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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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 ...

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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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(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...

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(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...

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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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Myanmar’s Suu Kyi not invited to speak at conference on Rohingya Muslims

Myanmar opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi speaks to journalists during a press conference at a parliament building Thursday, April 9, 2015 in Naypyitaw, Myanmar. AP Photo/Khin Maung Win

By Robin McDowell 
May 26, 2015

YANGON, Myanmar – An international gathering about the plight of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya Muslims boasts a star-studded cast, with three Nobel Peace laureates among those calling on the world to wake up to the unfolding tragedy.

But fellow winner and pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi will not be among them. She wasn’t invited.

During her 15 years under house arrest, Suu Kyi won admiration across the globe for her fiery speeches and scathing criticism of the military regime that ruled Myanmar, or Burma, at the time.

After her release in 2010, when ruling generals handed over power to a nominally civilian government, she won a seat in parliament.

The 69-year-old says she is a politician and that she never sought to be a human rights champion. Critics note she is carefully choosing her battles, in part because she has presidential ambitions.

In a predominantly Buddhist country of 50 million people, where there is much animosity for the 1.3 million Rohingya Muslims, Suu Kyi (pronounced “Suu chee”) has opted to remain silent, even as the world watched in horror while more than 3,500 hungry, dehydrated Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants washed ashore in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand this month.

The international gathering Tuesday at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway, will feature video statements from Nobel Peace Prize winners Desmond Tutu, Jose Ramos-Horta and Mairead Maguire. Others, like philanthropist George Soros, who escaped Nazi-occupied Hungary, and former prime minister of Norway Kjell Magne Bondevik, will also speak.

They will focus on concrete ways to end the decades-long persecution of Rohingya – and the need to speak out.

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor,” Tutu, who won the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime, says in his video statement. “If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”

Myanmar’s transition from dictatorship to democracy has been a bumpy one.

Despite early euphoria about much-touted political reforms, the accompanying freedoms of expression had a dark side, lifting the lid off deep-seated resentment toward the dark-skinned Rohingya minority.

With hard-line Buddhist monks fanning the anger, machete-wielding mobs started taking to the streets in 2012, killing up to 280 people and forcing another 140,000 into crowded, dusty internment camps. They have little access to school and adequate health care, nor can they move around freely, paying hefty bribes if they want to pass police barricades, even for emergencies.

The government insists they are illegal migrants from neighbouring Bangladesh and has denied them citizenship, adding to the desperation that sparked an exodus of an estimated 100,000 Rohingya in the last three years. Authorities refuse to identify them as “Rohingya” and use “Bengalis” instead. Suu Kyi also avoids the term and generally refers to them as “Muslims.”

The website for the three-day Oslo conference says the popular daughter of Myanmar’s late independence hero, Aung San, shares the “anti-Rohingya” sentiment of much of the population, something she had denied, but with little vigour. Aase Sand, of the Norwegian Burma Committee, one of the event’s organizers, said there was never a plan to invite her or to ask for a videotaped statement.

Suu Kyi has in the last two years actively campaigned to change the constitution that bars her from the presidency because she was married to a foreigner. With elections slated for the end of the year, the Oxford-educated opposition leader realizes she herself won’t be contesting the upcoming vote. Still, her National League for Democracy Party will be, and it’s expected to do perform strongly.

Suu Kyi has been playing a delicate balancing act. She has been careful not to rile the military, which still wields tremendous political power, with a quarter of the seats in parliament and veto power over changes to constitutional amendments. She also realizes she – and her party – risk public backlash if she speaks out in defence of Rohingya.

Suu Kyi, a member of the Burman Buddhist elite, bristles when foreign media or rights activists ask her why she has so far failed to denounce religious bigotry in Myanmar, whether against Rohingya or Christians from the Chin and Kachin minorities, who have also long been subjected to threats, intimidation, and discrimination.

She did not respond to questions from The Associated Press, but reiterated her position in an interview with Canada’s The Globe and Mail last month that the problems in Rakhine state – where almost all the country’s Rohingya live – are based on fear and perceptions of being a minority.

The Rohingya feel threatened by the Buddhists in Rakhine, while the Buddhists fear the Muslim world’s wider backing of the Rohingya.

“Those who criticize me for not condemning one side or the other – they’ve never said exactly what they hope will come out of such condemnation,” she told the paper. “You’re just taking the moral high ground for the sake of sounding good – it sounds a little irresponsible.”

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