Biography

A Burmese advisor to the newly established European Centre for the Study of Extremism at Cambridge, UK, Dr Zarni has been a human rights campaigner for 3-decades. He co-authored, with Alice Cowley, the first academic study of the persecution of the Rohingya through the genocide framework entitled “The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya” (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal, Spring 2014). In 2013 he served as a member of the panel of judges at the Permanent People’s Tribunal on Sri Lanka.

Dr Zarni combines honest scholarship with passionate activism in the fight against the rising state-sponsored racism against religious and ethnic minorities in what he calls “the Buddhist Triangle” (Burma, Sri Lanka and Thailand), for which he was honoured with “The Cultivation of Harmony” award by the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the world’s oldest interfaith organization. A Burmese exile, Dr Zarni was educated at the universities of Mandalay (Burma), California, Washington and Wisconsin in the United States. “If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

-  Lilla Watson, a Brisbane-based Aboriginal artist, activist, and academic