May 05, 2025

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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...

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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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...

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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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Thailand Arrests 62 Myanmar Migrants Near Malaysian Border

Sixty-two migrants from Myanmar wait at a house in Padang Besar, Thailand, to be taken into police custody, Aug. 2, 2016. (Photo: Benar News)

August 5, 2016

Thai authorities said they plan to charge and deport 62 undocumented migrants from Myanmar, including five Rohingya Muslims, who were arrested after human smugglers left them in a house near Thailand’s southern border with Malaysia.

The 62 were waiting to cross into Malaysia illegally but were taken into Thai custody Tuesday after being found at a townhouse in Padang Besar, a subdistrict of Songkhla province, officials said.

Padang Besar is the same area where dozens of graves of trafficked Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants were found in the jungle in May 2015. That discovery precipitated a Thai crackdown on human smuggling that contributed to a regional migration crisis.

Meanwhile, some 139 graves of other victims of human-smuggling were discovered on the other side of the border in northern Malaysia’s Perlis state.

At around that time, thousands of Rohingyas and Bangladeshis came ashore in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia after being abandoned in smugglers’ boats adrift in the Andaman Sea and Strait of Malacca.

“The 62 immigrants have been detained and questioned at Padang Besar police station. The police have been interrogating them, and will press charges of illegal entry. They intend to deport them to where they came from,” Lt. Col. Prapan Areebambud, deputy chief of the police station in Padang Besar, told Benar News on Thursday.

Police were notified about the group of undocumented foreigners by a woman from Myanmar who was being kept in the same house but managed to sneak out, according to the superintendent of the Thai police anti-human trafficking branch in Songkhla.

“We interrogated a Myanmar woman who escaped from the house to seek help from authorities. She said Thai and Malaysian brokers brought them from border checkpoints in Mae Sod district, in Tak province, and the border in Ranong province, and they each paid them 200,000 kyats (U.S. $168.50),” said the superintendent, Police Col. Narong Tedwiboon, referring to Thai provinces along the border with Myanmar.

“They were kept there for five days, waiting for the next brokers to take them into Malaysia, but no one came. They were afraid that they were cheated, so she sneaked out to seek help from authorities,” Narong told BenarNews.

‘Way too small’

Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim and relatively prosperous country, has been a prime destination in Southeast Asia for Rohingyas, with southern Thailand serving as an overland transit route for many.

Rohingyas belong to a stateless minority in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar whose members have been fleeing ethnic and religious persecution in Rakhine state, in search of better employment and educational prospects abroad.

Last year’s crackdown on human-smuggling in Thailand resulted in arrests warrants being issued for 153 suspected members of a transnational ring linked to the jungle graves in Padang Besar. Ninety-two of the suspects, including an army general, police officers, and some local officials, are standing trial in Bangkok on human-trafficking charges.

Nu Muhammad, a Rohingya expat who has lived in Thailand for more than 10 years, said human-smuggling into the country from Myanmar will go on on because operators at the ground level have not been caught, he said.

“The traffickers are using land routes because they can no longer go by sea,” he told BenarNews.

A trafficker in Padang Besar, who declined to reveal her real name, indicated that many more people were being trafficked through the area on their way to Malaysia.

“The arrest of 62 is way too small. To traffic [such] a small number is not worth the economy of scale,” she said, adding that human trafficking in the area was bouncing back after a lull that followed last year’s crackdown.

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