March 18, 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...

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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...

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

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...

Event

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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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Burma’s grim reality

President Obama and Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi hold a news conference at her residence in Rangoon, Burma, last year. (Nyein Chan Naing/European Pressphoto Agency)

By Editorial Board
July 7, 2015

JOURNALISTS IN Burma are “stifled” by a “climate of fear,” Amnesty International reported recently, finding “repression dressed up as progress.” The military government, after several years of pretend negotiations, recently vetoed constitutional changes that would have limited its power. Peace talks with ethnic groups have collapsed.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration, in its annual human rights report released just over a week ago, cheers a “trend of progress since 2011.”

Wai Wai Nu, a Burmese activist who recently visited Washington, is not surprised by the discrepancy. “The international perception is quite different from the reality,” she told us. “The human rights situation is deteriorating.”

Conditions in Burma, a Southeast Asian nation of about 56 million people also known as Myanmar, did improve in 2012. Wai Wai Nu herself, imprisoned in 2005 at age 18 because her father was a pro-democracy politician, was released along with hundreds of other political prisoners. Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the democracy leader who had spent the better part of two decades under house arrest, also was freed and allowed to contest and win a by-election for parliament. The U.S. government, eager to pocket a foreign-policy success, eased its sanctions on the generals and former generals running the country.

The administration’s hope, shared by Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, was that the regime would negotiate its own demise, in the fashion of South Africa’s apartheid government. Alas, the generals seem to be reading from a different script. They have eagerly shed their pariah status, welcoming an influx of investment, but they seem determined that there will be no Nelson Mandelas in their country. Elections are scheduled for the fall, but Aung San Suu Kyi will not be permitted to run for president, and one-quarter of parliament seats will be reserved for the military without election.

Things are especially bad for the ethnic minority known as Rohingya, of which Wai Wai Nu is one, and for other Muslims. “People can demonstrate freely — against Muslims,” Wai Wai Nu noted. “But when people ask for their rights, or their education, or their land, they are arrested and charged.” And not only Muslims: Phyo Phyo Aung, another young former political prisoner, recently led a protest march — and was charged with violating the law in every township she walked through. There’s an “illusion of change,” Yan Htaik Seng, a project manager with BBC Media Action, told us, but censorship and fear-inspired self-censorship keep the media in a straitjacket.

U.S. officials hope that fall elections, even if held under an imperfect constitution, will empower pro-democracy parties enough to spur further change. That remains the sensible goal in a season of disappointment. But its fulfillment would be more likely if the administration acknowledged reality and adjusted policy accordingly, including, as Amnesty International argued, by pushing for an end to repression. As the organization’s Southeast Asiaresearch director Rupert Abbott said, “Authorities are still relying on the same old tactics — arrests, surveillance, threats and jail time to muzzle those journalists who cover ‘inconvenient’ topics.”

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