March 15, 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

Opinion @ Int'l Media

History @ RB

Rohingya History by Scholars

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

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 ...

Interview

Open Letter

RB Poem

Book Shelf

The Irrawaddy’s fake story fuels anti-Rohingya feelings


By Jacob Goldberg
October 17, 2017

A story published by The Irrawaddy spent less than a day online yesterday when it was discovered that what the story’s authors presented as current news actually took place over a year ago.

In the Myanmar-language story, titled “Weapons plundered from Bangladeshi refugee camp guards,” The Irrawaddy reformulated a report by AFP and published by the Daily Mail about armed attackers raiding a security post at a Rohingya refugee camp in southern Bangladesh.

The attackers killed one Bangladeshi guard before they made off with 11 rifles and 570 rounds of ammunition. Police told AFP that Rohingya refugees themselves were being considered as suspects in the attack.

“The miscreants could be hiding inside the camp,” a police inspector said.

The report fits neatly into the Myanmar government’s narrative about the refugee crisis. It raises suspicions about Rohingya refugees and their alleged links to militant groups, whose activities the Myanmar government uses to justify its continued displacement of the Rohingya from their homes.

Rarely does this narrative go unquestioned in Myanmar publications, but in this case, serious doubts were raised for one simple reason – the report was false. The attack was not carried out on October 13, 2017, as The Irrawaddy claimed, but on May 13, 2016.

The inaccuracy was caught by Rohingya activist Nay San Lwin, who called attention to it on Twitter. The story was removed from The Irrawaddy’s website less than an hour later.

When asked about the story, The Irrawaddy’s Myanmar-language editor Ye Ni said: “It was a mistake. The regional desk translated it as they thought it was in October 2017. When we realized that was an old story, we took it down.”

Whether it was an honest mistake or not, the false report fueled anti-Rohingya sentiments among The Irrawaddy’s readers. Before it was deleted, one Mandalay-based Facebook news page with over a million followers shared the story, inviting commenters to warn of the rising threat of “Bengali terrorists.”



It was also shared by former information minister Ye Htut, who has thousands of followers on Facebook and now works as a visiting senior fellow at Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. (He eventually deleted the article from his timeline.)

The confluence in the messaging of The Irrawaddy and the military-affiliated former information minister would be surprising to those who recall that The Irrawaddy has its roots in Myanmar’s pro-democracy struggle and was once considered the most professional and trusted news source in the country.

However, in the weeks since the Myanmar army’s mass displacement of Rohingya Muslims from the country began, the independent outlet has quickly adopted the government’s script.

A few days after the ARSA attacks on August 25, the online publication introduced a policy of using the word “Rohingya” in its English-language reporting and “Bengali” – a term that implies they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh – in Burmese.

Several of the publication’s employees have resigned since the policy was introduced.

Nay San Lwin, the Rohingya activist, said he has written to The Irrawaddy’s chief editor Aung Zaw to correct this inconsistency.

“He never responded to me and keeps using ‘Bengali’ in the Burmese version and ‘Rohingya’ in English to please their funders…Some of the news they post in Burmese is complete propaganda,” he said.

In September, editor Aung Zaw told CNN that “Rohingya is not an ethnic minority that belongs to Burma.”


Yesterday’s fabrication, Nay San Lwin said, was “the worst in The Irrawaddy’s history,” but it was also the culmination of a process that has been changing the entire media landscape in Myanmar since 2012, when communal violence between Rohingya Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists ignited a Buddhist-nationalist fervor that has become a major force in the country’s politics.

He said: “All the [local media outlets] have changed since 2012. BBC Burmese, VOA, and RFA are biased. They have tried many times to use the term ‘Bengali,’ but as I keep complaining to them through media directors, they use ‘Rohingya’ sometimes and mostly refer [to us] as ‘Muslims.’”

A report published by the Myanmar Institute for Democracy last week found that The Irrawaddy’s coverage of the first two weeks of the Rakhine crisis “mainly relied on the news released by the Information Committee, the Sate Counsellor Office, the President Office, and the Chief of Defense Office.”



“The problem with all Burmese media is racism,” said Nay San Lwin. “If the Rohingya were Buddhist, I’m sure they wouldn’t take the military’s side.”

Write A Comment

Pages 22123456 »
Rohingya Exodus