Rohingya’s suffering continues in Bangladesh

ASIA TIMES  

Opinion

by Sabria Chowdhury Balland 

October 19, 2020 

While Bangladesh is rightly commended for granting Rohingya refuge, more should be done to respect their rights 

Rohingya at the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh. Photo: AFP

“Migrants and refugees are not pawns on the chessboard of humanity.” – Pope Francis

The Rohingya have been subjected to persecution, discrimination and torture for decades in Myanmar. In 2017, almost a million of them had to leave their homeland because of fierce human-rights abuses. Consequently, Bangladesh welcomed them. However, three years down the line, the Rohingya are still suffering, still not able to speak up for their rights and still marginalized.

Why Bangladesh Must Let the Rohingya Speak for Themselves

THE I DIPLOMAT

By Saad Hammadi
October 16, 2020

 

Any durable solution for the Rohingya will not come through more restrictions on their lives.

People shop for vegetables at the Kutupalong Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Tuesday, June 2, 2020. Credit: AP Photo/Shafiqur Rahman

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh drew the attention and concern of the world when they fled deadly violence in Myanmar in 2017. Three years later, they are among the most disempowered people in the world, with the least control over their lives. Recent events have accentuated this, and it is time for change.

Responding to Genocide half a world away

UVIC

University od Victoria
Law
Jonathan Woods
October 15, 2020

Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, March 2018. UN Women set up a centre in the Balukhali refugee camp to provide a safe space for Rohingya women and adolescent girls. Photo credit: UN Women/Allison Joyce

Virtual roundtable results in calls to action in seeking justice for the Rohingya

“Canada must take immediate, robust action on justice for the Rohingya people” and must fully address gender-based sexual violence and other gender-based atrocities that have been “central in the genocide against the Rohingya.”

Suu Kyi’s tainted policies alienate foreign investors

ASIA TIMES 

by Rory Wallace
October 15, 2020

YANGON – Aung San Suu Kyi’s government is putting off foreign companies that emphasize human rights in their investment decisions, as Britain’s CDC Group, Norway’s Telenor and international mining groups struggle to navigate her administration’s controversial policies and their associated reputation risks.

That’s holding back the underdeveloped nation’s economic and business potential, significantly at a time the de facto national leader is running for national re-election amid a moribund economy. 

For Young Rohingya Brides, Marriage Means a Perilous, Deadly Crossing

The New York Times 

By Hannah Beech
Oct. 17, 2020

Girls and young women from refugee camps in Bangladesh, promised to men they have never met, are undertaking the dangerous journey to Malaysia to join them.

After months at sea, hundreds of ethnic Rohingya refugees, most of them women and girls, landed in the Indonesian province of Aceh in September.Credit...Zik Maulana/Associated Press

BANGKOK — Haresa counted the days by the moon, waxing and waning over the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. Her days on the trawler, crammed into a space so tight that she could not even stretch her legs, bled into weeks, the weeks into months.

“People struggled like they were fish flopping around,” Ms. Haresa, 18, said of the other refugees on the boat. “Then they stopped moving.”

Don’t be fooled. Myanmar’s ‘democratic election’ is a sham.

The Washington Post 

Opinion by Tun Khin 

Oct. 14, 2020

Tun Khin is president of the Burma Rohingya Organization UK.

 

What a difference five years can make. In 2015, many of my fellow Rohingya people cheered as the party of the famed opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi won a landslide victory in Myanmar’s first democratic elections of the 21st century, bringing an end to decades of outright military rule. Euphoria reigned. We hoped not only for a new beginning for the country, but also for an end to the oppression against us.

Today, as Myanmar gears up for another general election on Nov. 8, the situation is starkly different. Three years ago, Aung San Suu Kyi, now the country’s de facto head of state, stood by as military leaders launched a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign that killed thousands of Rohingya and drove more than 700,000 across the border into Bangladesh, where they now languish in immense refugee camps. The roughly 500,000 who remain in the country have been effectively disenfranchised. They are denied access to Myanmar’s democracy simply because of who they are.

Can a Lawsuit Stop a Genocide?

COMMONWEAL

By Paul C. Saunders

October 13, 2020

 

The case against Myanmar 

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh (Alamy/Mahady Hasan Riad)

On January 23, 2020, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, informally known as the World Court, rendered a historic judgment. The decree ordered the government of Myanmar to comply with several directives: to take measures to prevent genocide against the Rohingya people; to ensure that its military refrain from acts prohibited by the Genocide Convention; and to preserve evidence and submit a report to the court within four months, detailing compliance with the court’s order. The unanimous decision by the fifteen-judge court represented only the third time that the Genocide Convention has been invoked before the World Court in a contentious case—and the first case ever to consider the claims, under the convention, of non-contiguous, non-warring countries.

Bangladesh-Myanmar: Rohingya Conundrum – Analysis

eurasiareview

By S. Binodkumar Singh*
October 13, 2020

Rohingya's in Kutupalong Refugee Camp in Bangladesh. Photo taken by John Owens/VOA, Wikipedia Commons.

 

On October 6, 2020, four people were killed in clashes between two groups of Rohingyas over establishing supremacy at the Lombasia Camp in the Kutupalang area of Cox’s Bazar District. 20 persons were injured in the violent clashes.

OPINION - Myanmar's colonial policies and crimes trigger renewed liberation struggles

AA

Maung Zarni 

LONDON 

09.10.2020 

Lack of action from UN and world community encourages Myanmar to commit atrocities against ethnic communities

Maung Zarni, Burmese coordinator of the Free Rohingya Coalition and a fellow at the Genocide Documentation Center in Cambodia

The writer is a Burmese coordinator of the Free Rohingya Coalition and a fellow at the Genocide Documentation Center in Cambodia.

Almost three decades ago the UN had established the mandate of Special Rapporteur to monitor the human rights situation in Myanmar, under the Commission on Human Rights Resolution number 58 of 1992.

But the UN-mandated human rights missions have not deterred Myanmar’s successive governments from perpetrating human rights crimes against dissidents, government critics, and national minorities.

Rohingya Trapped by 'Apartheid' Regime in Myanmar, Says Human Rights Watch

VICE

by Anthony Esguerra

08 October 2020

 

More than 130,000 Rohingya Muslims have been in internment camps for eight years in Rakhine State. 

Rohingya people who were arrested at sea in December walk on a beach after being transported by Myanmar authorities to Rakhine state on Jan. 13, 2020. 173 Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar were arrested at sea in December by Myanmar's navy and were escorted back to Rakhine state on Jan. 13, authorities said. PHOTO: STR / AFP

A major human rights group said Myanmar is carrying out a policy of apartheid against Rohingya Muslims languishing for eight years in internal displacement camps, accusing civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi of complicity in their persecution weeks before national elections.

The truth about Burma’s ‘imprisoned princess’

The SPECTATOR
Francis Pike
10 October 2020

It’s as ignorant to demonise Aung San Suu Kyi as it was to idolise her

As Perseus was flying along the coast on his winged horse Pegasus, he spotted Andromeda tied to a rock as a sacrifice to Poseidon’s sea monster Cetus. It was love at first sight. Perseus slew Cetus and married Andromeda. Thus began the damsel-in-distress archetype that has been a mainstay of western culture ever since. Riffs on the archetype have been used by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens and Wagner. Perhaps it was these examples that inspired the global liberal establishment (the BBC, Hollywood and the Nobel Peace Prize committee among others) to create, in the 1990s, the mythical version of Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s ‘imprisoned princess’, the saintly spiritual heir to Mahatma Gandhi, as Time magazine described her.

အမှန်တရားရှာမှာလား လုပ်ဇာတ်တွေကို မီးထိုးပေးမှာလား

ဧရာဝတီ
အောင်ဇော်
5 October 2020

၂၀၁၂ ခုနှစ် ရန်ကုန်တွင် ရခိုင်တိုင်းရင်းသားများက ကုလသမဂ္ဂနှင့် INGOs များ၏ ရခိုင်အရေးအပေါ် ကိုင်တွယ်သဘောထားပုံများအား ဆန့်ကျင်ကန့်ကွက် ဆန္ဒပြကြစဉ် / ဧရာဝတီ

ကုလသမဂ္ဂ၏ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ လူ့အခွင့်အရေးဆိုင်ရာ အစီရင်ခံစာတင်သွင်းသူသစ် ခန့်အပ်လိုက်သူသည် အေမရိ ကန်ပြည်ထောင်စု မိန်းပြည်နယ် ပထမ လွတ်တော်မဲဆန္ဒနယ်မှ အောက်လွှတ်တော်ကိုယ်စား လှယ် ဟောင်း သောမတ် အင်ဒရူးဖြစ်သည်။

Saudis Giving Bangladesh A Cause For Worry – Analysis

eurasiareview
By Syed Badrul Ahsan
October 3, 2020

In these past many months since the coronavirus pandemic broke out, as many as 140,000 Bangladeshi expatriate workers, mostly from the Middle East, have returned home. And now that conditions have eased a little, they are ready to return to their workplaces, especially in Saudi Arabia. But that does not appear to be easy, given that most of these workers have yet to come by air tickets to fly back to Riyadh. Compounding matters for them has been the inability of the Saudia airlines office in Dhaka as well as Biman Bangladesh Airlines to facilitate their departure for their places of work.

Activists Denounce Myanmar Election App For ‘Inflaming’ Ethnic Tensions

THE I DIPLOMAT
By Sebastian Strangio
October 01, 2020

By accepting Myanmar’s rigid official racial and religious categorizations, the EU-funded app runs the risk of entrenching sectarian divides.

A donor-funded election app designed to provide information to Myanmar voters has come under fire for its potential to inflame racism and religious nationalism ahead of elections on November 8.

The mVoter 2020 app, which was launched on September 29, was developed by the Stockholm-based organization International Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), under the EU-funded STEP Democracy program. The app was built in partnership with The Asia Foundation and Myanmar’s Union Election Commission (UEC).

Rohingya refugees face continuous violence

NEW FRAME 
Friday, 2 October 2020

Two Myanmar soldiers have confessed to committing atrocities against Rohingya Muslims, giving more evidence of the genocide against the minority group.

Two personnel in Myanmar’s military have confessed to “exterminating” Rohingya Muslims. Human rights defenders believe that this public acknowledgement could substantiate the ongoing international genocide investigation at the International Court of Justice against Myanmar’s military establishment.

Myo Win Tun, 33, and Zaw Naoing Tun, 30, who belong to separate light infantry battalions, claimed they were given orders to “shoot and rape villagers” while raiding “kalar” villages – “kalar” is a derogatory term for Muslim Rohingyas.

Myanmar Desertions Offer an Opening for Rohingya Justice

THE I DIPLOMAT
By Shannon Maree Torrens
September 30, 2020

The recent confessions of the two Myanmar army defectors bring justice one step closer to fruition.

The long-term persecution of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, which dates back to the 1970s, has become particularly grave in recent years, as increasing crackdowns have coincided with mounting challenges to the pursuit of justice. However, a new opportunity for justice for the Rohingya has recently opened, in the form of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

Ongoing oppression of Rohingya highlighted again

ASIA TIMES

 by Kyaw Win  
Opinion
September 25, 2020
The effort to cause the Rohingya harm through the legal system and in the media is fully operational  

Rohingya refugees walk on a muddy path after crossing the border in Teknaf, Bangladesh, on September 3, 2017. Photo: Reuters / Mohammad Ponir Hossain

A new report has highlighted the need for the international community to examine the ongoing oppression against the Rohingya.

Myanmar is a nation whose history is marred by the struggle between those in power and those they oppress. In recent years this has been especially true of the ethnic Rohingya in the country’s western Rakhine state. They have faced decades of oppression, culminating most recently in a military campaign against them that is now being investigated as genocide by the United Nations.

The importance of land rights to Rohingya repatriation

Farhaan Uddin Ahmed
25 September 2020

The Pinheiro Principles and justice for the displaced

Given widespread confiscation of Rohingya land, it is essential that Myanmar instate changes in property rights to encourage the voluntary return of its displaced Rohingya Muslim community, Farhaan Uddin Ahmed writes.

In August 2017, Myanmar’s military – the Tatmadaw – and other actors backed by it initiated a brutal violent campaign of ethnically cleansing the Rakhine state of Myanmar’s Rohingya community. The atrocities forced more than 800,000 Rohingya people to flee Myanmar, leaving behind their homes and livelihoods and seek refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh.

Give voice to the Rohingya

Bangkok Post 

Editorial . 

Bangkok Post editorial column
25 Sep 2020

The Rohingya saga has been prominent in some international headlines of late. In addition to the mass exodus, with nearly 300 Rohingya drifting to the shores of Indonesia's Aceh province after spending months at sea, another major cause for concern is the deprivation of voting rights of those Rohingya remaining in western Rakhine state as well as the one million refugees living in neighbouring Bangladesh.

Racism Is Fueling Myanmar’s Deadly Second Wave of COVID-19

THE I DIPLOMAT
By Andrew Nachemson
September 11, 2020

Anti-migrant — and especially anti-Rohingya and anti-Rakhine — sentiments are undermining efforts to control the pandemic.

This article is freeThe Diplomat has removed paywall restrictions on our coverage of the COVID–19 crisis.

As COVID-19 cases surge in Myanmar, the country’s famously serene State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi appears to be getting flustered. In a severe speech delivered September 2, she castigated “reckless and unsympathetic” nightclub owners, admonished Yangon residents for flouting COVID-19 restrictions, and threatened legal punishment against uncooperative citizens. On August 24, a week after the second wave began, she also warned against potential racial tension in Rakhine state, the epicenter of Myanmar’s renewed outbreak, reminding Burmese that recent violence there has made Myanmar a global “embarrassment.”