March 16, 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 ...

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The U.N. Has Agreed to Investigate Myanmar's Alleged Abuse of Rohingya

Asia is 8 months pregnant as she stands for a photo with her son in the Balu Kali refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, on Jan. 17, 2017. Allison Joyce—Getty Images

By Feliz Solomon
March 24, 2017

The U.N. Human Rights Council agreed Friday to create an international fact-finding mission into alleged rights violations in Myanmar, particularly against the country's Rohingya Muslims, a stateless minority that has suffered decades of persecution in the western state of Rakhine.

A resolution adopted by consensus says the 47-member council has decided to "dispatch urgently an independent international fact-finding mission" to investigate allegations that may amount to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing, "with a view to ensure full accountability for perpetrators and justice for victims."

The U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, had initially urged the council to establish a full commission of inquiry, the body's most powerful investigative tool, but members ultimately reached a compromise on a fact-finding mission that Myanmar and its neighbors would be more likely to agree to. While the resolution passed, Myanmar and several other nations, including the Philippines, "disassociated" themselves from the resolution in whole or in part.

The mission will likely focus on events that unfolded since Oct. 9 of last year, when Myanmar's army and other state security forces began what they called "clearance operations" in the northern part of Rakhine state in response to a deadly attack on border patrols by suspected Rohingya insurgents.

Tens of thousands of refugees poured over the border into Bangladesh in the weeks and months that followed, arriving with harrowing accounts of gang-rape, torture, arson and extrajudicial killing. A U.N. flash report published in early February, based on interviews with more than 200 victims, details the alleged atrocities, concluding the "likely commission of crimes against humanity."

Amnesty International's Director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Champa Patel, welcomed the "long overdue step" of establishing an international probe, urging the U.N. to "waste no time turning words into action" and to appoint gender-based violence and children's rights experts to the panel, given the high volume of violations alleged against women and children.

"The people of Myanmar in general and the Rohingya community in particular have the right to know the full truth, as does the international community," Patel said in a statement to the media.

The Myanmar government, led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has largely denied the allegations, claiming that the international community is exaggerating the gravity of the events. The credibility and impartiality of domestic inquiries, including one headed by Vice President and former General Myint Swe, has been called into question by U.N. officials and rights groups. The resolution recognized, however, that the Myanmar government "notes the seriousness" of the contents of the flash report, acknowledged domestic efforts to investigate and called on the government to "consider assistance" to strengthen them.

The resolution is the most serious intervention to date into the crisis in Rakhine, an impoverished state bordering Bangladesh where most of Myanmar's 1.1 million Rohingya live. The rapporteur warned last week that the government "may be trying to expel the Rohingya population from the country altogether.” An estimated 94,000 Rohingya have been displaced since October, most of them to Bangladesh.

Violence between minority Muslims and the majority Rakhine Buddhists in the state capital Sittwe that began in 2012 displaced more than 100,000 Rohingya, most of whom still live in squalid displacement camps which they are not allowed to leave. Lee's initial request for an inquiry also called for a probe into the events leading up to the 2012 exodus, which remain a mystery.

It is unclear whether the 2012 violence will fall within the scope of the newly established fact-finding mission.

The Myanmar government has kept in place long-standing policies of state discrimination, such as a 1982 citizenship law linking political rights to ethnic identity; restrictions on family life; and excessive regulations governing access to healthcare, education and employment that appear to amount to apartheid.

A commission chaired by former U.N. chief Kofi Annan at the behest of Suu Kyi has been tasked with making recommendations to alleviate the crisis. The panel, which has no investigative mandate, published its initial guidance last week, calling on the government to allow unfettered humanitarian access to all people affected by the recent violence, many of whom have been completely unreachable for more than five months due to the lockdown.

Annan's commission also called on Suu Kyi's government to allow media access to affected areas, pursue accountability for alleged human rights violations, establish a clear path to citizenship and close all displacement camps in the state.

The wide-ranging U.N. resolution adopted Friday also addresses a number of other human rights concerns in the country, notably including an escalation in charges of criminal defamation targeting journalists, politicians and social media users.

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