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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...

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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...

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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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Muslim candidates fear no shot at the polls

By Ei Ei Toe Lwin and Ye Mon With AFP

September 7, 2015

With the finalised candidate list expected to be released today, barred Muslim election hopefuls fear not a single one of them will be left to contend the looming polls, leaving no one to represent what many estimate is Myanmar’s largest religious minority.

Lower house MP U Shwe Maung talks to reporters during a press conference on September 4. (Aung Khant/The Myanmar Times)

The Union Election Commission’s scrutiny process has scrubbed 88 candidates from the list, with citizenship complaints the most frequently cited cause for disqualification. Around one-third of the rejected candidates – at least 30 – are Muslim contestants, mainly hailing from Rakhine State.

Leaders of Muslim parties said they have tried every avenue for appealing the disqualifications, including heaps of paperwork proving their eligibility. But none of it has prevailed so far.

“The final decision will be made on September 7 [before the candidate campaign period begins]. We hope to get good results, but we understand it won’t be a fair trial,” said U Zaw Min, chair of the National Development and Peace Party, which has had all six of its candidates nixed due to allegations their parents were not citizens at the time of the candidates’ birth. All have sent appeals to the state commission with the relevant paper trail attached.

“We can show the right documents if they ask, but they don’t take that into account. We feel that our rights have been violated under this so-called democratic government,” he said.


A lower house parliamentarian elected in 2010 during the ruling party’s courting of the Muslim vote, U Shwe Maung was axed from the Union Solidarity and Development Party and then blocked from running as an independent. The election commission found him and the other Muslim independent running in Buthidaung, Daw Khin Khin Lwin, ineligible on the grounds that their parents were not valid citizens at the time of their birth.

U Shwe Maung says the accusation – which was brought against him by his ethnic Rakhine political rival – is ridiculous as his father was a senior police officer, and he also passed scrutiny in 2010, when the political atmosphere was more amenable to Muslim candidates.

“The [state] commission rejected my appeal without taking even 10 seconds to check my documents. While they were hearing my case, I requested they look up my documents but they said there was no need to check,” the MP said, adding that the sidelining of Muslim parliamentarians would make the elections “unfree and unfair”.

“How many times do we need approval?” he said.

But the barring of Muslim candidates is just one part of the larger ostracisation of the Muslim community ahead of the elections. Hundreds of thousands of Muslim voters, including in Muslim-majority communities, have been struck from electoral rolls amid ever-increasing pressure from ultra-nationalist hardline groups with an avowed mission to disenfranchise those they regard as foreign intruders. The New York Times reported on August 23 that up to 500,000 Royinga voters in Rakhine State found their names missing from the voter lists, despite many having participated in previous polls.

In February of this year, parliament enacted a referendum law that would enable those holding white cards to vote, a decision that instigated public outcry and a swift reversal of both the voting plan and the white cards, which were invalidated.

The largest opposition party, the National League for Democracy, did not field a single Muslim candidate among its over 1000 submissions, according to a senior party member.

“People see this as religious discrimination,” the party member told AFP, adding that party chair Daw Aung San Suu Kyi “must be afraid” of the hardline monks.

Meanwhile, parties purporting to represent the Muslim community have had most if not all their candidates disqualified. The Democracy Human Rights Party has had so few candidates pass the citizenship stumbling block that they may be disqualified from the elections. The election law prohibits parties with fewer than three candidates from contesting the vote, which some allege is being used to oust parties without explicitly barring them.

“This strategy of deliberate disenfranchisement is a win-win for the government and its proxy [the] UEC,” said London-based scholar and activist U Maung Zarni. “The Muslims in Myanmar are already anxious and scared for the safety of their communities across the country, generally speaking.”

“If the disenfranchised Muslims … take to the streets or show their displeasure in any aggressive or public manner, the military will use U Wirathu and his Islamophobic networks such as the Ma Ba Tha to counter the Muslim protests,” he said.

Political commentator U Sithu Aung said the burden of citizenship proof for Muslim and opposition candidates was unreasonably high. “Even for me it is impossible to show the status of my parent’s citizenship before I was born. It is a very complicated issue,” he said.

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