March 18, 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 ...

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...

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Sanction Myanmar And Give The Rohingya A State Of Their Own

(Photo: Getty Images)

By Anders Corr
December 28, 2016

In the 8th Century A.D., Rakhine State of modern Myanmar was the Kingdom of Arakan, populated by the Rohingya. But with increasing frequency over time, in 1784, 1942, 1977, 1991, 2012, and 2014, waves of Muslim minority Rohingya fled Rakhine due to extreme forms of repression from various Buddhist-majority Burmese governments. The resulting Rohingya diaspora of 1.5 million is global, and outnumbers the 1.3 million living in Myanmar itself. The plurality of Rohingya refugees fled to Bangladesh, where 300,000 to 500,000 now live in squalid settlements. The persistent repression and lack of representation suffered by the Rohingya gives them a right to their own state in the Rakhine region of Myanmar. The international community has a moral imperative to support the Rohingya , and pressure Myanmar through economic sanctions . If the Myanmar government dislikes that idea and wants to keep Rakhine State, it should rapidly correct its provision of human rights to the Rohingya and repatriate the Rohingya refugees.

The Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar, a Buddhist-majority country, is under attack by their own government. What the Myanmar military has called “clearance operations” and a senior U.N. official calls “ethnic cleansing” has been revived against the Rohingya over the past three months. Myanmar is riddled with racism against Muslims, and the Myanmar military, unlike most professional militaries, could have financial incentives to cause the Rohingya to flee. The military uses land it takes from peasants for private agri-business.

In the last few months, extensive evidence emerged that the Myanmar military is committing what I would call a campaign of terror against its defenseless Rohingya minority. Murders, rapes, and restricting the right of the economically precarious Rohingya to fish in their ancestral fishing grounds are likely meant to clear land by forcing the Rohingya out of Myanmar. In 2012, clashes between Rohingya Muslims and Myanmar Buddhists led to the displacement of 125,000 people. Some allege that the Myanmar military looked the other way, or participated against the Muslims. The military has since torched 1,200 homes, and forced 150,000 into what one Time Magazine reporter calls “concentration camps”. Hundreds of thousands of the Muslim minority were disallowed from voting in the last election. This recurring and recently renewed atrocity has caused an additional 25,000 Rohingya to flee into Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Malaysia since 2012. 

The camps are a new strategy by Myanmar against the Rohingya, and are ringed with government checkpoints. Residents must obtain government permission to leave. The military bars journalists and most aid groups from entry. Food and medical care is scarce, and Rohingya deaths from easily-preventable illnesses and malnutrition are rising. These camps are a contemporary and brutal manifestation of the failed strategic hamlet strategy of 1960s Vietnam, meant to isolate a developing Rohingya insurgency. 

It is unconscionable for Myanmar to again cause the flight of Rohingya. Myanmar has agreed in writing on multiple occasions in the past that the Rohingya are residents of Myanmar. To welch on those agreements now puts Myanmar into a category of country that violates international norms and laws. Amnesty International has called such activities by Myanmar potential “crimes against humanity.” One Time Magazine author has called it a “genocidal terror.”

The Myanmar government must immediately correct its human rights violations in Rakhine State, or lose all legitimacy and the goodwill of the international community. Given persistent Burmese attacks, the Rohingya people have a moral right, and perhaps even a duty, to nonviolently protect their own society from the government.

The Rohingya, like other stateless and unrepresented Muslims, are at risk of producing a persistent terrorist threat. Such terrorism would bring greater repression and lead to a cycle of violence. The international community should avert the risk by supporting the Rohingya through the toughest of peaceful measures , including negotiations for provision of an independent state of Rakhine to the Rohingya, and through economic sanctions against the Myanmar government meant to improve Myanmar’s Rohingya policies.

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