March 17, 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 ...

Interview

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Aung San Suu Kyi's government rejects term 'Rohingya'

Myanmar Foreign Minister and State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi looks on during a meeting with Laos President Bounnhang Vorachit in Vientiane, Laos. CREDIT: EPA/STR

By Andrew Marszal
The Telegraph
May 8, 2016

New Delhi -- The Burmese foreign ministry led by Aung San Suu Kyi has told foreign diplomats to stop using the word “Rohingya”, prompting accusations that it has abandoned the minority Muslim community.

The foreign ministry sent an advisory to embassies in Rangoon this week warning them against the term, which is used by the stateless Muslim group to self-identify, but is rejected by the country’s nationalist Buddhist wing who view the Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

“We have never accepted this term,” Kyaw Zay Ya, a retired lieutenant-colonel who was elected as an MP for Ms Suu Kyi’s party last year and now serves in the foreign ministry, told the Wall Street Journal.

He added that “it is not possible to enforce” the directive, and would be up to foreign governments to decide.

The memo indicates that the position of the ministry on the term “Rohingya” is the same under the leadership of 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner Ms Suu Kyi as it was under the previous military junta.

Burma Task Force, a coalition of 19 Muslim groups, on Thursday accused Ms Suu Kyi of having “caved to the hate message of extremist Buddhist protesters”.

Last month, Buddhist monks joined several hundred protesters outside the US embassy in Rangoon on Thursday to demand it stop using the term “Rohingya”.

Ms Suu Kyi has been widely criticised for failing to stand up for the Rohingya’s rights since coming to power, and has herself never used the term publicly. Fellow Nobel laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama have both signalled their concern about her silence on the fate of the Rohingya.

For the more than one million Rohingya who live in Burma, mainly along its western border with Bangladesh and India, the term is extremely politically loaded.

It represents that fact that the group are not considered Burmese citizens. Instead, they are referred to in the rest of the country as “Bengalis”, implying that they are largely illegal interlopers from neighbouring Bangladesh.

It comes as a Burmese activist was arrested for claiming on Facebook that Min Aung Hliang, the country's army chief, did not seize power because he wants to marry Ms Suu Kyi.

PROFILE

Aung San Suu Kyi

Ms Suu Kyi Pic: Getty Images

Position: Leader of the National League for Democracy, Burma’s main opposition party
Born:June 19, 1945
Education: University of Delhi and St Hugh’s College, Oxford

Who is she?

The daughter of Burma’s assassinated independence hero Ms Suu Kyi was living quietly in Oxford with her husband, a British academic, and their two sons when she returned to her homeland in 1988 to care for her sick mother.

Early political career?

She quickly emerged as the leader of a popular democracy uprising against the military junta and spent 15 years under house arrest by Burma’s general in three stints between 1989 and 2011. She was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in absentia and became the world's most famous political prisoner.

Now?

Her party has won a majority in Burma's parliament after a historic election. But she will still be barred by the constitution from becoming president because of her foreign family ties.

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