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...

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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 ...

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Burma’s Muslims Are Facing Incredibly Harsh Curbs on Marriage, Childbirth and Religion

Buddhist monks protest against a visit to Myanmar by a high-level delegation from the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), in Yangon in November 2013. The clergy play a leading role in stoking anti-Muslim feeling. (Photo: Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters)

By Charlie Campbell
March 27, 2014

Proposed discriminatory laws are the latest escalation in persecution of Muslims and a political ploy to secure Buddhist votes ahead of polls in 2015

Last March, sectarian riots roiled Central Burma and at least 48 people, mainly Muslims, were slaughtered by machete-wielding thugs. Buddhist monks spurred on frenzied mobs in an orgy of bloodshed that will be forever indelible in the minds of the Southeast Asian nation’s Muslim minority. The violence spread to a further 11 townships.

One year on, thousands remain homeless and animosity is entrenched. “It is not stable and conditions are still very dangerous,” says Aung Thein, a 51-year-old Muslim lawyer in Meiktila, a central Burmese town of 100,000 people, where at least five mosques and more than 800 homes were razed to the ground. “Extremists use hate speech every day and Muslims are not safe.”

Adding to this already fraught picture, new legislation threatens to isolate the Muslims further. Proposed regulations will restrict religious conversions, make it illegal for Buddhist women to marry Muslim men, place limits on the number of children Muslims can have, and outlaw polygamy, which is permitted in Islam.

More than 1.3 million signatures have reportedly been gathered in support of this plan, which is spearheaded by a group of extremist Buddhist monks and their lay supporters. The proposals wereforwarded by reformist President Thein Sein to Lower House Speaker Shwe Mann late last month, and have now been submitted to relevant ministries to be drafted as bills. They have been dubbed an “intolerance package” by Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, who says they would be a “recipe for disaster for a multicultural, multi-religious country like Burma.”

As part of the marriage proposal, those of other religions must convert to Buddhism before marrying a Buddhist, and seek written consent of the bride’s parents. (The consent of the groom’s parents is not required, for it is assumed the non-Buddhist party is always the groom.) Any non-Buddhist who ignores the regulations will be hit with a 10-year prison sentence and confiscation of property.

The proposals are merely the latest incarnation of spiraling religious extremism that has gripped Burma (officially known as Myanmar) since quasi-democratic rule was introduced in 2010. In June 2012, pogroms against the heavily persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority in the country’s far western Arakan state led to more than 280 deaths. Even today, some 140,000 Rohingya languish in squalid displacement camps, where they struggle to receive medical care or sufficient food.

The government maintains the fiction that the Rohingya are illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh — when, in fact, they have lived in Burma for generations — and so has painted the carnage as anti-migrant in nature, with Buddhist Burmese merely resisting land grabs from Muslim interlopers. However, the violence that erupted in Meiktila last March — spreading to Shan State and even parts of Rangoon, the former capital and biggest city — did not involve the Rohingya, and therefore suggests that religion rather than supposed land scarcity is fostering this simmering acrimony.

An extremist Buddhist movement known as 969, led by the charismatic monk Wirathu, has been gathering steam in recent years, and portrays Burma’s Muslim population as intent on conquering the nation through rampant propagation. The group’s hate-filled rhetoric speaks of “protecting” Burmese women and it has led calls for the boycotting of Muslim businesses. Naturally, it enthusiastically champions the proposed discriminatory legislation.

“We found on the ground in almost every township that there are [Buddhist] women who were forced to convert to another religion,” Wirathu told The Irrawaddy in January. “We need to have an interfaith marriage law to protect them.”

Ashin Gambira, a former monk who spent four years as a political prisoner after fronting the 2007 pro-democracy Saffron Revolution, believes Wirathu is being used as a political tool. “The Burmese government is always trying to cause unrest among the Burmese people,” he says. “The government supports and donates money to 969.”

Robertson says anti-Islamic feeling must be seen in light of elections in 2015, in the run up to which various elements “are trying to whip up divisive sentiment to garner support, which is really dangerous and ill-advised.”

Tellingly, when Thein Sein told the U.N. that the Rohingya would not be given citizenship and should be deported, his popularity soared and crowds waved banners extolling his steadfastness — adulation previously inconceivable for a former junta general. Presenting himself as the only feasible foil to Islamization would appear to be a naked political ploy on Thein Sein’s part, with his military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party preparing to face off at the ballot box with the National League for Democracy (NLD) of Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

Compounding matters, a new national census is about to begin, run by the U.N. Population Fund and the Naypyidaw government at a cost of some $75 million. The last official census in 1983 put the Muslim population at 4% of the total, although the many mosques and madrasas to be found in virtually every Burmese urban center indicates this is a significant underestimate. (Experts suggest 10%.)

Unfortunately, the sectarian turmoil “could intensify if the results of the 2014 census shows non-Buddhist populations have markedly expanded since the last national census was held in 1983,” writesprofessor emeritus of Asian Studies at Georgetown University David I. Steinberg in the Asia Times. Such evidence would naturally bolster extremist arguments that social and population curbs on Muslims are needed.

Unfortunately, not even Suu Kyi — a human rights icon after spending 15 years as a political prisoner — appears brave enough to speak out against the proposed legislation or to confront extremist elements. To do so would be political suicide. Last month, the NLD canceled a party meeting at the behest of a group of monks. The reason? Two of the four speakers were Muslim.

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