May 12, 2025

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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...

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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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UNICEF blasted for ‘humiliating’ concession as it tries to mend fences in Arakan

In this file photo from 2009, Rohingya children bathe at a pond in a Cox's Bazaar refugee camp. (Photo: Reuters)

By Colin Hinshelwood
June 9, 2014

International agency UNICEF finds itself again on the receiving end of criticism from various sides following a Burmese media report that it had apologised for using the word “Rohingya” and promised Arakanese authorities that it would not use the term again.

The humiliating kowtow comes just two weeks after exile media group The Irrawaddy lambasted the UN organisation for renting office space in Rangoon from a former military officer for the sum of US$87,000 per month.

Officially known as the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF has been active in Burma since 1950. According to its website, UNICEF helped to successfully initiate programs in Burma to protect children against smallpox, leprosy and yaws, before expanding its programs to include rural health services, basic education for children, and community water supply and sanitation systems. More recently, UNICEF has supported HIV/AIDS prevention, early childhood development, and child protection programs, it says. The agency also supports immunisation and malaria prevention programmes in high risk areas.

One high-risk region in Burma is Arakan State in western Burma, the most impoverished region in the country next to remote Chin State. In recent years, conditions have deteriorated due to ongoing communal violence between the Muslim Rohingya community and Arakanese Buddhist nationalists, which has left more than 200 dead and 140,000 displaced from their homes.

Despite the ever-increasing need for humanitarian aid in Arakan State, several international NGOs, including UNICEF and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), were accused earlier this year by local Buddhist politicians and civic groups of bias in their deliveries in favour of the Rohingyas, commonly referred to as “Bengalis” by local Buddhists due to their presumed roots in Bangladesh.

Tensions peaked in March when an otherwise innocuous incident involving an aid worker from NGO Malteser International set off a chain of violence which cumulated in attacks on the offices of several agencies, including UNICEF. Foreign staff were quickly evacuated from the Arakan capital, and negotiations to return the INGOs to the region to continue humanitarian work have been protracted and met with resistance from Arakanese Buddhist representatives.

MSF and Malteser International were refused permission to return to Arakan, while UNICEF and other UN agencies saw their activities curbed.

On 2 May, Bertrand Bainvel, UNICEF’s top official in Burma, made an effort to clear up perceptions of biased aid delivery.

“UNICEF [follows] the same principles as the United Nations, which are principles of neutrality, impartiality, and dignity. We are providing our support based on needs, not based on ethnicity [or] religion,” he said.

“Needs are not the same across all communities. Needs are different. If you’ve been part of a family who’s been displaced, who’s living in a camp, of course your environment is much more fragile, and you become much more vulnerable.”

Despite or perhaps because of its uncompromising approach to aid work, it appears that UNICEF has now been forced into offering apologies and promises to Sittwe authorities.

During a 4 June power point presentation in the Arakan capital, a UNICEF staffer used the common term “Rohingya”, sparking outrage from local administrators.

According to a 6 June report in Eleven Media, Than Tun, a member of the Emergency Coordination Centre — a body that oversees delivery of aid in the state — described the use of the word “Rohingya” as a “breach of diplomacy” and as a “violation of Myanmar’s sovereignty”. The report even alleged that the terminology could reignite violence in the region.

According to the report, UNICEF’s Bainvel was later compelled to personally apologise for the verbal faux pas, and promise that his agency would not use the term again.

The organisation’s concession to state terminology was immediately condemned by commenters on social media with many international observers calling the move a “humiliation”.

UNICEF has not responded to DVB’s calls for a response to date.

The incident is compounded by a report on 22 May in The Irrawaddy which slammed the agency for leasing a property for $87,000 per month in Rangoon’s Bahan Township from former Gen. Nyunt Tin, who served as minister of agriculture under the former ruling junta.

UNICEF responded to the report with a statement on Thursday saying, “Standard due diligence on the owner and her family concluded that none of the international sanctions in place until recently had been levied against the landlady or her immediate family and no criminal charges were extant.

“Although allegations against a member of her family who was once a member of the previous military regime surfaced, the official had since left public office and was not subject to any criminal charges or international sanctions,” the statement said. “Consequently, the best interests of the children we exist to help would not be damaged through this commercial engagement.”

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