March 15, 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...

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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...

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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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Obama is going soft on Myanmar’s military bosses

President Obama shook hands with Myanmar’s President U Thein Sein. (Photo: Getty Image)

By Alan Berger
Boston Globe
November 21, 2014

In the silences as well as the speeches made during President Obama’s recent visit to Myanmar, attentive observers could glimpse a dramatic illustration of the tension between morality and amoral realism in the execution of US foreign policy.

Reading from one script, Obama assured the people of Myanmar that he understood “the process of reform is in no way complete or irreversible.’’ This was his tactful way of saying America has not been duped by Myanmar’s generals and their cronies who have disguised the perpetuation of their power under a patina of democratic pretenses. Obama was hinting to the many victims of Myanmar’s brass that Washington could still halt its pursuit of diplomatic, economic, and military engagement with the resource-rich nation along China’s southern border.

But no sooner had the US president issued his carefully calibrated message than a caucus of military members of Myanmar’s parliament voted to retain articles of a Constitution that guarantees the army a blocking quarter of the seats in that body and prohibits Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi from running for president in 2015 because her children hold foreign (British) citizenship. In essence, the military MPs were calling Obama’s bluff.

They know that America’s foreign policy elites are eager to horn in on China’s backyard, that US corporations hanker to extract Myanmar’s bounteous natural resources and peddle their fried chicken and gluten-free lattes to the consumers of Myanmar. Accordingly, Obama made no mention of a study by Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic describing war crimes attributed to three serving generals. Nor did he invoke a call from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to stop an unfolding genocide in Myanmar against Rohingya Muslims.

To his credit, Obama did denounce in public the vicious persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims. He properly called for humanitarian assistance to be provided to Rohingya families that have been herded into barren concentration camps, and for the Rohingya to be granted full citizenship rights. Not only did Obama’s defense of basic human rights amount to an implicit denunciation of the ruling generals and of a racist campaign against the Rohingya incited by demagogic Buddhist monks; the president’s appeal for tolerance also made for a desolating contrast with Suu Kyi’s politic silence on the plight of the Rohingya.

But Obama’s forthright allusion to the crimes against humanity committed in the campaign against Myanmar’s Muslims amounts to words substituting for action.

Obama is certainly not alone among American political leaders suddenly going soft on Myanmar’s military bosses. Senate majority leader Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and the outgoing Democratic Chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Diane Feinstein, both longtime supporters of sanctions on the generals, have fallen silent, in apparent fealty to US companies eager to do business in Myanmar. Nevertheless, the continuing crimes against humanity committed by Myanmar’s military in its wars against the Karen, Shan, Kachin, and other minorities cry out not only for condemnation but also for sanctions and diplomatic pressure.

In the case of Myanmar today, a policy grounded in the protection of human rights also promises to suit the long-term, international interests of the US and its citizens.

Alan Berger is a retired Globe editorial writer.

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