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...

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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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The uncomfortable truth about Myanmar

This May 20 photo shows ethnic Rohingya Muslims collecting water at a camp set up outside Sittwe in Myanmar's Rakhine state. (Photo by Ye Aung Thu/AFP)

By Michael Sainsbury
November 7, 2015

Let's call the dire situation in parts of Rakhine state what it is: apartheid


The 150,000 or so Muslim Rohinyga now trapped in 10 refugee camps near Sittwe, the capital of Myanmar's Rakhine state, are not allowed to leave the site, nor are about 50,000 others who were, up until now, villagers tilling the land and fishing the backwaters and shores.

In downtown Sittwe, there are a further 3,000 or so people barricaded in their homes in a handful of city blocks, allowed out once a week on a police bus to shop at the food and goods markets inside the camps. Conditions there are possibly still worse — the parallel is World War II's Warsaw ghetto.

Outsiders are no longer allowed in to check, and international nongovernment organizations including aid and refugee groups have been run out of town — literally. Violence has been reported against NGO workers keen to help alleviate some of the appalling conditions inside the camps. Local police now occupy Sittwe's main mosque.

No matter what the result of Myanmar's Nov. 8 election, the plight of the Rohingya seems certain to continue deteriorating. This could even take a sharp turn for the worse on a number of fronts.

A new legal analysis by advocacy group Fortify Rights argues that the Myanmar government's treatment of the Rohinhya is tantamount to genocide.

The report — "Persecution of the Rohingya Muslims: Is Genocide Occurring in Myanmar's Rakhine State? A Legal Analysis" — draws on nearly three years of research and documentation provided to the Lowenstein Clinic by Fortify Rights, including eyewitness testimonies, internal government documents as well as U.N. data, reports, and information.

"The publication is the first to apply the law of genocide to the situation of the Rohingya in Myanmar. It concludes that strong evidence exists to establish the elements of the crime of genocide: that Rohingya are a protected group as defined under the Genocide Convention; that Rohingya have suffered acts of genocide as enumerated by the convention; and that those acts were committed with the intent to destroy Rohingya as a group, in whole or in part," the group said in an Oct. 29 statement accompanying the report's release.

"The government of Myanmar has openly attempted to prevent Rohingya births, in policy and legislation. It denies freedom of movement to more than 1 million Rohingya, and at least 140,000 internally displaced Rohingya are confined to more than 60 internment camps throughout Rakhine state. The government is responsible for denying Rohingya access to adequate humanitarian aid, sanitation, and food, and these abuses have led to avoidable deaths. Authorities have effectively forced Rohingya to take deadly journeys by sea, particularly since 2012, knowing the risks of death they face in doing so."

"The plan of the government is to finish our people, to kill our people, but they cannot kill us all by the bullet," a Rohingya man, 52, told Fortify Rights. "What they can do is deny us food and medicine, and if we don't die, then we'll opt to leave the country. [In these cases] the government has used a different option to kill the people. We must understand that."

The situation seems ripe for rising radicalization of the disaffected youth who haven't already fled on the dangerous sea journey to Malaysia, often via Thailand and human slave camps.

Although the mullahs at the Sittwe Islamic University told ucanews.com reporters that they in no way encourage radical speech or action, they admit they have no control over the imams preaching in makeshift mosques that dot the camps. Some have said there are at least a few whose ideas are more radical than their former teachers at the madrasas.

"At some stage, if hunger gets bad enough and hope fades away, radicalism can take over, people decide they want to fight back," one elder in the camps said.

The irony is that in Myanmar's 2010 election, the vast majority of Rohingya voted for the ruling military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party.

"They promised us a better deal and they lied," is the general consensus — a widespread case of buyer's remorse.

In March, the ruling party stripped 800,000 Rohingya of the identity cards that would have given them a vote in the Nov. 8 election.

That the Rohingya now appear, again universally, to put their hopes in opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is also tragic, as she has been all but dismissive of their situation.

Meanwhile, the greatest human tragedy in the Asia Pacific, further tainted by apartheid and possibly genocide, continues to unfold as the world watches idly.

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