compound when he ed. It would take them six more weeks
to make the journey to Bangladesh.
When the family reunited in a refugee camp, Duza broke down as he hugged his wife and squeezed the
children he never thought he’d see again. They had lost so much -- their friends and relatives, their home, their savings, their future -- but they had somehow found each other.
“It felt like living in another world,” Duza said. “It felt like a new life.”
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This story’s summary has been corrected to remove erroneous reference to thousands killed.
Trump threat to cut aid raises stakes in UN Jerusalem vote By EDITH M. LEDERER, Associated Press
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — President Donald Trump’s threat to cut off U.S. funding to countries that op- pose his decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has raised the stakes in Thursday’s U.N. vote and sparked criticism at his tactics, which one Muslim group called bullying or blackmail.
Trump went a step further than U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley who hinted in a tweet and a letter to most of the 193 U.N. member states on Tuesday that the U.S. would retaliate against countries that vote in favor of a General Assembly resolution calling on the president to rescind his decision.
Haley said the president asked her to report back on countries “who voted against us” — and she stressed that the United States “will be taking names.”
At the start of a Cabinet meeting in Washington on Wednesday, with Haley sitting nearby, Trump told reporters that Americans are tired of being taken advantage of and praised the U.S. ambassador for send- ing the “right message” before the vote.
“For all these nations, they take our money and then vote against us. They take hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions of dollars and then they vote against us,” Trump told reporters at the Cabinet meet- ing. “We’re watching those votes. Let them vote against us.”
“We’ll save a lot. We don’t care,” he said, alluding to U.S. aid.
Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, tweeted after Trump’s comments: “Our government should not use its leadership at the UN to bully/blackmail other na- tions that stand for religious liberty and justice in Jerusalem. Justice is a core value of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.”
The Palestinians and their Arab and Islamic supporters sought the General Assembly vote after the