Massive fire in Bangladesh’s Rohingya refugee camps leaves 45,000 people displaced

OXFAM

By Oxfam

April 6, 2021

Oxfam Senior Public Health Promotion Associate Arif Hossen helps refugees collect drinking water in the aftermath of a devastating fire in Bangladesh’s Rohingya refugee camps on March 22. The blaze spread rapidly for several hours in the densely populated camps, destroying homes and critical water and sanitation infrastructure. Oxfam emergency response teams are on the ground providing safe drinking water, hygiene kits, and emergency latrines. Mutasim Billah / Oxfam

Oxfam assisting survivors with clean water, soap, emergency latrines

A massive fire that swept through the refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on March 22 has left 10,000 families—roughly 45,000 people—displaced and in urgent need of food, water, and sanitation services. The fire was yet another devastating blow to the Rohingya people who fled shocking violence and persecution in Myanmar.

Myanmar coup: Asean leadership offers best chance to avert a refugee crisis

South China Morning Post

Lucio Blanco Pitlo III

Opinion

7 Apr, 2021

• Many international actors are vying to play the role of peacemaker in Myanmar, but Asean – flaws and all – remains the most suited to broker talks

• The efforts of Indonesia, along with other key members, show genuine interest to stop growing instability in the country from spilling across the region

Myanmar refugees line up to receive rescue materials in a camp in Manghai, a small border town between China and Myanmar in Yunnan province, in November 2016. Continuing violence in Myanmar has neighbours China, India and Thailand worried about a fresh exodus of refugees fleeing across their border. Photo: Simon Song

A breakthrough could be in the offing as China lends support to an Asean-led initiative to de-escalate the situation in Myanmar and bring warring parties to a dialogue. Last week, foreign ministers from Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines flew to Nanping in southeastern Fujian province to meetForeign Minister Wang Yi.

Myanmar coup: Indonesia tries a difficult mediation

ASIANEWS.it

Ati Nurbaiti
04/07/2021

President Jokowi calls on ASEAN to intervene to ensure the safety of the people of Myanmar whose generals are more interested in Thailand’s military coup than Indonesia’s model of democratic transition. In Indonesia there is little empathy for protesters in Myanmar.

Jakarta (AsiaNews) – Indonesia needs to continue efforts to open communication channels with Myanmar’s military, which carried out a coup against the civilian government of democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

To stop the crackdown against the anti-coup protest movement, Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo has called for an emergency meeting of the Association of Southeast Asia Nations (ASEAN). Such a move, which Malaysia supports, has met with opposition by some ASEAN nations, which usually insist on non-interference in the domestic affairs of the group’s members.

Religious freedom must be guaranteed for everyone, everywhere, all the time

THE HILL

BY SAM BROWNBACK AND GAYLE MANCHIN, 

OPINION CONTRIBUTORS  

04/06/21 

 
THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

© Getty Images

Merdan Ghappar was put in a prison camp in China for being a Muslim. Pastor Youcef was thrown in jail in Iran for following Jesus and helping others do the same. Twenty-five-year-old Ravinder Singh was killed in Pakistan for being a Sikh. And just last week in Indonesia, two terrorist suicide bombers targeted Roman Catholics as they were leaving Sunday morning mass.

What do they have in common? Religious persecution.

OPINION - Political calculations to settle Myanmar crisis

AA

Ramdhan Muhaimin
JAKARTA, Indonesia
06.04.2021

Myanmar’s military coup has put Association of Southeast Asian Nation at crossroads

The writer teaches at the Center for Peace and Defense Studies (PSPP), University of Al-Azhar Indonesia.

Since the military forcibly seized control and forced the exit of the National League for Democracy (NLD) from the government on Feb. 1, the socio-political conditions in Southeast Asian nation Myanmar have again moved towards uncertainty.

The coup, led by the head of Tatmadaw -- the national armed forces – Gen. Min Aung Hlaing shortly after Aung San Suu Kyi's NLD won the election, has become a nightmare for people in the country.

Fire becomes new fear for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh

DW
Author Arafatul Islam
07.04.2021

Several deadly fire incidents in overcrowded Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh over the past several weeks point to a "very worrying trend," say experts.

A Rohingya refugee stands among the remains of burnt materials after a fire broke out recently at a camp in Cox's Bazar

Three Rohingya men died after a fire gutted shops at a makeshift market near the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh's southeastern Cox's Bazar district on Friday.

Their bodies were found in one of 20 shops burned after the fire broke out before dawn at the market near the Kutupalong refugee camp.

Dhaka seeks serious regional, multilateral initiatives over Rohingya repatriation

Dhaka Tribune

UNB
April 7th, 2021

Mahmud Hossain Opu/Dhaka Tribune

The crisis might turn into a broader regional and global security issue, speakers said during the webinar

Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen has said they should now seriously consider regional or multilateral initiatives for the repatriation of Rohingyas to Myanmar as it remains a compelling priority for Bangladesh.

"Canada, with its global stature and standing on human rights issues, may consider taking a lead in such initiatives. Bangladesh always stands ready to work with Canada and other partners in this direction," he said.

Death threats and hate speech make Rohingya activist's Malaysia refuge a prison

the japan times

BY ROZANNA LATIFF AND EBRAHIM HARRIS
REUTERS
Apr 6, 2021


Rohingya refugee and activist Zafar Ahmad Abdul Ghani and his wife look out from their home in Kuala Lumpur. | REUTERS

KUALA LUMPUR – Zafar Ahmad Abdul Ghani, a Rohingya Muslim refugee and activist who fled persecution and ethnic strife in Myanmar, has called Malaysia home for nearly three decades.

Now, it’s more like a prison.

Zafar, 51, has not left his home on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur for nearly a year, after misinformation spread online that he had demanded Malaysian citizenship — triggering a wave of hate speech and death threats against him and his family.

“I’m still scared. For a year, I’ve not set foot outside. I’ve not seen the earth outside,” said the father of three.

Bloodshed in Myanmar as troops open fire on protesters

WHBL

By Syndicated Content
Apr 7, 2021 

(Reuters) - Myanmar troops stormed an anti-coup protest camp on Wednesday, a resident said, in a pre-dawn operation that local media said killed and wounded several demonstrators, as activists defied a bloody crackdown and internet blockade by the ruling junta.

Myanmar has been in chaos since a Feb. 1 coup that ended a brief period of civilian-led democracy and sparked nationwide protests and strikes, despite the ruling military's use of lethal force to quell the resistance.

AFTER RAGING FIRES, FUTURE OF ROHINGYA REFUGEES REMAINS UNCERTAIN

ACTION AGAINST HUNGER

April 6, 2021

Last month, a massive fire swept through the largest refugee camp in the world in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where nearly one million Rohingya refugees live. The fire took 15 lives and burned down thousands of shelters and health facilities, leaving more than 45,0000 people displaced.

Our teams met Ismael, 35, in the middle of the crowds and confusion. Ashes and burned debris are all we could see. His eyes fixed on the horizon, Ismael told one of Action Against Hunger’s psychosocial workers: "I was in the tea shop when I heard a fire broke out. How many more times I may witness my shelter being burnt down to ashes..."

ရခိုင်ပြည်၏ စည်းလုံးညီညွတ်သော မတူကွဲပြားသည့် အသိုင်းအဝန်းများ ထုတ်ပြန်ကြေညာချက်

ရခိုင်ပြည်၏ စည်းလုံးညီညွတ်သော မတူကွဲပြားသည့် အသိုင်းအဝန်းများ ထုတ်ပြန်ကြေညာချက်

ရခိုင်နှင့် ရိုဟင်ဂျာ အသိုင်းအဝိုင်းများ
၂၀၂၁ ခုနှစ်၊ ဇန်နဝါရီလ ၁၈ ရက်
 
ရခိုင်၊ မွတ်ဆလင် (ရိုဟင်ဂျာ) နှင့် လူနည်းစုအသိုင်းအဝန်းများသည် လွန်ခဲ့သည့် အောက်တို ဘာလမှ စတင်ကာ အစည်းအဝေးများကျင်းပခဲ့ကြသည်။ ထိုအစည်းအဝေးများတွင် ပါဝင်တက် ရောက် ကြသူ များ မှ အောက်ဖေါ်ပြပါမူ (Principles) များကို သဘောတူခဲ့ကြသည်။ ထိုသဘော တူညီချက်များကို အ ခြေ ခံပြီး အောက်ပါထုတ်ပြန်ချက်ကို ထုတ်ပြန်အပ်ပါသည်။

၁၉၆၇ တရုတ္ ဗမာ အေရးအခင္း အေၾကာင္း တေ ေစ့တ ေစာင္း

တင္ေမာင္

၁၉၆၇ တရုတ္ ဗမာ အေရးအခင္း အေၾကာင္း တေ ေစ့တ ေစာင္း
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ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ လူမ်ိဳးမတူမႈ ဘာသာမတူမႈ ခံယူခ်က္မတူမႈ အစရွိတဲ့ အေၾကာင္းရင္းမ်ား ကို အေျချပဳျပီး ပဋိ ပကၡမ်ား အစဥ္အဆက္ ေပါက္ဖြားခဲ့တဲ့ အနက္ ၁၉၆၇ ခုႏွစ္မွာ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့တဲ့ တရုတ္ ဗမာ အေရးအခင္း ဟာ လည္း တစ္ခုအပါအဝင္ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ဒီလုိ ျဖစ္ခဲ့တဲ့ ပဋိပကၡေတြကို သင္ခန္းစာယူျပီး ေနာင္မျဖစ္ေစဖို႔ ၾကိဳးပမ္းအားထုတ္ဖို႔ အတြက္လည္း အဲ့ဒီလုိ အျဖစ္အပ်က္ေတြကို ျမန္မာသမိုင္းတေလ်ာက္ မွန္မွန္ကန္ကန္ တရားဝင္မွတ္တမ္းတင္မႈ ျပည္သူလူထုကို မွန္ကန္တဲ့ နည္းလမ္းနဲ႔ ပညာေပးမႈ ေတြဟာလည္း အားနည္းလြန္းတဲ့အတြက္ ပဋိပကၡေတြဟာ တမ်ိဳးျပီးတမ်ိဳး ဆက္တိုက္ ေပါက္ဖြားခဲ့ရတာပဲျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

ယခုတင္ျပမဲ့ တရုတ္ဗမာ အေရးအခင္းလုိ႔ လူသိမ်ားတဲ့ အေရးအခင္းဟာ တကယ္ေတာ့ ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနဝင္း အာ ဏာသိမ္းျပီးေနာက္ ၅ ႏွစ္အၾကာမွာ ေပၚေပါက္ခဲ့တာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ျမန္မာျပည္တြင္းက တရုတ္ အမ်ိဳး သား မ်ား နဲ႕ ဗမာ မ်ားအၾကား ရက္အတန္ၾကာ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့တဲ့ အေရးအခင္း တစ္ခုျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

တ႐ုတ္-ျမန္မာ နယ္စပ္ေဒသ၏ သမိုင္းေၾကာင္း အက်ဥ္း

75 AD
လြန္ခဲ့သည့္ ႏွစ္ေထာင္ေသာင္းမ်ားစြာကတည္းက ယေန႔ခတ္ တ႐ုတ္-ျမန္မာ နယ္စပ္ေဒသ၌ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ၊ ဘာ သာစကား မတူညီ ကြဲျပားသည့္ လူမ်ိဳးေပါင္းစုံ ယွဥ္တြဲေနထိုင္ခဲ့ၾကသည္။ လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ ႏွစ္ ၂၀၀၀ ခန္႔ ဧရာဝ တီျမစ္ဝွမ္းေဒသတြင္ ၿမိဳ႕ျပယဥ္ေက်းမႈ ဉီးဆုံး ေပၚေပါက္လာခ်ိန္က ယေန႔ေခတ္ ယူနန္ျပည္ အေရွ႕ပိုင္းေဒ သ ကို ဒီယန္ဘုရင္မ်ား ေခတ္အဆက္ဆက္ အုပ္စိုးခဲ့သည္။ ဒီယန္ဘုရင္မ်ားသည္ ျမန္မာဘာသာႏွင့္ ဆက္စပ္ေန သည့္ ဘာသာစ ကား တစ္မ်ိဳးကို အသုံးျပဳခဲ့ဟန္ တူေသာ္လည္း အတိအက် မဆိုနိုင္ပါ။ ယူနန္နယ္သားမ်ား သည္ အျခားေသာ တိဘက္-ျမန္မာႏြယ္ ဘာသာစကားမ်ား၊ တိုင္ဘာသာႏွင့္ ၾသစထရိုအာရွ ဘာသာစကား မ်ား (ေခတ္သစ္မြန္ဘာသာကဲ့သို႔) ကိုလည္း အသုံးျပဳခဲ့ၾကသည္။

Myanmar’s Brutal Military Was Once a Force for Freedom – but it’s been Waging Civil War for Decades

INTERNATIONAL POLICY DIGEST

Tharaphi Than

APRIL 5, 2021

With great fanfare – but few guests – Myanmar’s armed forces recently celebrated their 76th anniversary in the nation’s capital of Naypyitaw.

Only Russia, China, Thailand, and a handful of other Asian countries sent representatives to attend the March 27th parade showing off Myanmar’s modern war machines – mostly imported from Russia and China over the past decade, to the tune of $2.4 billion.

The Myanmar military has been terrorizing civilians since a coup two months earlier. On the day of the parade, soldiers killed over 90 people for protesting military rule, including a 5-year-old boy and three teenagers. An estimated 564 people have been killed in Myanmar since the Feb. 1 coup.

Alarmed by inaction, lawmakers push Japan to embrace rights diplomacy

the japan times

BY SATOSHI SUGIYAMA
STAFF WRITER
Apr 6, 2021



Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga and Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi go to meet Antony Blinken, U.S. Secretary of State, and Lloyd Austin, U.S. Secretary of Defense, at the prime minister's official residence in Tokyo on March 16. | POOL / VIA AFP-JIJI

As Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga gears up for his trip to Washington late next week, one potential discussion topic could throw a wet blanket over his excitement: Japan’s role in advocating for human rights through diplomacy.

As much as Tokyo is elated over having the first foreign leader to meet U.S. President Joe Biden in person since his inauguration and reaffirmation of Washington’s commitment to national security cooperation, there are worries that the meeting could be used by Biden to compel Suga to augment the Japanese government’s contributions to defending human rights in Asia.

Myanmar crisis: Asean's next moves

Bangkok Post

PUBLISHED : 6 APR 2021

Myanmar's Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin takes part in a virtual meeting of Asean foreign ministers in Nay Pyi Taw last Friday. AFP

The recent call by Indonesian President Joko Widodo for a meeting with his colleagues on the Myanmar crisis is gaining traction. It is now possible to say that the proposed leaders' meeting could take place at the end of this month, after the Songkran break and the Muslim Ramadan festival.

Senior Asean officials will have to decide tomorrow whether to have the physical meeting either in Bandar Seri Begawan or the Asean Secretariat and the preferred date. Both places have their own merits in discussing the Myanmar crisis. Therefore, the right timing is imperative for a face-to-face rendezvous. Asean has learned to its cost that a teleconference on the Myanmar crisis could cause harm and bitterness due to the lack of clarifications and personal rapport in virtual meetings. This time, the Asean chair wants to ensure that all Asean leaders, including Senior Gen Min Aung Hlaing, join the meeting.

Thousands of Rohingya Refugees in Northwest India Live in Fear of Deportation

VOA

VOA News

06 April 2021

 Thousands of Rohingya refugees live in temporary camps in India’s northwestern Jammu and Kashmir region, where they fear deportation back to Myanmar. VOA Urdu Service’s Zubair Dar visited a camp of people in Bathindi Narval who said they fled abuses and do not want to go back. Roshan Noorzai narrates the story. VOA Khmer's Leakhena Sreng narrates the story in Khmer. 

Link : Here

Protests In Burma

The Hitavada

By Gwynne Dyer

Date :06-Apr-2021

‘Non-violent struggle’ is rarely non-violent on both sides, but the oppressors find it hard to use unlimited force when the other side is using none at all. Especially when the whole world is watching. That is why non-violent movements succeed so often. If the protesters turn into just another Army, then all limitations on the use of force by the big, professional, well-equipped Army are lifted, and the bad guys win.

Thailand unlikely to join ASEAN in pressuring Myanmar junta to stop bloodshed

Thaiger

Ann Carter

Monday, April 5, 2021

Thailand’s government is unlikely to join other members of ASEAN in calling for Myanmar’s junta to stop the bloodshed. Fears over receiving a flood of refugees across the Burmese border and damages to its military ties may be of more importance to the Kingdom, despite the government’s recent claims that it is “gravely concerned” over the situation in Myanmar.

If Thailand refuses to join increasing calls for Myanmar’s junta to step down, it could, however, place it in a unique position as a mediator. Political scientist, Panitan Wattanayagorn, at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, told Reuters that Thailand may be in a unique position to act as a mediator if it doesn’t join sides with the ASEAN community.

Total Must Maintain Myanmar Output to Protect Workers, CEO Says

Bloomberg

James Regan
4 April 2021, 

Skip to content

CEO says Total employees at risk of forced labor or prison

French oil major is halting Myanmar gas well drilling campaign


Anti-coup protesters shout slogans towards approaching security forces as smoke rises from burning car tires in Yangon, Myanmar on March 28. Source: Getty Images

French oil major Total SE must continue to produce gas in Myanmar and pay taxes to the military junta to protect staff from forced labor and maintain electricity supplies, Chief Executive Patrick Pouyanne said in an op-ed in Le Journal du Dimanche newspaper.

Amid calls not to provide funds to the military, which ousted Myanmar’s parliament on Feb. 1, Total is scrapping plans to develop gas off the west coast and halting its gas well drilling campaign, Pouyanne said. He added that Total would donate the equivalent of the taxes owed to human rights associations.