Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who have been sentenced to seven years in jail in Myanmar, were on Friday included in a list of 10 most urgent cases of journalists whose global press freedoms are being abused or whose situations demand justice.
Detained Reuters journalist Wa Lone leaves the court in Yangon, Myanmar August 27, 2018. REUTERS/Ann Wang
The list, which will be updated each month, was put together by the One Free Press Coalition, a new group formed by leading news organizations to spotlight journalists under attack globally.
Written by Peter Yeung Published on March 15, 2019
An amendment to Myanmar’s land-ownership laws will make it nearly impossible for Rohingya refugees and Myanmar’s internally displaced to return to land they’ve tilled for generations, Peter Yeung reports.
Traders selling produce in Yangon, Myanmar.
Hussein Ahmed was once the respected chief of Inn Din, a village in the northern part of Myanmar’s Rakhine state. But since the end of 2017, the 74-year-old Rohingya has been a refugee in Bangladesh’s sprawling Kutupalong refugee camp.
When thinking of children and youth in their usual environment, we think of them amidst their families and friends, in the playground, and first and foremost, in schools.
We grow up with school being a natural part of our lives. We are nervous on our first day in school, excited to learn how to read, write or count and soon after our first day, school has become part of our daily routines. Getting older, decisions such as choosing the type of secondary school, vocational training or university become key to our personal and professional development.
By Ikuko Higuchi / Japan News Staff Writer Japan was hailed by the Asian University for Women’s vice chancellor, Prof. Nirmala Rao, for helping make such a success of the university at an AUW fundraising event at the Tokyo American Club in the capital’s Minato Ward on Thursday.
“The first support group (for the university) was Japan’s, and it makes the largest contribution,” said Prof. Rao in her speech at the event. “Today, 38 percent of AUW’s entire budget comes from Japan.”
According to Prof. Rao, more than 800 students of 17 countries and 35 ethnicities, including Rohingya refugees who fled from violence in Myanmar, are currently enrolled at AUW. The majority of the students, 72 percent, are on full scholarship from the university, funded by foundations and businesses in the United States, Europe and Asia.
theindepedent 15 March, 2019 “Statelessness is first and foremost a minority issue because more than
three quarters of the world’s official 10 million stateless people are
from minorities”
Millions around the world, including Rohingyas, are deprived of citizenship because they belong to specific minorities, UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues Fernand de Varennes has said.
THE NATION Asean gets first glimpse of Rakhine situation
ASEAN+ March 15, 2019 12:53
By The Nation
The Asean Emergency Response and Assessment Team (ERAT) gained access to Myanmar’s strife-torn Rakhine state last week to conduct a preliminary needs assessment for the return of Rohingya refugees aimed at ending a repatriation stalemate, the Thai Foreign Ministry said on Friday.
Relocating Refugees to Unsafe Island Would Risk Lives, Livelihoods
Satellite image time series of Bhasan Char camp development (October 2017 – March 2018).
Bangladesh authorities say they will soon start relocating over 100,000 Rohingya refugees to Bhasan Char, a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal. Officials said this is necessary to reduce pressure on the world’s largest refugee settlement in Cox’s Bazar, where nearly 1.2 million Rohingya have fled to escape military atrocities in Myanmar.
Bhasan Char is a spit of land made of accumulated silt. Officials say the island has been secured with embankments, and the homes and cyclone shelters are better than anything available to millions of Bangladeshis. But they have yet to provide convincing assurances that the refugees will be safe there, and their freedom of movement and right to livelihood protected.
The government brought some diplomats and other foreign officials to see the infrastructure on the island. But Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur on Myanmar, who visited in January, noted, “There are a number of things that remain unknown to me even following my visit, chief among them being whether the island is truly habitable.”
Residents from nearby Hatiya Island say it is not. “Part of the island is eroded by the monsoon every year,” one man told Human Rights Watch. “In that time, we never dare go to that island, so how will thousands of Rohingya live there?”
Humanitarian aid groups are concerned about refugee health and safety in the Cox’s Bazar settlement, but isolating them on Bhasan Char, with likely limited access to education and health services, could be even more problematic. Although Bangladeshi authorities say there will be no forced relocations, there is little evidence that any of the refugees would be willing to move there. “Bhashan Char will be like a prison,” one local journalist said.
Dumping a battered and traumatized people on Bhasan Char to face yet another threat to their survival is not a solution. Bangladesh should terminate the relocation plans unless or until independent experts determine that the island is suitable, and until the government ensures that refugees who consent to relocate there will be allowed freedom of movement on and off the island.
Rohingya children are seen at a refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh March 7, 2019. — Reuters pic
DHAKA, March 14 — There is no future for the 900,000 Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh, a leading campaigner said yesterday, likening the camps to zoos and calling for a proper repatriation strategy.
Nathan VanderKlippe Asia correspondent Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh Published March 14, 2019
Mohammad Salim was working past midnight, installing water pipe, when he received a phone call. “There is a fire at the shelters,” the caller told him.
Flames had engulfed Jamaat Ali Camp, the collection of wood-and-cardboard homes where his family lived in Jammu, in the far northwest of India.
