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...

Video News

...

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

Event

Editorial by Int'l Media

Interview

Open Letter

RB Poem

Book Shelf

Pressure mounts on Myanmar over Asia 'boat people' crisis

A Rohingya child, who recently arrived in Indonesia by boat, receives medical assistance at a shelter in Kuala Langsa, in Indonesia's Aceh Province, May 17, 2015. REUTERS/RONI BINTANG

By Al-Zaquan Amer Hamzah & Aubrey Belford
May 18, 2015

Malaysia prodded Myanmar on Sunday to halt the exodus from its shores as concern grew for uncounted migrants adrift in rickety boats around the Andaman Sea.

The United Nations has called on Southeast Asian nations not to push back the boatloads of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and Bangladeshis - men, women and children who fled persecution and poverty at home, and now face sickness and starvation at sea.

Malaysia, which says it has already taken in 120,000 illegal migrants from Myanmar, has made it clear that it wants no more and its deputy prime minister said on Sunday that Myanmar must now take responsibility.

"What is the responsibility of the Myanmar government ... is there any humanitarian aspect for them to solve this matter internally?" Muhyiddin Yassin told a news conference, adding that the burden should not fall on other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Foreign Minister Anifah Aman told reporters that Malaysia, as current chair of ASEAN, was hoping to discuss the crisis with Myanmar "before it is brought to the international level".

An estimated 25,000 Bangladeshis and Rohingya boarded smugglers' boats in the first three months of this year, twice as many as in the same period of 2014, the UNHCR has said.

A clampdown by Thailand's military junta has made a well-trodden trafficking route into Malaysia - one of Southeast Asia's wealthiest economies - too risky for criminals who prey on Rohingya fleeing oppression in Buddhist-majority Myanmar and on Bangladeshis looking for better livelihoods abroad.

REGION'S LEADERS HAVE "FAILED TO ACT"

The United Nations said last week that the deadly pattern of migration across the Bay of Bengal would continue unless Myanmar ended discrimination.

Most of Myanmar's 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims are stateless and live in apartheid-like conditions. Almost 140,000 were displaced in clashes with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in 2012.

Myanmar terms the Rohingya "Bengalis", a name most Rohingya reject because it implies they are immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh despite having lived in Myanmar for generations.

Thailand has said it will host talks in Bangkok on May 29 for 15 countries to discuss the emergency.

However, there has been no sign yet of a coordinated response from regional governments over what to do with some 2,500 migrants who have landed in Malaysia and Indonesia over the past week or some 5,000 others still stranded at sea.

"The need for effective regional action to combat the crisis is clear, yet our leaders have consistently failed to act," said Charles Santiago, chairperson of ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights and a member of parliament in Malaysia.

"They hide behind the arcane and ultimately destructive policy of non-interference, repeating the demonstrably false claim that the Myanmar government's persecution of Rohingya is an 'internal affair'," he wrote in the Jakarta Post on Sunday.

U.S. RAPS MYANMAR OVER RIGHTS

Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand have all turned or towed overcrowded migrant boats away from their shores in recent days, in what the International Organization for Migration has described as "maritime ping-pong with human lives".

For several days, about 300 Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants on one particular boat have zig-zagged across maritime borders just out of sight of gleaming Thai beach resorts.

Reuters journalists on a speedboat off the coast near the border between Malaysia and Thailand saw hundreds of rake-thin migrants huddling on the sun-beaten deck of the boat, which was towed back out to sea twice by the Thai navy and intercepted by the Malaysians.

Bangkok said in a statement released on Sunday that the people on the boat did not want to land in Thailand, that it would not push boats back and would set up temporary shelters for migrants that do land.

The United States last year downgraded Thailand and Malaysia to its list of the world's worst centers of human trafficking, dumping them in the same category as North Korea and Syria.

As for Myanmar, U.S. President Barack Obama said in a routine note to Congress last week that Washington - while not curtailing engagement with Myanmar after decades of military rule - would maintain some sanctions on the country.

White House spokesman Eric Schultz said that Washington continued to raise its concerns with Myanmar over the migrants "because of dire humanitarian and economic situations they face at home out of fear of ethnic and religious violence."

There was no immediate response from Myanmar to Malaysia's calls for it to take responsibility. On Saturday, a senior official from the president's office said Myanmar had not received an invitation for the Bangkok meeting and would not take part anyway if the word 'Rohingya' was used.

Write A Comment

Pages 22123456 »
Rohingya Exodus