US State Department’s Women of Courage nods shines spotlight on Myanmar

Coconuts Yangoon

By Coconuts Yangon Mar. 7, 2019

 

First Lady Melania Drumpf delivers remarks at the 2017 Secretary of State’s International Women of Courage Award Ceremony at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on March 29, 2017. [State Department photo/ Public Domain]

A Myanmar-born Rohingya activist and an advocate for the country’s ethnic Karen minority are among those being honored today at the US State Department’s 13th Annual International Women of Courage (IWOC) Awards in Washington.

International Criminal Court starts Rohingya probe

ASIA TIMES

ByBertil Lintner, Chiang Mai
March 7, 2019

Rohingya refugees wait to be taken to a camp after crossing the Naf River at the Bangladesh-Myanmar border in Palong Khali, near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on November 2, 2017. Photo: AFP/Adnan Abidi

The process of bringing the Myanmar military to the International Criminal Court (ICC) to answer charges of genocide has started. From March 8 to 12, ICC prosecutors will visit refugee camps in Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands of Muslim Rohingya from Myanmar have been staying since 2017, the Bangladesh Chronicle reported on Wednesday.

Rohingya Women Seek to “Raise Our Voices Ourselves

REFUGEE INTERNATIONAL 

Daniel Sullivan,March 6, 2019

 

Even in the midst of overwhelming tragedy, there are often rays of hope to be found. This is true of the plight of the Rohingya ethnic minority that has been largely purged from their homeland in western Myanmar. One such ray of hope is Chekufa and her Rohingya Women’s Empowerment and Advocacy Network.

With entry to Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar closed for a day, time to explore life and organizations nearby

JEWIS WORLD WATCH

WALK TO END GENOCIDE

Ann Strimov Durbin

Ann Strimov Durbin is a human rights attorney and the Director of Advocacy and Grantmaking at Jewish World Watch.

Students pose with JWW Advocacy and Grantmaking Director Ann Strimov Durbin at a school in Bangladesh.

After an auspicious first day in the camps — in the sense that we got in and moved freely without incident — the second day brought unexpected challenges. I woke up to find out that street protests by the host community living adjacent to some of the camps were blocking any vehicles from going through, effectively cutting off all access to the camps. The government wasn’t permitting any NGOs to enter. At first, I started to panic: does this mean I lose a whole day? What if the Rohingya refugee camps don’t reopen for the rest of my time here? I decided to just see where the day takes me. Since everyone was essentially stuck in the city center due to the camp closures, I quickly coordinated meetings in and around my hotel. It turned out to be an unforgettable day exploring areas and interventions I didn’t even know existed.

Chinese Embassy Official: No Money Offered to Rohingya in Bangladesh

RADIO FREE ASIA
2019-03-07

Rohingya refugees collect drinking water at the Shalbagan refugee camp in Teknaf, Bangladesh, March 5, 2019.

Reuters 

China has not offered Rohingya refugees money to repatriate to Myanmar, a Chinese Embassy attaché in Dhaka told BenarNews, after the news outlet reported that a delegation of officials from Beijing had promised refugee families up to U.S. $6,000 each if they returned to Rakhine state.

ရခိုင်စစ်ဘေးရှောင် ၁ သောင်းကျော်အတွက် စားနပ် ရိက္ခာ အရေးပေါ်လိုအပ်

DVB 
8 March 2019

တိုက်ပွဲတွေကြောင့် ကယ်ဆယ်ရေးစခန်းတချို့မှာ ခိုလှုံနေကြတဲ့ ရခိုင်စစ်ဘေးရှောင် တသောင်းကျော် အတွက် စားနပ်ရိက္ခာ အရေးပေါ်လိုအပ်နေပြီလို့ ရခိုင် အရပ်ဘက် လူမှုအဖွဲ့အစည်းတွေက ပြောပါတယ်။

ရခိုင်ပြည်ဒုက္ခသည် နေရပ်ပြန်ရေး အစီအစဉ် တရုတ် ကြားဝင် ညှိနှိုင်း

VOA

ဗွီအိုအေ (မြန်မာဌာန)
သားညွန့်ဦး ၊
07 မတ်၊ 2019 

ရခိုင်မြောက်ပိုင်းကနေ ထွက်ပြေးသွားတဲ့ မွတ်ဆလင်ဒုက္ခသည်တွေ ပြန်လည်နေရာ ချထားရေးအတွက် တရုတ်နိုင်ငံအနေနဲ့ သူတို့ တတ်နိုင်တဲ့အနေအထားကနေ အကူအညီတွေပေးနေသလို၊ လက်တွေ့လို အပ် ချက်တွေနဲ့ နှစ်နိုင်ငံသဘောဆန္ဒအတိုင်း တရုတ်နိုင်ငံ အနေနဲ့ အပြုသဘောဆောင်ရပ် တည်သွားမယ် လို့ တရုတ်နိုင်ငံခြားရေးဌာန က ထုတ်ပြန်လိုက် ပါတယ်။ ရခိုင်အကျပ်အတည်းကူညီဖြေရှင်းရေးအတွက် တ ရုတ်နိုင်ငံရဲ့ အာရှရေးရာ အထူးသံတမန် Sun Guoxiang ဟာ မြန်မာရော ဘင်္ဂလားဒေ့ရ်ှပါ နှစ်နိုင်ငံစလုံးကို ပါ ဒီရက်ပိုင်းထဲ သွားရောက်ခဲ့တာပါ။

( 08.03.2019 ) New Light of Myanmar

( ၀၈-၀၃-၂၀၁၉ ) ၿမန္မာ့အလင္း သတင္းစာ

Govt firm on Rohingya relocation to Bhashan Char

DhakaTribune
Humayun Kabir Bhuiyan
Published at 12:37 am March 7th, 2019

Bangladesh is currently sheltering over 1.1 million Rohingyas in a number of refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar Syed Zakir Hossain/Dhaka Tribune

More than 1.1 million Rohingyas are currently living in a number of refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar

The government appears to be firm in its decision to go ahead with the relocation of the Rohingyas from Cox’s Bazar to Bhashan Char, an island in Noakhali that is being developed to make it habitable for the refugees.

Bangladeshi lawyer gets US award for advocating Rohingya rights

bdnews24.com
Senior Correspondent, bdnews24.com

Published: 07 Mar 2019 

 

 

Razia Sultana, a Bangladeshi lawyer and advocate for the rights of the Rohingya, will receive the 2019 International Women of Courage Awards in Washington on Thursday.

Sultana is one of 10 “extraordinary” women from around the world who will receive the award this year at the US Department of State in a ceremony hosted by Secretary of State Pompeo, the embassy in Dhaka said in a Facebook post.

First Lady Melania Trump will deliver special remarks on the occasion.

The US embassy has sent its “heartfelt congratulations” to Sultana.

Link :https://bdnews24.com/people/2019/03/07/bangladeshi-lawyer-gets-us-award-for-advocating-rohingya-rights 

( ၀၇-၀၃-၂၀၁၉ ) ၿမန္မာ့အလင္း သတင္းစာ

( 07-03-2019 ) New Light of Myanmar

Rights groups warn against Rohingya relocation to Bangladesh island

ABC

Thursday 7 March 2019 

Image: Advocates have dubbed the island where the refugees will be relocated, "death island". (K M Asad/Getty Images) 

 

 

Bangladesh has confirmed it will begin relocating Rohingya refugees to an uninhabited island off its southern coast within weeks.

A room of one’s own: Why Rohingya refugees keep returning to Aligarh

TwoCircles.net 

March 6, 2019

Rohingya refugees pooled together money to build this school that doubles up as a community centre where they hold their meetings ( Photo: Mohammad Zubeir) 

Meher Ali for TwoCircles.net 

Aligarh:-– Guran Miya (30), a Rohingya refugee, returned with his family to Aligarh in mid-2018, just nine months after he had left.

During this time, he lived in Bangalore and then Hyderabad. It was a struggle, especially in Hyderabad, where he lived in a refugee camp. He says that people had to get in line to use the toilet and there was also a lack of privacy, especially for his wife, when she went to take a bath.

President urges UK to play strong role for Rohingya repatriation

Prothum Alo _______________

Mar 06, 2019 

President M Abdul Hamid sought continued cooperation and stronger role of the United Kingdom to ensure a safe and dignified repatriation of the Rohingyas as outgoing UK High Commissioner to Bangladesh Alison Blake called on him at Bangabhan in the capital on Wednesday afternoon.

ICC team probes Rohingya atrocities in Bangladesh

RAPPLER
Published 8:53 PM, March 06, 2019

The International Criminal Court in a statement says the probe is part of the prosecutor office's 'ongoing preliminary examinations concerning the situation in Bangladesh/Myanmar'

ICC PROBE. A young Rohingya refugee walks back to his home at Balukhali refugee camp in Ukhia on February 4, 2019. Photo by Munir Uz Zaman/AFP

DHAKA, Bangladesh – A team from the office of the International Criminal Court prosecutor was in Bangladesh on Wednesday, March 6, for a preliminary probe into alleged atrocities committed against the Rohingya by the Myanmar military in 2017.

International Criminal Court team in Bangladesh for Rohingya atrocities probe

bdnews24.com
Senior Correspondent,  bdnews24.com Published: 07 Mar 2019

Demonstrators in front of the European Union headquarters in Brussels call for an end to the genocide of Rohingyas in Myanmar's Rakhine State. File Photo: mostafigur rahman 

A delegation from the office of the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor has arrived in Dhaka for an initial probe into alleged atrocities committed against the Rohingya by the Myanmar military.

Apart from meeting with the relevant ministers and senior officials, the seven-member team would go to Cox’s Bazar, an official with knowledge of their visit told bdnews24.com on Wednesday.

700 illegals set for 3rd-country resettlement

The Himalayan
Published: March 06, 2019

300 Rohingayas, 400 Africans likely to get exit permits

Shelters made of corrugated metal by the Rohingya refugees are pictured in Kathmandu, Nepal, on September 12, 2017. Photo: Reuters

Kathmandu, March 5
The government is preparing to grant exit permits to around 700 illegal immigrants for resettlement in third countries.

According to Secretary at the Ministry of Home Affairs Prem Kumar Rai, a proposal to grant exit permits to at least 167 illegal immigrants has already been forwarded to the Cabinet. “The ministry has forwarded the proposal at the request of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees,” Rai told THT.

Locals in Cox's Bazar demand Rohingya return to Myanmar

UCA News
Stephan Uttom, Dhaka
Bangladesh
March 6, 2019 

Anti-Rohingya protest in southeastern Bangladesh turns violent, police among the injured

Thousands of Bengalis protest at Cox's Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh on March 4 demanding the speedy repatriation of Rohingya Muslims. They also demanded that the refugee camps be properly fenced off, and that jobs be made available to local communities. (Photo by Abdul Aziz/ucanews.com)    

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Thousands of local residents in Cox's Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh took part in hours-long protests on March 4 demanding the speedy repatriation of Rohingya Muslims to Myanmar, and more jobs with aid agencies operating among the refugees.