March 16, 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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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...

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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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Death camps for Rohingya Muslims shame Thailand’s generals

A young Rohingya boy looks on as he waits along with other refugees at a temporary detention centre in Langkawi. Source: AFP

By Michael Sheridan
May 12, 2015

The graves in the jungle yawned open to the rains and a haze of mosquitoes still buzzed around the surgical masks and rubber gloves left by the team that had dug up the bodies to take them away.

This is Thailand’s shame, the final destination for Rohingya Muslims who fled hatred in Myanmar but fell into the hands of human traffickers and met their end through sickness, starvation and murder.

In a week of appalling ­revelations, the Thai military ­government finally acknowledged that its own policemen and officials were in league with gangs who preyed on some of the most ­vulnerable people on earth.

Death camps have come to light where the traffickers ­imprisoned desperate migrants in bamboo cages, forcing them to call their impoverished families for ransoms many could never pay — typically about $4000.

There were 26 graves at this one spot outside Padang Besar, ­a town that nestles in the lee of ­Elephant Mountain, along the forested border with Malaysia.

I counted three about the right size for a child.

The most shocking thing about the site is six shallow graves lie so close to the road that local villagers must have known about them. But just five minutes away in the nearest hamlet, which is ­inhabited by Thai Muslims, the locals shook their heads, vanished into its tiny mosque or pointed ­inquirers in the wrong direction.

Last weekend, Banjong Pongphon, the mayor of Padang Besar, was arrested on suspicion of ­involvement with human ­trafficking, the police announced.

The authorities issued 29 ­arrest warrants for alleged traffickers and transferred 58 policemen suspected of collusion with them. An army colonel has been sacked from his local ­command.

On Friday night, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha pledged in his weekly television address to stamp out the rackets for good.

General Prayuth knows this is a national crisis. Thailand already risks a EU ban on its vital exports of seafood after the exposure of human trafficking and slave ­labour on its fishing fleet.

The US State Department last year gave it a “Tier 3” rating, the worst possible, for failing to fight the trade, raising the threat of sanctions.

After years of inaction, squads of police and soldiers began sweeping the dense jungles last week and found four camps holding 50 makeshift dormitory huts.

They rescued 55 survivors but the other hostages and their captors had vanished. A total of 56 graves have been located and more are being found by the day.

“We were called by villagers and found 13 Rohingya wandering in a rubber plantation,” said police Colonel Supachai Fuenpanich at a rural police post about 16km from the border.

His men led the haggard, ­dishevelled migrants, none of whom could communicate in English or Thai, to a van, which then took them to a court hearing.

They will be treated as illegal immigrants and are likely to end up in a detention centre where the food is so sparse that a local ­Muslim charity sends in meat, fish and eggs to stave off malnutrition.

They had told an interpreter of being lured by traffickers with tales of jobs in Malaysia paying about $20 a day and the promise of safety in that mainly Muslim country.

“They said they came in large and small boats, taking 10 days to cross from Myanmar and then they were five or six days in the Thai jungle,” the colonel said.

The Rohingya are Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladesh, where they are often stateless and victims of racial hatred. In Myanmar, mobs incited by Buddhist extremists turned on them, leaving terrified survivors living in isolated conditions that have been compared to apartheid.

Tens of thousands crammed on to fishing boats and rickety cargo vessels in an exodus across the Bay of Bengal, hoping to reach Malaysia, where more than 35,000 have already sought refuge. Along the way, a terrible fate befell some.

A Pulitzer prize-­winning investigation by Reuters news agency in 2013 found that Thai immigration officials sold them to traffickers for as little as $400 each to get rid of the ­problem.

The Thai government still ­refuses to allow the UN’s refugee agency full access to the Rohingya to determine whether they qualify as refugees.

Many victims are shipped ­offshore to slave hulks or remote islands. Despite pleas for action against the trafficking ships, ­nothing has been done.

Instead, the Royal Thai Navy has filed a criminal defamation case against an Australian journalist, Alan Morison, and his Thai ­colleague Chutima Sidisathian for their reporting of the issue on a local news website, Phuketwan.

“Trafficking of persons in Thailand has long been out of control,” said Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch.

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