Rohingya refugees on an island of no return

ASIA TIMES

by Bertil Lintner
December 21, 2020 

Bangladesh is moving Rohingya refugees to an isolated island amid fears militant Islamic groups are penetrating border camps

Rohingya refugees perform prayers as they attend a ceremony organized to remember the first anniversary of a military crackdown that prompted a massive exodus of people from Myanmar to Bangladesh, at the Kutupalong refugee camp in Ukhia on August 25, 2018. Photo: AFP / Dibyangshu Sarkar

CHIANG MAI – They were told that they would be the first to be repatriated to Myanmar.

But when the first lot of 1,642 Rohingya Muslim refugees arrived on Bangladesh’s Bhasan Char island on December 3, they were herded into a huge, newly built settlement consisting of concrete living quarters, two hospitals, clinics, mosques, teaching centers, cyclone shelters, playgrounds and a police station.

Located 34 kilometers from the mainland, or a three-hour journey by boat, the island and what has been constructed there show that the Bangladeshi authorities are accepting the fact that they are stuck with a permanent refugee population. None of the estimated one million Rohingyas in Bangladesh are going back to Myanmar in the foreseeable future, if at all.

‘R’ is for Rohingya: Sesame Street Creates New Muppets for Refugees

The New York Times 

By Hannah Beech
Dec. 19, 2020

A child in a Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh and Grover the Muppet in 2018.Credit...Ryan Donnell/Sesame Workshop

BANGKOK — Six-year-old twins Noor and Aziz live in the largest refugee camp in the world. They are Rohingya Muslims who escaped ethnic cleansing in their native Myanmar for refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. They are also Muppets.

On Thursday, Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit that runs the early education TV show “Sesame Street” and operates in more than 150 countries, unveiled Aziz and Noor as the latest Muppets in their cast of characters.

Rohingya Women: A Life of Desperation

albawaba

Published December 17th, 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.

This is the bleak choice many Rohingya women, already scarred from fleeing violent persecution in Myanmar, are now facing.

As conditions deteriorate in increasingly overcrowded Bangladeshi refugee camps, desperate parents are marrying off their daughters to Rohingya men thousands of kilometers away in Malaysia.

Virtual weddings and international betrothals can seem an ideal solution.

Moving refugees to Bashan Char is not a solution to Bangladesh’s Rohingya problem

ARAB NEWS

DR. AZEEM IBRAHIM
December 18, 2020

Now that the government of Bangladesh seems finally to have recognized the fact that the Rohingya will be in the country for the long haul, it has started looking for long-term options for managing the huge refugee population.

Authorities in Dhaka are correct that holding more than one million people in cramped conditions at Cox’s Bazaar is not a sustainable solution. But the authorities are wrong to believe that moving some of them to Bashan Char will help to solve the problem.

Part II: Refugees trafficking network’s route to false salvation

MYANMAR TIMES 

AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE
17 DEC 2020

Northern Rakhine Muslim refugees alight from a ship that brought them to Aceh Indonesia in June. Photo: AFP

 

For the northern Rakhine Muslim refugees, escaping the Bangladesh camp starts with a down payment that can reach the equivalent of $2,000, often paid by a northern Rakhine Muslim's husband or other relatives in Malaysia using mobile banking applications.

 

Refugees then get a phone call typically from someone they do not know.

"The call came after a few days and a man instructed us to go to the rickshaw stand in the main food market area of the camp," said 20-year-old Julekha Begum, who married a northern Rakhine Muslim man in Malaysia via a video chat app.

‘What choice do we have?’

The Daily Star

AFP, Kutupalong
December 17, 2020 

After escaping prosecution in Myanmar, Rohingya women face odyssey of misery

In this file photo taken on September 7, 2020, Rohingya migrants look on following their arrival by boat in Lhokseumawe, Aceh, Indonesia. Photo: AFP

 

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.

This is the bleak choice many Rohingya women, already scarred from fleeing violent persecution in Myanmar, are now facing.

As conditions deteriorate in increasingly overcrowded Bangladeshi refugee camps, desperate parents are marrying off their daughters to Rohingya men thousands of kilometres (miles) away in Malaysia.

ANALYSIS - Anti-Rohingya monk promotes Myanmar ‘Buddhist’ nationalism

AA

Maung Zarni

LONDON 

14.12.2020 

Monk’s description of ‘Buddhists truths’ superior to Universal Declaration of Human Rights is far from ground realities.

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

Exuding a palpable sense of spiritual and cultural superiority, a genocide-denying Myanmar Buddhist monk declared Myanmar’s “true nationalism” which is anchored in the “universal declaration of Buddhist truths” to be even superior to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

ANALYSIS - New scopes for Bangladesh to put pressure on Myanmar for Rohingya repatriation

AA

Md. Kamruzzaman

ISTANBUL

08.12.2020

If Dhaka fails to mount due pressure on Naypyidaw from the very beginning of the newly elected government, Rohingya repatriation issue may lag behind, putting Bangladesh through unnecessary troubles 

The writer is an Asia-based journalist who writes on diplomacy, human rights, climate change, and the refugee crisis. 

More than one million people, forced to leave their homeland amid cycles of mass killings, gang rapes, and arson attacks for decades and who have taken shelter in a neighboring country as stateless people, can never be an internal matter of any country. The issue drew greater global attention with 700 thousand Rohingya fleeing their country and crossing the border to Bangladesh three years ago now within a span of just a few months. Thus, the Rohingya refugee crisis is no more a domestic or internal matter of Myanmar; rather, it is now one of the most crucial global crises.

From Crowded Camps to a Remote Island: Rohingya Refugees Move Again

TheNew York Times

By Hannah Beech
Published Dec. 4, 2020

 

More than a million Rohingya Muslims have fled atrocities in Myanmar for tent cities in Bangladesh. Some are now being taken to a low-slung landmass in the Bay of Bengal.

 

Rohingya refugees en route to the Bangladeshi island of Bhasan Char on Friday. The Bangladeshi government hopes to move up to 100,000 Rohingya to the island from overcrowded camps.Credit...Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters 

 

The clump of silt in the Bay of Bengal could be inundated by a single strike from a cyclone. Before this year, no one lived there.

But on Friday afternoon, seven Bangladeshi naval boats carrying more than 1,640 Rohingya Muslims landed on the low-slung island of Bhasan Char, as part of the Bangladeshi government’s plan to ease crowding in refugee camps where more than a million Rohingya have lived since fleeing systemic persecution and violence in Myanmar.

Rights groups have decried the resettlement, saying that the Rohingya, yet again, were being forced to move against their will.

“The relocation of so many Rohingya refugees to a remote island, which is still off limits to everyone including rights groups and journalists without prior permission, poses grave concerns about independent human rights monitoring,” Saad Hammadi, a South Asia campaigner for Amnesty International, said on Twitter.

India Accuses China of Helping Rebel Groups on Myanmar Border

Bloomberg

Sudhi Ranjan Sen
7 December 2020,

• India sent thousands of troops to region as tensions increased
• China denies supplying weapons to ‘non-state actors’
  

Photographer: Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images

Indian officials say China is assisting rebel groups that have stepped up attacks on its border with Myanmar in recent months, opening another front in the conflict between two nations already engaged in a deadly standoff in the Himalayas.

Armed groups in Myanmar -- including the United Wa State Army and the Arakan Army, which was designated a terrorist organization this year -- are acting as Beijing’s proxies by supplying weapons and providing hideouts to insurgent groups in India’s northeastern states, according to Indian officials with knowledge of the situation, who asked not to be identified due to rules for speaking with the media.

Ceasefire Raises Hopes of Elections in Myanmar’s Rakhine State

THE I DIPLOMAT 

Sebastian Strangio
December 07, 2020

The most important obstacle – a ceasefire – is now in place, but many more challenges remain.

One least heralded developments to have taken place in Myanmar since the country’s election on November 8 is the lull in fighting in Rakhine State in the west of the country. Until last month, fighting between the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army (AA), which is fighting for greater autonomy from the central government, had raged in Rakhine since 2018. During that time, it had killed or injured hundreds and forced some 226,000 people to flee their homes.

Sasakawa Yohei, Japan’s special peace envoy to Myanmar, helped broker the ceasefire between the Myanmar military and the Arakan Army.Credit: Flickr/ Palácio do Planalto

The conflict followed the army’s brutal assault on Muslim Rohingya communities in northern Rakhine, which caused thousands of civilian deaths and drove more than 700,000 people over the border into Bangladesh.

The fighting also prompted the Union Election Commission (UEC) to cancel the elections in nine townships of northern Rakhine State, in addition to other conflict-torn parts of Myanmar, claiming that these regions were “not in a situation to hold free and fair elections.” But now, an informal ceasefire between the AA and the Myanmar military, or Tatmadaw, has opened the door to supplementary elections in Rakhine, and beyond that, to the glimmer of a lasting solution to the civil war.

Hope During The Rohingya Refugee Crisis

BORGEN   Magazine

World News 

November 29, 2020 

DHAKA, Bangladesh — For the past three years, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees have flooded into Bangladesh, fleeing violence in Myanmar. During this time, there have been countless stories of the tragedies these refugees have faced. The root causes of what forced them to leave their homes include the severe discrimination and violence they faced. Many also lived in poverty, with their homes being burned down. Since Myanmar refused to acknowledge their existence, these individuals have zero proof of citizenship and lack access to schools and hospitals. However, there are some stories of hope during the Rohingya refugee crisis.

Ethnic tension, conflicts key concern for Myanmar’s incoming MPs

Aljazeera

Andrew Nachemson,
Naw Betty Han
27 Nov 2020

The National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Aung San Suu Kyi, recorded another landslide victory in elections held earlier this month [File: Shwe Paw Mya Tin/Reuters]

Yangon, Myanmar – On November 8, the National League for Democracy won another resounding victory in Myanmar’s national election, claiming 920 of the 1,117 seats available in the local and national parliaments and improving on its 2015 landslide.

The election was marred by some significant shortcomings – mainly the exclusion of the Rohingya Muslim majority and widespread vote cancellations in Rakhine – but was free of any serious irregularities and widely seen as reflecting the NLD’s continued overwhelming popularity.

Think before you ink: KTR

Telangana Today

By TelanganaToday
Business Bureau
Published: 26th Nov 2020

People should think and analyse who has brought progress to the region and what kind of Hyderabad they want, said TRS party working president KT Rama Rao

Hyderabad: Telangana government over the last six years has not only taken care of the basic amenities of the people such as electricity, water, roads and support to farmers but also made strides across spheres of society and industries. And it is time for people to think before they ink (vote). They should think and analyse who has brought progress to the region and what kind of Hyderabad they want, said TRS party working president KT Rama Rao on Thursday.

Participating in an interactive meeting with Mak Projects MD on ‘Transforming Hyderabad into a global city’, KTR said, “When the State was formed, we not only wanted to prove to ourselves but also to naysayers who questioned our ability and vision for the State. Since then, we have achieved success in all the spheres.”

Suu Kyi's Myanmar election win fails to excite foreign investors

NIKKEI ASIA
YUICHI NITTA,
Nikkei staff writer
November 24, 2020

Aung San Suu Kyi's fervid supporters show a clear contrast from the cool attitude of western media and human rights organizations. (Nikkei montage/Source photo by Reuters) 

 

Overseas companies put off by red tape, poor infrastructure and plight of Rohingya

YANGON -- Aung San Suu Kyi's landslide Myanmar election win this month triggered a frenzy of excitement among her supporters, but it was met with cool shrugs by many foreign governments and investors seeking economic and political reform.

On the polling day of Nov. 8, voters lined up from early morning to cast their ballots support for Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy. And for three nights, dozens of people stood outside the NLD's headquarters in Yangon chanting her name as incoming results pointed to a huge victory for the party.

The world must hold ‘democratic’ Myanmar to account

ARAB NEWS
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim
November 23, 2020

An exhausted Rohingya refugee woman touches the shore after crossing the Bay of Bengal, in Shah Porir Dwip, Bangladesh, Sept. 11, 2017. (Reuters)

The Rohingya people have faced sustained persecution in Burma/Myanmar since it gained independence in 1948. At the core of this discrimination lies the false narrative that they have no place in the ethnic mix of the country because, it is alleged, they migrated from what is now Bangladesh in the 19th century.

At its most benign, this falsity resulted in them being denied full citizenship in 1948 (though they were granted conventional civic rights). By the 1970s, the country’s military dictatorship began taking a series of steps to strip them of even this limited status and, as a result of several campaigns of violence, expelled many to Bangladesh.

Myanmar Still Loves Aung San Suu Kyi, but Not for the Reasons You Think

The New York Times 

 By Min Zin
Mr. Min Zin is a political scientist.
Nov. 23, 2020

 

Credit...Ye Aung Thu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

YANGON, Myanmar — The National League for Democracy, the incumbent party led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, secured another landslide victory in the general elections of Nov. 8. It did better even than in 2015, a landmark election, winning this year 396 of the 476 elected seats to be filled in both the lower and the upper houses. (Another 166 seats were reserved for military appointees.)

And the N.L.D. obtained this result despite the government’s weak performance on its key pledges during its first term in office — constitutional reform, national reconciliation and peace, socioeconomic improvement — and the rise of both ethnic minority parties and new challengers. In addition to Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party and the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (U.S.D.P.), some 90 parties fielded candidates this year.

So what does the outcome say about what Myanmar’s voters really care about?

Suu Kyi's capabilities tested amid numerous issues plaguing Myanmar: Yomiuri Shimbun

THE STRAITS TIMES

Editorial Notes
Nov 23, 2020

The paper says there has been little progress on ending the civil war between the military and ethnic minorities, issues that Aung San Suu Kyi included in her campaign pledges.

Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi delivering a speech on State Television in Naypyitaw, Myanmar, Nov 9, 2020. PHOTO: EPA-EFE

TOKYO (THE YOMIURI SHIMBUN/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) - Efforts to weaken the military's involvement in politics are essential if Myanmar is to promote democratisation and achieve domestic stability. Aung San Suu Kyi's ability to take action is being called into question.

In the Myanmar general election, the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD), led by State Counsellor Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of the government, won more than 80 per cent of the seats up for grabs, maintaining its sole majority. Suu Kyi's popularity has been demonstrated, but the future will be difficult.

The NLD won a landslide in the previous election in 2015, marking a shift from the military-centred political rule that lasted more than half a century. 

A plea to help Myanmar's Rohingya people

The Washington Times

ANALYSIS/OPINION:
By Heather Nauert
Tuesday, November 24, 2020 

More than a million Rohingya have fled persecution and are unable to return home

 

Heather Nauert with Rohingyan children at the Cox’s Bazaar refugee camp, Bangladesh )Photo courtesy Heather Nauert) more >

Myanmar’s security forces have systematically attacked the country’s Muslim minority, known as the Rohingya, for many years.

The United States and the international community have denounced this violence, which includes mass killings and widespread rape of civilians, but the world has done little to hold Myanmar to account. This must change or the lives and safety of the Rohingya people will never improve.

Why Do Non-Myanmar Ethnic Nationalities Choose To Die With Their Boots On? – OpEd

eurasiareview

By Kanbawza Win
November 21, 2020

A clarion call for the non-Myanmar youths is silently echoing through, the non-Myanmar areas of Shan, Chin, Kachin, Karen, Karenni (Kayah), Mon and Arakan youths now, as there is no other choice left but to fight the imperialistic Myanmar forces, with whatever weapons available, for after a quarter century (to be exact since 2nd Feb.1947) to date, there is no other choice left. These non-Myanmar ethnic nationalities had patiently waited, hoping against hope that the NLD, construed as a potential ally, has just rode a Covid 19 horse and have implemented the not so fair elections with a landslide with a clear mandate of Myanmarnization of the non-Myanmar ethnic nationals infidel who doesn’t speak Burmese especially who are not Buddhist.