March 14, 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...

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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...

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 ...

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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...

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...

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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...

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...

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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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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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Aung San Suu Kyi is making wartime rape easier to commit

A poster hanging in the New York headquarters of Human Rights Watch. Photo: Phil Robertson / Twitter

By Coconuts Yangon
December 26, 2016

Former human rights activist Aung San Suu Kyi is leading the Myanmar government’s campaign to make sure that nothing is done to protect women from sexual assault by the military in Rakhine State.

Two of her cabinet portfolios – the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Counsellor’s Office – have been more vocal than any other government offices in denying allegations of rape of Rohingya women at the hands of government security forces.

On Friday, the Myanmar State Counsellor’s Office publicly accused Rohingya women of fabricating stories of rape by government security forces, calling the phenomenon “fake rape”.



On December 13, the same office tried to debunk the Guardian’s profile of a Rohingya rape victim on the basis that people from the same village had “only heard of such cases in the form of rumours”.

On Saturday, the Information Committee appointed by the State Counsellor’s Office once again denied rape allegations on the basis of villagers saying they had not heard of any rape incidents, even after two Rohingya women told reporters on December 21 that they had been raped by security forces.

Though numerous reports of rape perpetrated by Tatmadaw soldiers against Rohingya women since October 9 have been corroborated by interviews with victims and witnesses in Bangladesh and in Rakhine State, the military continues to block formal investigations, allowing government spokespeople to control the narrative.

Aye Aye Soe, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told IRIN: “Most of them are made-up stories, blown out of proportion. The things they are accusing us of didn’t happen at all.”

Beyond her own offices, the Ministry of Information, whose minister was hand-picked by Suu Kyi, published a piece of ‘analysis’ on November 3 claiming that “accusations of international media of violations of human rights of local residents during Maungtaw area clearance operations were intentionally fabricated in collusion with terrorist groups”.

All of this sends a message to Myanmar soldiers that there is no consequence for rape, and it is happening on Aung San Suu Kyi’s watch.

Before she started campaigning for votes in Myanmar’s 2015 general election, Aung San Suu Kyi seemed like an ideal champion for women’s rights. She already had a Nobel Peace Prize under her belt, and she was eager to criticize the forces in Myanmar society that bolstered patriarchy – including the military.

In 2011, she told Nobel Women’s Initiative: “Rape is used in my country as a weapon against those who only want to live in peace, who only want to assert their basic human rights. Especially in the areas of ethnic nationalities, rape is rife. It is used as a weapon by armed forces to intimidate the ethnic nationalities and to divide our country.”


But the person who said those words is gone. Or, just as likely, she never existed at all.

Suu Kyi’s opposition to rape softened almost as soon as she had something to lose. In December 2014, after she was elected to parliament and less than a year before the NLD would be swept into power, she was asked if she was concerned about the impunity the Myanmar military enjoys after using rape as a weapon of war, which had been documented in a report by the Women’s League of Burma a few weeks earlier.

Instead of reiterating the well-documented truths in her 2011 statement, she defended the Tatmadaw by saying the ethnic armed groups rape, too.

“This has to do with rule of law. And that has to do with politics, and the position of the army as it is in a particular political structure. I think you are well aware of the fact that military armed groups which are not official armies also engage in sexual violence in conditions of conflict,” she said at a press conference in Yangon.

By not calling for rape allegations to be investigated and refusing to condemn wartime rape, which once she said herself is “rife” in the country, Aung San Suu Kyi is making rape easier to commit and easier to get away with.

Some political calculus in Suu Kyi’s mind led her to denounce rape committed by the military in 2011, to distract us from it in 2014 and then to all but guarantee impunity for it in 2016. Her political pragmatism endangers the lives of women and their families and stunts development in Myanmar.

“Every case of rape divides our country between…the armed forces and ordinary citizens,” Suu Kyi told the Nobel Women’s Initiative in 2011.

Today, we know what side of that divide Aung San Suu Kyi is on.

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