March 16, 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

...

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

Petition

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

...

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

Open Letter

RB Poem

Book Shelf

‘They Call It Myanmar’ (Film)


‘They Call It Myanmar’: US filmmaker pries lid off daily life in military-dominated country


By Associated Press,

WASHINGTON — American professor Robert Lieberman went to Myanmar to train local filmmakers and shot his own documentary on the sly. The solo-filmed “They Call It Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain,” pries the lid off daily life in what has long been one of world’s most isolated and repressed places, examining its grinding poverty and tragic decades of military rule.

The film is a reminder that, despite recent upbeat news as Myanmar ventures on a reform path that has seen releases of political prisoners and easing of censorship, it remains a country with huge problems.

The movie is showing at selected theaters in the United States.

Lieberman, 71, took time off from his regular job teaching physics at Cornell University and traveled to Myanmar several times over two years, initially on a U.S. government-funded Fulbright program. He helped shoot health awareness commercials, then taught film at a university in the main city Yangon. He also accumulated 120 hours of his own footage, often filmed clandestinely.

Part documentary, part travelogue, “They Call It Myanmar” absorbs the country’s charms and cruelties and spills them out with disarming curiosity. He explains, both from his own perspective and the narrations by anonymous collaborators, just what life is like there and what makes its long-suffering people tick.

In a sense, the film already is outdated. Lieberman did the leg work before change began taking hold, although he sneaked back early last year to interview democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi after she was released from her latest stretch of house arrest. The Nobel Laureate’s musings on the country also known as Burma, and its turbulent history, are part of the narrative.

Lieberman describes Myanmar as the second most-isolated country in the world after North Korea, but foreign journalists are now being allowed in to report, and there is public debate on issues such as human rights and ethnic conflict that just a year ago would have been off-limits.

While the isolation and climate of fear has eased, however, that has not translated yet into a shift in political power or improved living conditions. Lieberman’s film lays bare how far what was once one of Southeast Asia’s most prosperous countries has sunk.

His starting point is not the ruinous military rule that has led it to that point, but, refreshingly, something more simple and vital to Burmese identity: tanaka, a fragrant, light brown paste that people daub on their faces. Opening the movie that way makes sense, as many faces populate Lieberman’s film. They are filmed on the street, on trains, in temples, in markets and clinics, though some are blurred out to protect their identities.

The videography is often rough-and-ready but sometimes scenic. He takes in the historical treasures of the country, the famed Shwedagon Pagoda, the hundreds of ancient temples of Bagan, as well as exploring the importance of the predominant Buddhist faith.

He sometimes injects his own dashes of humor, like when he jokes on seeing a Buddha image covered thick with countless offerings of gold leaf: “Shall we grab it and run?”

The abiding theme, however, is deprivation. In one hard-to-watch scene, a young, shaven-headed girl with a deep ulcer cries in pain at an ill-equipped clinic. The doctor says the girl has tuberculosis, but her mother cannot afford the drugs to treat her.

A political prisoner, interviewed off-camera, tells how he was tortured by his jailers who put a bag on his head with two mice inside. He says to stop the mice biting him, he had to bite them back.

In the second half of the film, Lieberman looks at Myanmar’s turbulent modern history. There is rare archive footage of Suu Kyi’s father, national hero Aung San, speaking during a visit to Britain before he led the country toward independence after World War II, only to be assassinated months before it shook off its colony status.

The film then tells the compelling story of how Suu Kyi was catapulted to political prominence following a brutal military crackdown on democracy protesters in 1988. The military used deadly force again to put down Buddhist monk-led mass demonstrations in 2007. The junta’s reputation was sullied further by its initial refusal to allow in foreign aid after Cyclone Nargis in 2008, which killed 130,000 people.

But what is missing from “They Call It Myanmar” is what beckons now. Even hardened human rights activists and dissidents view the changes of the past year as the country’s most significant in the half-century since the military took power.

The film’s touching closing sequences tell of people’s aspirations. One Burmese tearfully speaks of how Myanmar is a proud country, but one that needs help to stand on its own feet. Another simply yearns “to speak, read and write poetry the way your heart tells you to do it.”

Online: http://www.theycallitmyanmar.com

Source here



Write A Comment

Pages 22123456 »
Rohingya Exodus