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...

Video News

...

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

...

Editorial by Int'l Media

Interview

Open Letter

RB Poem

Book Shelf

Searching for a safe space: The story of a young Rohingya woman displaced in Myanmar

Khin Me Me Htun has been displaced from her home in Rakhine state for four years. © UNFPA Myanmar/Yenny Gamming

By UNFPA
May 19, 2016

RAKHINE, Myanmar – Khin Me Me Htun was 22-years old when a wave of inter-communal violence swept across the state of Rakhine in 2012. At the time, she had just graduated with a degree in English from Sittwe University, and was planning to move to Yangon to start post-graduate studies and pursue her long-time dream of a career in diplomacy. 

Then one night, riots broke out in her town, Sittwe, and her carefully planned future was upended. She saw her neighbours being beaten with steel sticks and stabbed with knives. And she watched as her father nearly died from a beating. 

“I could see my father’s brain,” she says. “I saw my friend die from a knife wound. There was blood everywhere. That was the last time I saw my neighbourhood.” 

Khin Me is one of the approximately 1 million people in Myanmar who self-identify as Rohingya, a Muslim minority that came into international focus in 2015 when thousands fleeing persecution were left floating at sea in rickety boats, unable to find a country willing to grant them refuge. 

And today, four years after she was forced to flee her home, Khin Me and 120,000 others affected by the 2012 conflict remain displaced within Myanmar’s borders. 

Most live in restricted zones, often just kilometres from their home villages and towns, but the zones’ perimeters are policed, and they are barred from leaving or returning home. 

Inside the walls, they are shut off from jobs, education and health care, including sexual and reproductive health services. Most struggle to survive day to day, and, while there is no data available from the camps, anecdotal evidence suggests that women and girls in the zones faced an increased risk of sexual and gender-based violence

A village in the restricted zones where many displaced Rohingya now live. © UNFPA Myanmar/Yenny Gamming

So close, but so far from home 

As she scrolls through photos on her phone of her old, more urban life in Sittwe – going to the cinema, goofing around with friends, Khin Me discusses living in the restricted zone. “At first, it was strange,” she says, her demeanour quiet and serious and very different from the smiling, light-hearted Khin Me floating by in her photos. “I cannot wear trousers here. Women don’t go to the tea stall. And there is nowhere to borrow or buy books.” 

In the camps, water is collected from a shared pump, electricity is intermittent and the latrines are outdoors. For many women and girls, venturing out to use the latrines at night is the time they most fear experiencing sexual assault. However, the huts where most live have no locks, and even staying inside after dark is no guarantee of protection. 

In addition, families live day after day, year in and year out, in these small, stiflingly hot makeshift huts, without privacy, and the conditions breed despair and frustration that contribute to domestic violence. 

Khin Me laughs with her colleague at a UNFPA Women and Girls Centre in Rakhine. © UNFPA Myanmar/Yenny Gamming

Finding a safe space 

In response to the displacement, UNFPA has established 15 Women and Girls Centres in Myanmar, in partnership with the International Rescue Committee and the Metta Development Foundation, to provide women and girls with social support, information about sexual and reproductive health and family planning, psychosocial counselling, other violence-related services and transport to a nearby hospital for those in need of medical attention. In 2015 alone, 16,000 women and girls accessed the centres. 

All staff members at these safe spaces are themselves internally displaced women and girls, and the work not only provides them with financial security, but also allows them to use their first-hand knowledge of life in the camps to shape and improve the response to gender-based violence. 

Khin Me is among those on staff at the seven centres in Rakhine. She says her position as a response manager gives her a sense of purpose. And as she sits there, talking and laughing with her colleagues and the women visiting the centre, she begins to look more like the playful young woman in her photos. 

“I feel that my work really matters,” she says. “Many of the women who come here have little or no education, and we teach them not only about gender-based violence, but also about health and sanitation.” 

However, despite the fulfilling work, Khin Me says she constantly teeters between hope and hopelessness. 

To date, there has been little progress towards an agreement or reconciliation that would allow Khin Me and the rest of the Muslim community to return to their homes. And in the centre of Sittwe, there remains only a vacant lot where her family’s house and tea stop once stood. 

But Khin Me still holds out hope for returning there. “My dream has changed,” she says. “I don’t want to go to Yangon anymore, or to America, or anywhere else in the world. I just want to go home.” 

Write A Comment

Rohingya Exodus