January 21, 2021
What would it mean for the U.S. government to officially declare the Myanmar atrocities “genocide”?
What would it mean for the U.S. government to officially declare the Myanmar atrocities “genocide”?
South Asia Weekly | Volume XIV; Issue 3
News and analyses from South Asia this week.
China-brokered tripartite meeting will bring no solution for either Bangladesh or Rohingya refugees
With an air of renewed optimism, Bangladesh side has widely reported on the Beijing-brokered meeting yesterday to resuscitate the repatriation process of 1 million Rohingya.
ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္တြင္ လူကုန္ကူးမႈအတြက္ စြဲခ်က္တင္ခံရၿပီးေနာက္ ထိုင္းနိုင္ငံမွ ဒါဇင္ႏွင့္ခ်ီေသာ ရဲမ်ား သည္ ရာဇဝတ္ေၾကာင္း အေရးယူမႈႏွင့္ စည္းကမ္းပိုင္းဆိုင္ရာ အေရးယူမႈမ်ားကို ရင္ဆိုင္ၾကရသည္။
ထိုအမႈမ်ားတြင္ ရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႕ဝင္ အနည္းဆုံး ၃၃ ဦးပါဝင္ပတ္သက္ေနေၾကာင္း ထိုင္းအမ်ိဳးသားရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႕ ဒုတိယရဲ ခ်ဳပ္ ရဲဗ္ိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ ဒမ္ေရာင္ဆက္ ကစ္တီပရာပက္ ေျပာၿပီး စြပ္စြဲခံရသူမ်ားတြင္ ျပန္တမ္းဝင္အရာရွိ မဟုတ္သူမ်ား၊ ျပန္တမ္းဝင္အရာရွိမ်ားႏွင့္ ဒုတပ္ဖြဲ႕မႉးအထိ ပါဝင္ေၾကာင္း ရွင္းျပသည္ဟု ဘန္ေကာက္ပို႔စ္က ဆိုသည္။
CJ Werleman
14 January, 2021
Infrastructure is high on China’s agenda in Myanmar, but it is also making headway in other important sectors.
A year after Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first state visit to Myanmar, Foreign Minister Wang Yi is scheduled to arrive in the capital Naypyidaw today for a two-day official visit. The trip to Myanmar follows an African tour that has taken Wang to Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Botswana, Tanzania, and the Seychelles. The agenda of his Myanmar trip is yet to be confirmed, but the ongoing progress of the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC), along with COVID-19 diplomacy, is very likely to be high on the list.
“Even an animal would not stay in that kind of trapped situation.”
The mass arrest of nearly 100 Rohingya Muslims hiding in safe houses in Myanmar’s biggest city last week cast a harsh spotlight on the lengths to which the persecuted minority go to escape the country, and how a small mistake can shatter dreams of a better life.
Rohingya, who are not recognized as citizens in Buddhist-majority Myanmar and lack access to many basic services, have been fleeing their homes in Rakhine state for decades. But conditions worsened after a 2017 crackdown drove 740,000 Rohingya to Bangladesh in a violent campaign that is now the focus of a genocide investigation.
The Tatmadaw and Arakan Army are both in favor, but the ruling National League for Democracy remains hesitant.
ARAB NEWS
Dr. Azeem IbrahimA heartwarming initiative from the creators of “Sesame Street” shows that the international community is finally beginning to understand how to effectively approach the perennial issue of education for refugees. Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that creates the early education TV show, has unveiled Aziz and Noor, two new Muppet characters who are twin brother and sister Rohingya children.
This will be the first time that Rohingya children will have seen anyone like them in a mainstream media production. What is more, the two characters will appear alongside Elmo and other beloved characters in shows in the Rohingya language that are dedicated to topics in math, science and health, among others. This is all part of a curriculum developed by Sesame Workshop, alongside a number of other high-profile charities, specifically for Rohingya children.
Jayanta Kalita
January 9, 2021
Unlike China’s ‘iron brother’ Pakistan, which has rolled out the red carpet for its BRI projects, Southeast Asian nation Myanmar is set to clip the wings of the dragon.
China may be aiming to conquer the world with its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) undermining local sentiments in certain host countries, but the dragon is not invincible it seems. Myanmar is one country where citizens are resisting aggressive and intrusive policies Beijing is known for.
Rakibul Hasan has shared with IPS a selection of images document life in the Rohingya refugee camps.
The ongoing case on behalf of the Rohingya people at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Myanmar for genocide has been initiated and championed by the small nation of The Gambia and has broken new ground in international law for being the first case of its kind brought by one UN country against another. In truth, all signatories to the UN Genocide Convention have the ability, and indeed the moral responsibility, to prosecute the crime of genocide wherever it may occur. And the UK should lend its full backing to the action by The Gambia.
In August 2017, the Myanmar military perpetrated a genocide on the Rohingyas, an ethnic group residing in Northern Rakhine. Large numbers of Rohingyas were killed, women and girls were raped, villages burnt and upwards of 800,000 men, women and children were driven out of their homes. They crossed the border into Bangladesh to save their lives and are now sheltered in camps in Teknaf and Ukhia, in the southern tip of Bangladesh.
24 December 2020
Stay in a squalid refugee camp -- hopeless, starving, and made to feel a
burden -- or leave, risking death, rape, human trafficking and months
at sea to reach a husband you've never met.