March 17, 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...

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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...

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 ...

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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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Rohingya and our rule-bending arrogance

For a country that values its commitment to human rights as does Australia, the silence in the face of Rohingya suffering is a humiliating moment. AFP: Christophe Archambault

By Mathew Davies
May 18, 2015

Australia's "stop the boats" policy has helped to unravel global norms around refugees, which is now contributing to Rohingya refugees being bounced around the oceans of South-East Asia, writes Mathew Davies.

In 2003 Bill Clinton, in a speech at Yale University, suggested that American foreign policy should try "to create a world with rules and partnerships and habits of behaviour that we would like to live in when we're no longer the military, political and economic superpower in the world".

It is a long way from the carefully tended quads of New Haven to the leaky boats full of Rohingya refugees fleeing persecution in Myanmar, currently being bounced around South-East Asia as Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia refuse them entry into their territorial waters. Yet the same concerns that shaped Clinton's speech back then should today shape Australia's approach to the question of refugees.

What Clinton meant was that America, a superpower that could see its own decline, faced a choice. It could revel in the Indian summer of its power, violating the laws and norms that it had helped create because it was powerful enough, for now, to do so. Or it could make harder but more longsighted decisions, foregoing short term success for the more important goal of helping to bed down an order where its values would be best preserved when it was no longer in a position to materially force their realisation.

Australia too faces this choice - and the Rohingya illustrate the human cost of this decision.

The Government's policy of "turning back the boats" has been one of its few political success stories - first in opposition when it bludgeoned the Gillard government with it, and then in power when it militarised the issue, authorised the tow-back of incoming boats and crafted elaborate offshore processing systems. The victims have remained largely faceless, stripped of their identity in the press and safely kept away from the cameras.

But in crafting this policy Australia weakened both the international refugee regime as a set of rules and norms that should shape how states deal with such refugee flows and helped along a regional trend that has questioned the international regime as never before.

To be clear, Australia has in no way caused the Rohingya crisis nor has its policy alone been the impetus for South-East Asian states' current policy. The current crisis could not have been predicted when the Australian Government's policy to "stop the boats" was being designed and implemented.

However, Australia's actions have helped contribute to a general questioning of international norms on the question of refugees arriving by sea and a weakening of received practice - that states would accept these refugees as they arrived. It is not that Australia's actions in this area are unprecedented in the region - Thailand in particular has a reputation as a bad citizen. Likewise, Malaysia has long cracked down on what it labels illegal migrants.
But Australia's actions are the largest, most organised and most publicly trumpeted and have changed the scale of the critique against the refugee regime. And both the Abbott and previous Rudd/Gillard governments have participated in this.

The dangers of weakening international norms when politically expedient to do so has long been understood. We can choose to break the fragile web of laws and norms that shape our world when it is politically expedient to do so, especially when we are powerful. But even then, we cannot control the consequences of that transgression in terms of the precedent we set and the lessons others learn from our actions.

The consequences of Australia's actions in the past are coming home to roost today, and it is some of Asia's most vulnerable people who are suffering as a result.

It is impossible for Australia to criticise those who do what we have with such a fanfare of self-congratulation. Prime Minister Tony Abbott has defended the rights of Southeast Asian nations to prevent the boats making landfall despite the human cost of this policy potentially being the lives of thousands on the ocean right now. This is in stark contrast to US Secretary of State John Kerry's call for regional states to accept these refugees to avoid a humanitarian disaster.

For a country that values its commitment to human rights as does Australia, our position in the face of Rohingya suffering is a humiliating moment; a realisation of what happens when our policies and our professed beliefs no longer march in step. We are left advising Europeans to tow boats back to the civil and political turmoil of Libya or ignoring the lives of the Rohingya in favour of a "tough on people-smuggling" rhetoric that we are now trapped in regardless of the human cost.

The price of living in a world of rules and norms widely shared is that you do not get to pick and choose which of those rules apply to you and which only apply to others. For a superpower like the US, facing its own mortality, these decisions were global in nature - questions of military adventurism, respect for sovereignty and pluralism, relations with the non-Western world.

For Australia they are no less fundamental; do we want to craft a regional order where our values have wider resonance because we follow them even when politically costly? Or do we want to jettison all notions of common governance in the name of self-interested politics?

The short-term electoral benefits of stopping the boats have been clearly illustrated - now we move into a different phase, the consequences of those decisions so willingly adopted.

Sadly it is not us who bear the costs of those decisions. As almost always happens, it is those most vulnerable, most persecuted and most needy who experience the consequences of our arrogance.

This article was originally written for New Mandala.

Dr Mathew Davies is a fellow and senior lecturer researching international relations, ASEAN and human rights at the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, The Australian National University.

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