April 03, 2025

News @ RB

Announcement of New Website: Rohingya Today (RohingyaToday.Com) Dear Readers, From 1st January 2019 onward, the Rohingya News Portal 'Rohingya Blogger' will be renamed and upgraded as 'Rohingya Today'. Due to this transition to a new name, our website will be available at www.rohing...

Rohingya News @ Int'l Media

Maung Zarni, leader of the Free Rohingya Coalition, speaks at a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo on Thursday. | CHISATO TANAKA By Chisato Tanaka, Published by The Japan Times on October 25, 2018 A leader of a global network of activists for Rohingya Mu...

Myanmar News

By Sena Güler | Published by Anadolu Agency on December 1, 2018 Maung Zarni says he will boycott Beijing-sponsored events until the country reverses its 'troubling path' ANKARA -- A human rights activist and intellectual said he withdrew from a Beijing-sponsored forum in London to pro...

Video News

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Article @ RB

Oskar Butcher RB Article October 6, 2018 Every night in an unassuming shop space located in Mandalay’s 39thStreet, Lu Maw and Lu Zaw – the remaining members of the Burma’s most famous comedy trio, the Moustache Brothers – present their show: a curious combination of comedy, political sa...

Article @ Int'l Media

A demonstration over identity cards at a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh in April, 2018. Image: NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. By Natalie Brinham | Published by Open Democracy on October 21, 2018 Wary of the past, Rohingya have frustrated the UN’s attempts to provide them with documenta...

Analysis @ RB

By M.S. Anwar | Opinion & Analysis The Burmese (Myanmar) quasi-civilian government unleashed a large-scale violence against the minority Rohingya in the western Myanmar state of Arakan in 2012. The violence, which some wrongly frame as ‘Communal’, was carried out by the Burmese armed forces...

Analysis @ Int'l Media

By Maung Zarni, Natalie Brinham | Published by Middle East Institute on November 20, 2018 “It is an ongoing genocide (in Myanmar),” said Mr. Marzuki Darusman, the head of the UN Human Rights Council-mandated Independent International Fact-Finding Mission at the official briefing at ...

Opinion @ RB

Rohingya refugees who fled from Myanmar wait to be let through by Bangladeshi border guards after crossing the border in Palang Khali, Bangladesh October 9, 2017. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj MS Anwar RB Opinion November 12, 2018 Some may differ. But I believe the government of Bangladesh is ...

Opinion @ Int'l Media

By Maung Zarni | Published by Anadolu Agency on December 15, 2018 US will not intercede, and Myanmar's neighbors see it through economic lens, so international coalition for Rohingya needed LONDON -- The U.S. House of Representatives Thursday overwhelmingly passed a resolution ca...

History @ RB

Aman Ullah  RB History August 25, 2016 The ethnic Rohingya is one of the many nationalities of the union of Burma. And they are one of the two major communities of Arakan; the other is Rakhine and Buddhist. The Muslims (Rohingyas) and Buddhists (Rakhines) peacefully co-existed in the A...

Rohingya History by Scholars

Dr. Maung Zarni's Remark: The best research on Rohingya history: British Orientalism which created the pseudo-scientific biological notion of "Taiyinthar" or "real natives" of #Myanmar caused that country's post-colonial cancer of official & popular genocidal Racism.  This co...

Report @ RB

(Photo: Soe Zeya Tun, Reuters) RB News  October 5, 2013  Thandwe, Arakan – Rakhinese mob in Thandwe started attacking Kaman Muslims on September 28, 2013. As a result, 5 Kaman Muslims were mercilessly killed and 1 was died in heart attack while escaping the attack. 781 Kaman Mus...

Report by Media/Org

Rohingya families arrive at a UNHCR transit centre near the village of Anjuman Para, Cox’s Bazar, south-east Bangladesh after spending four days stranded at the Myanmar border with some 6,800 refugees. (Photo: UNHCR/Roger Arnold) By UN News May 11, 2018 Late last year, as violent repressi...

Press Release

(Photo: Reuters) Joint Statement: Rohingya Groups Call on U.S. Government to Ensure International Accountability for Myanmar Military-Planned Genocide December 17, 2018  We, the undersigned Rohingya organizations worldwide, call for accountability for genocide and crimes against...

Rohingya Orgs Activities

RB News December 6, 2017 Tokyo, Japan -- Legislators from all parties, along with Human Rights Now, Human Rights Watch, and Save the Children, came together to host the emergency parliament in-house event “The Rohingya Human Rights Crisis and Japanese Diplomacy” on December 4th. The eve...

Petition

By Wyston Lawrence RB Petition October 15, 2017 There is one petition has been going on Change.org to remove Ven. Wira Thu from Facebook. He has been known as Buddhist Bin Laden. Time magazine published his image on their cover with the title of The Face of Buddhist Terror. The petitio...

Campaign

A human rights activist and genocide scholar from Burma Dr. Maung Zarni visits Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi Extermination Camp and calls on European governments - Britain, France, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Denmark, Hungary and Germany not to collaborate with the Evil - like they did with Hitler 75 ye...

Event

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Editorial by Int'l Media

By Dhaka Tribune Editorial November 5, 2017 How can we answer to our conscience knowing full-well what the Myanmar military is doing to the innocent Rohingya minority -- not even sparing children or pregnant women? Despite the on-going humanitarian crisis involving Rohingya refugees ...

Interview

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ေစာင့္ေမွ်ာ္ေနပါတယ္ by လူထုစိန္၀င္း

Written by လူထုစိန္၀င္း     သမၼတဦးသိန္းစိန္အစိုးရကို မေထာက္ခံေသးဘူး၊ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေနဆဲျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ ေရးလိုက္တဲ့စာ ဂ်ာနယ္ေတြထဲပါလာတဲ့မနက္ပိုင္းမႇာတင္ စာဖတ္ပရိသတ္အေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားဆီက ဖုန္းေတြလက္ခံရရႇိတယ္။ အားလံုးက အားမလိုအားမရျဖစ္လို႔ ဆက္ၾကတာ။ အေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္ကိုယ္စီရႇိ အားမရသူအမ်ားစုက ဘယ္ေလာက္ၾကာေအာင္ေစာင့္ရဦးမႇာလဲ။ ႏႇစ္ေပါင္းငါးဆယ္လံုးလံုး ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ခဲ့တာ မလံုေလာက္ေသးဘူးလားလို႔ ေမးၾကတယ္။သူတို႔တေတြ စိတ္မရႇည္ႏိုင္ေတာ့တာ အေၾကာင္းမဲ့ မဟုတ္ဘူး ဆိုတာ သိေနတဲ့အတြက္ နားလည္ေပးလုိက္ပါတယ္။ အားမရသူအနည္းစုကေတာ့ အရပ္သားအစိုးရသစ္က ဒါေလာက္ေျပာၿပီး ဒါေလာက္လုပ္ျပေနတာေတာင္ မေထာက္ခံေသးဘူး။ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ဦးမယ္ဆိုတာက မလြန္လြန္းဘူးလား။ မ်က္မႇန္စိမ္းႀကီးခြၽတ္လိုက္ပါေတာ့လို႔ ေငါ့ေတာ့ေတာ့နဲ႔ ေျပာၾကတယ္။ သူတို႔မႇာလည္း အ ေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္ေတြ အမ်ားႀကီးရႇိေနေၾကာင္းသိထားလို႔ နားလည္ေပးလိုက္ပါတယ္။ အမ်ားႀကီးပိုပိုသာသာ ႏႇစ္ငါးဆယ္လံုးလံုး ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ခဲ့ၿပီးၿပီဆိုသူမ်ားမႇ အေၾကာင္းျပခ်က္ေတြ လံုေလာက္႐ံုမက [...] Read more

He regarded his 8-day visit to Burma, 20-28 October, as a fruitful eye-opener, said Harn Yawnghwe, director of Brussels-based Euro-Burma Office (EBO) and youngest son of the late first President of Burma who went into exile with his mother in 1963. 

Harn Yawnghwe with his daughter arriving in Rangoon 
The only problem he faced was when he applied for his visa. Despite being invited by three ministers, he was technically still a persona non grata, the embassy told him. It was finally issued, only after he had put down a minister's name as his guarantor.

If there were any more misgivings, he was discouraged from them when he arrived there. 

There were only two fixed items on his agenda: To visit his hometown Yawnghwe, once the seat of one of the most powerful Shan princedoms, and Rangoon, where he went to school. But it turned out most of his time there were filled up by a flurry of meetings with 12 political parties and a number of high ranking regime officials. 

"I didn't meet anybody saying anything negative about what's taking place in Burma," he remembered. 

One senior police officer: This is just what we've been waiting for so long.
An Inlay shopkeeper: Since you are back after all these years, things must be moving for the better for our country.
A Shan Nationalities Democratic Party (SNDP) leading member: Since the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) is made up of all national races, including Shans, cooperation is better than expected earlier.

The parties

Apart from the SNDP, he also held meetings with 5 democracy parties, remaining 4 Nationalities Brotherhood parties and the deregistered Shan Nationalities League for Democracy (SNLD). "All seemed to be saying three things to me: 

The government under U Thein Sein leadership is really working for change
Change won't come easy. Old systems and laws are still in place. It'll take some time before new systems and laws can move in. The new labor act, for instance, came into being because of the assistance by the ILO. It means exiles can take part in drafting new laws. And it should not be considered as propping up the old regime, but as help strengthening democracy in the country.
Support and encouragement therefore are needed to make the changes in the making irreversible"

He earlier told Financial Times, "They have decided to change. It's not what we called for, but there are changes. Even if they are pretending to change, we should push them so the change becomes irreversible." 

The NLD

His argument found an ally at least in the National League for Democracy's U Win Tin. "Our line of thinking does not differ from yours," Harn was told. 

"Unfortunately, I didn't get the chance to meet The Lady, despite tireless efforts made by one of her close associates," he said. 

He declined to name the said close associate, but said he is one of her intimates who still carries deep mistrust of Thein Sein. "She told me I need to have trust in him," he said to Harn. 

The ruling class

Without doubt, the country's top leadership is made up of two factions, divided by conflicting personal feelings and ways of thinking, according to him: 
The Gang of Four:

Vice President #1 Tin Aung Myint Oo 
Upper House Speaker Khin Aung Myint
Information Minister Kyaw Hsan
Finance Minister Hla Tun

"They have reportedly urged the Senior General (Than Shwe) to stage a comeback, but unless Thein Sein makes a big blunder thereby giving him sufficient excuse, it is unlikely he will return", he reasoned. 
The "Reformists":

President Thein Sein 
Lower House Speaker Thura Shwe Mann
Railway Transport Minister Aung Min
Industry #1 Minister Soe Thein
(and surprise, surprise) Electric Power Minister Zaw Min(whose declaration "not to back off" from the Myitsone project had triggered a series of popular actions culminating in its suspension)

"However, the fence sitters are still the majority in the top echelon, I was told," he said. "They are naturally waiting to see which direction the wind is blowing before they make up their minds." 

Peace talks

Negotiations for a renewed ceasefire are conducted by a team led by U Aung Thaung, USDP Secretary #1 and U Thein Zaw, Chairman of Lower House National Races Affairs and Internal Peace making committee, on the Sino-Burmese front. It has notable but not surprising success with the Wa and Mongla groups, but "nothing but love" with the Kachins. Despite negotiations since June, war between the two has intensified much to the chagrin of the local populace. 

"An alternative for the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), if it is not held up by the United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC) the alliance of which it is the leading member, is to propose to Naypyitaw for an appointment of a new negotiating team," said Harn. 

Coincidentally, on the Thailand-Burma side, another team led by U Aung Min had been seeking out appointments with the armed groups along the border. It had already met the Karen National Union on 9 October 2011, though details have yet to be disclosed. A source said the Karens were impressed with Aung Min who used to serve on the Karen front. 

Harn Yawnghwe, while in Rangoon on Thursday, 27 October, told the 5 democracy parties "he would try to help in making peace in ethnic areas," reported Mizzima News quoting Nayyi Ba Swe, daughter of former prime minister U Ba Swe. 

"I was asked (by a regime official) what I thought of about its 'group-by-group' approach, shunning the UNFC approach," Harn recalled. "I told them at the initial level which is for conclusion of ceasefire agreements, it should be okay to deal groupwise. But when it comes to political negotiations, all stakeholders should be invited." 

He said he had also urged the government to release the political prisoners as soon as possible, so to dispel the lingering doubts, if nothing else. 

Other opposition movements meanwhile are making a 3 point call: Release of all political prisoners, nationwide ceasefire and inclusive dialogue.

Credit : Shanland

ျမန္မာအစိုးရတပ္က ကခ်င္တပ္အား ဓါတုလက္နက္ျဖင့္ စ တိုက္ - Burma uses Chemical Weapons against Kachin rebel

According to the Kachin News Group, the Burma Army has been firing chemical weapon mortars against Kachin soldiers for the last week. This is a war crime and it is absolutely unacceptable. This is the real face of the military regime, not the sweet talk coming out of Naypyidaw and which some [...] Read more

အေျခအေနကို ထိန္းထားႏုိင္ရမယ္

ဦးဟန္ေညာင္ေဝသည္ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ ပထမဆံုး သမၼတႀကီးလည္းျဖစ္၊ ေညာင္ေရႊ ေစာ္ဘြားဆက္၏ ေနာက္ဆံုး ေစာ္ဘြားလည္းျဖစ္ေသာ ေစာ္ဘြားႀကီးစပ္ေရႊသိုက္၏ သားတဦးျဖစ္သည္။ လြတ္လပ္ေသာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအျဖစ္ ေၾကျငာၿပီး ၄ လ အၾကာ ၁၉၄၈ ခုႏွစ္ ဧၿပီလ ၁၅ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ဦးဟန္ေညာင္ေဝကို ေမြးဖြားခဲ့သည္။ အေျခခံပညာေရးကို ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္ သင္ယူဆည္းပူးခဲ့ၿပီး ထိုင္းႏိုင္ငံႏွင့္ ကေနဒါႏိုင္ငံတို႔တြင္ ပညာ ဆက္လက္ဆည္းပူးကာ ဘြဲ႔ရရွိသည္။ ထို႔ေနာက္ ကေနဒါႏိုင္ငံ McGill University မွ စီးပြားေရးစီမံခန္႔ခြဲမႈဆိုင္ရာ မဟာဘြဲ႔ (MBA) ကို ရရိွခဲ့သည္။ဦးဟန္ေညာင္ေဝ (ဓာတ္ပံု - Shan Herald  Agency for News)ဦးဟန္ေညာင္ေဝသည္ [...] Read more

ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ ျပည္ေထာင္စုဝန္ႀကီး ဦးေအာင္ၾကည္တုိ႔ စတုတၳ အႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ေတြ႕ဆုံ (Video)

အမ်ဳိးသားဒီမုိကေရစီအဖဲြ႕ခ်ဳပ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္နဲ႔ ျပည္ေထာင္စုဝန္ႀကီး ဦးေအာင္ၾကည္တုိ႔ ေအာက္တုိဘာ ၃၀ ရက္ ဒီကေန႔ ေန႔လယ္ ၁း၀၀ ကေန ၁း၅၅ အထိ စိမ္းလဲ့ကန္သာ အစုိးရဧည့္ေဂဟာမွာ စတုတၳ အႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ေတြ႕ဆုံခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္က လုိအပ္သည္မ်ား ကူညီ ေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးေနသည့္ အေျခအေန၊ တုိင္းျပည္ စီးပြားေရး ဖြံ႕ၿဖဳိး တုိးတက္လာေစရန္ အတြက္ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ကုန္သြယ္ခြင့္၊ ကူးသန္းေရာင္းဝယ္ခြင့္ ရရွိေရးႏွင့္ လြတ္လပ္စြာ ေငြေၾကး လည္ပတ္ သုံးစဲြခြင့္ရရွိေရး၏ အေရးႀကီးမႈႏွင့္ ပတ္သတ္၍ အျမင္ခ်င္း ညီညီညြတ္ညြတ္ ဖလွယ္ခဲ့ၾကပါသည္။ ထုိ႔အျပင္ တုိင္းရင္းသား လက္နက္ကုိင္ အဖဲြ႕အစည္းမ်ားႏွင့္ ထာဝရၿငိမ္းခ်မ္းေရး ရရွိရန္ ႏုိင္ငံေတာ္က [...] Read more

Natalegawa Urged to Push Ethnic Issue

By SAW YAN NAING (Irrawaddy News) As Indonesia's Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa arrives in Burma on Friday on a visit deemed vital to advance Naypyidaw's bid to chair the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) in 2014, observers from both countries have called on the respective parties to [...] Read more

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi's view on Rohingya

Another e-mail from Shaik Ubaid, New York, USA: I am a physician and a human rights activist. I am greatly concerned about the persecution and ethnic cleansing of Rohingiya Muslims of Arakan. Does your vision include a pluralistic Burma with equal rights for all, including religious minorities? Aung [...] Read more

Who are Burma's minority groups?

More than 40% of people living in Burma belong to one of the military-ruled nation's different minority groups. The government recognises eight distinct ethnic groups, with dozens of sub-groups, but refuses to acknowledge others.As the country holds its first elections in 20 years, the BBC profiles some of [...] Read more

Statement by U.S Ambassador Ronald Goddard, at the 66th UN General Assembly

Statement by Ambassador Ronald Goddard, at the 66th UN General Assembly - Third Committee Item 69 (b) and (c) - Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, October 26, 2011  Ambassador Ronald Goddard New York, NY October 26, 2011 AS DELIVERED  Thank you, Mr. President.  Last year, the United States joined [...] Read more

ႏိုင္ငံေရး ဓားစာခံမ်ား

By ဗိုလ္မႉးေအာင္လင္းထြဋ္ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္း ႏွင့္ အာဇာနည္ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ႀကီးမ်ား က်ဆုံးသြားခ့ဲျပီးေသာ ေနာက္ပိုင္းမွစ၍ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္တို႔ ခ်မွတ္ခ့ဲေသာ လမ္းစဥ္မ်ားက ိုႏိုင္ငံေရးသမားမ်ား တိုင္းရင္းသားေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား တပ္မေတာ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား သည္ မိမိတို႔လိုသလိုသာအသုံးခ်ခ့ဲႀကျပီး ေခတ္အဆက္ဆက္ ယေန႔အထိတိုင္ေအာင္တိုင္းသူျပည္သားမ်ားကိုဓါးစာခံအျဖစ္အသုံးခ်ေနဆဲျဖစ္ေနသည္ကိုေတြ႔ျမင္ေနရမည္ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ တစ္ေန႔ကလြတ္ေျမာက္လာေသာ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသား ကမၻာေက်ာ္ ဟာသ သရုပ္ေဆာင္ ကိုဇာဂနာ ေျပာခ့ဲသလိုဆိုမာလီပင္လယ္ဓါးျမမ်ားက့ဲသို႔အစိုးရသည္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးအက်ဥ္းသားမ်ားကိုျပန္ေပးဆြဲထားျပီး သူတို႔လိုခ်င္တာကိုရမွ လိုသေလာက္သူတို႔အိပ္ ကပ္ထဲကထုတ္ေပးေနတာကိုေတြ႔ျမင္ရမည္ျဖစ္ပါသည္။ စာေရးသူအေနျဖင့္၁၉၈၈ခုႏွစ္ ျပည္လံုးက်ြတ္လူထုဆႏၵျပပြဲေနာက္ပိုင္းတပ္မေတာ္ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား၏ ႏိုင္ငံေရး ကစားကြက္မ်ားကိုေလ့လာတင္ျပလိုပါသည္။ ၈၈၈၈ ေလးလုံးအေရးခင္းကို စက္တင္ဘာလ ၁၈ ရက္ စစ္တပ္ အာဏာသိမ္းစဥ္ ပါတီစုံေရြးေကာက္ပြဲ က်င္းပျပဳေပးျပီး တပ္မေတာ္သည္စစ္တန္းလ်ားျပန္မည္ဟူေသာ ေႀကျငာခ်က္ျဖင့္ ႏိုင္ငံေရးေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား ႏွင့္ ျပည္သူျပည္သားမ်ားကို ေခြ်းသိပ္ေစခ့ဲျပီး [...] Read more

US envoy calls for prisoners' release in Myanmar

The US special envoy on Myanmar called for the release of all political prisoners as he made his second trip in as many months to the long-isolated nation, the State Department said Tuesday. Envoy Derek Mitchell flew back to Myanmar this week after its leaders announced a prisoner [...] Read more

Remarks on Statelessness and Gender Discrimination By U.S.Department of State

Remarks Maria Otero Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs Refugees International Event, U.S. Institute of Peace Washington, DC October 25, 2011  Good morning. It’s a pleasure to be here with you all today. I want to thank Refugees International for hosting this important conference, and to our [...] Read more

ရုရွားႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ ျမန္မာသံအမတ္ၾကီး၏ လွ်ိဳ႕ဝွက္ သတိေပးစာ

ရုရွားမွ ျမန္မာစစ္ဗိုလ္မ်ားရဲ့ ၂၀၁၀ ျပည္ေထာင္စုေန႔က ျမန္မာ့ရိုးရာ အတာသၾကၤန္ သရုပ္ျပပြဲ..ရုရွားမွ ေနာင္တေခတ္ရဲ့ ေအာင္စစ္သည္မ်ား စည္းမဲ့၊ ကမ္းမဲ့ စည္းပ်က္၊ ကမ္းပ်က္ ေနထိုင္မႈေၾကာင့္ အေဆာင္မွ ထြက္ေပးရန္ ေတာင္းဆိုခံရမႈႏွင့္ ၂၀၁၀ၾသဂုတ္လက ရုရွားႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ ျမန္မာသံအမတ္ၾကီး၏ လွ်ိဳ႕ဝွက္ သတိေပးခ်က္တဲ့ဗ်ိဳ႕...     ၂၀၁၀ခုႏွစ္ ေဖေဖာ္ဝါရီလက ရုရွားမွာ ျပဳလုပ္တဲ့ ျပည္ေထာင္စုေန႔ အခမ္းအနားမွာ ေတြ႔ရတဲ့ သံအမတ္ၾကီး ဦးမင္းသိန္း (ဝဲ-ဒု)၁၆ ၾသဂုတ္ ၂၀၁၀ ခုႏွစ္က ရုရွားႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ ျမန္မာသံအမတ္ၾကီး ဦးမင္းသိန္း၏ လွ်ိဳ႕ဝွက္ သတိေပးစာ         (function() { var [...] Read more

Which Part Does China Play In Burma’s Civil War?

By Zin Linn The Chinese army secretly transported dozens of Burmese troops inside its border on 21 October morning to fight against the Kachin Independence Army, which is resisting an offensive by Burmese regiments, referring local witnesses, Kachin News Group reported. As said by eyewitnesses, approximately 30 Chinese [...] Read more

U.S General (Ret) Wesley Clark Discussed about the Future of Burma/Myanmar

A new Asia Society Task Force Report offers recommendations on framing US policy toward Burma. Retired General Wesley Clark, Henrietta Fore, and Suzanne DiMaggio discuss the findings. [...] Read more

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Rohingya Exodus