Rohingya Influx Next to NCR Demands Home Ministry and NIA’s Full Security Attention

NEWS 18

K Yatish Rajawat
October 12, 2021, 

The Tablighi Jamaat, which was founded in Nuh district in Haryana but has expanded globally, could be facilitating the entry of Rohingyas into the region.

 The airport in Delhi is a few kilometers away from the millennium city of Gurgaon, and just 50 kilometers from the millennium city is the district of Nuh (Mewat). Despite its proximity to Delhi, the district has the dubious distinction of being the only backward district of Haryana; the callousness now extends to security matters. The district has been witnessing a continuous, rising influx of Rohingya immigrants in the last few years, yet the district administration, while being aware of this influx, is limited in its action and can do little to prevent it.

There is a perception about the district built by the administrators in Gurgaon—that it is a den of criminals. This baseless perception has done immense harm to the development, and even to the security, of the district. The national media also picks up selective stories about the district based on this perception.

Rohingyas were promised a new home in Bangladesh. They are now trying to escape it

New York Times
By Saif Hasnat, Sameer Yasir,
Oct 11, 2021,

Buildings meant to accommodate Rohingya refugees at Bhasan Char, Bangladesh, in the Bay of Bengal.Credit...Mahmud Hossain Opu/Associated Press

They Were Promised a New Home. Then They Tried to Escape It. 

Bangladesh is relocating Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar to a vulnerable, environmentally unstable island that is giving some cause to run again.

DHAKA, Bangladesh — Its name translates into “floating island,” and for up to 100,000 desperate war refugees, the low-slung landmass is supposed to be home.

One refugee, Munazar Islam, initially thought it would be his. He and his family of four fled Myanmar in 2017 after the military there unleashed a campaign of murder and rape that the United Nations has called ethnic cleansing. After years in a refugee camp prone to fires and floods, he accepted an invitation from the government of neighboring Bangladesh to move to the island, Bhasan Char.

EU Parliament Voices Support for Myanmar’s Opposition Government

THE I DIPLOMAT

By Sebastian Strangio
October 11, 2021

Despite the motion, Western support for the National Unity Government is likely to remain informal and unofficial.

The European Parliament has voted to support Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government (NUG) and its parliamentary committee as the legitimate representatives of crisis-hit Myanmar.

In a resolution adopted late last week, the European Parliament expressed its “support for the people of Myanmar in their struggle for democracy, freedom, and human rights.” It said that it “supports the CRPH [Committee Representing Pyidaungsu Hluttaw] and the NUG as the only legitimate representatives of the democratic wishes of the people of Myanmar” and called on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other foreign governments “to include and involve them in genuine and inclusive political dialogue and efforts aimed at the peaceful resolution of the crisis.”

Myanmar has been in a state of severe crisis since the coup, which immediately prompted a nationwide movement of protests and work stoppages, which have been complemented in recent months by growing armed resistance.

Rohingya leader killed for wanting to return: minister

The Phnom Penh Post

AFP
Publication date 03 October 2021

Police say a 28-year-old Rohingya man has been arrested over the murder of Mohib Ullah. AFP

BANGLADESHI foreign minister AK Abdul Momen on October 2 vowed to bring the killers of Rohingya leader Mohib Ullah to justice soon.

He said a vested quarter killed Mohib Ullah as he wanted to return to his home country of Myanmar.

"The government will take stern action against those involved in the killing. Nobody will be spared," he said.

This was the minister's first remarks after the global condemnation of the Rohingya leader's murder.

Rights groups urge full probe into Rohingya leader’s killing

Aljazeera
2 Oct 2021

Mohibullah, a prominent Rohingya leader, was killed this week at world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh.

Rohingya refugees offer funeral prayers for Rohingya community leader Mohibullah at Kutupalong refugee camp in Ukhia on September 30, 2021, a day after unidentified assailants gunned him down outside his office [Tanbir Miraj / AFP]

Rights groups have called for an investigation into the killing of a prominent Rohingya leader who was shot to death at the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh arrests members of Rohingya insurgent group after refugee leader’s murder

South China Morning Post
dpa
Published: 3 Oct, 2021

• Mohib Ullah, who was killed on Wednesday, had met former US president Donald Trump and joined a UN Human Rights Council session in 2019
• Three suspects with links to an armed insurgent group were detained and are being interrogated, officials said.

Bangladesh police officials stand guard near the crime scene after the Mohib Ullah a top Rohingya community leader, was shot dead in Cox’s Bazaar. Photo: EPA-EFE

Police inBangladesh arrested three suspects believed to have links to an armed insurgent group among Rohingya refugees, as officials promised justice for the killers of a prominent Rohingya rights activist.

“The killers will certainly be brought to justice. None will be spared,” Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen said on Saturday, three days after the murder of Mohib Ullah, the head of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights (ARSPH).

“The working class in Myanmar stood before the military regime, and they showed us the way.”

Sagebrush Rider

Obadiah Silva 

October 3, 2021

Eight months after the bloody military coup, we interviewed Tincher Sunley, a Burmese grassroots activist who described the situation in his country today. Myanmar is a country in Southeast Asia, a former British colony with decades of political instability and strategic emphasis on China’s natural resources and its access to the Indian Ocean, which will give further economic impetus to its southern region. In the Biden era, the United States aimed at its strategic rival, the Asian Company, with the cynical discourse of “democracy” aimed at restoring the value of international institutions. President Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy is the party that won the November 2020 election, which was overthrown by a coup, but in previous years it ruled alongside the military and was previously complicit in crimes against ethnic minorities. He is now part of the military junta, the opposition front of the “National Unity Government” (NUG), and they rely on this controversy of central powers, which is being transformed into imperialism in the form of “diplomacy”: ONU. The real opposition to the coup arose as young people fighting in the streets against military tanks, their workers in factories and textile workshops went on strike.

Mohib Ullah, 46, Dies; Documented Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya

The NewYork Times

By Hannah Beech

Oct. 2, 2021

Shot dead by gunmen, he had compiled a list of those who perished in the hope that the data could be used as evidence in international courts.

Mohib Ullah in 2020 at a refugee camp in Kutupalong, Bangladesh. Death threats had become part of his life.Credit...Munir Uz Zaman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mohib Ullah, a Rohingya community leader who believed in the power of data to confront the brutality of ethnic cleansing, died on Wednesday, shot by gunmen in a bamboo and tarp shelter in Kutupalong, Bangladesh, the world’s biggest refugee camp. He was 46.

The gunmen had burst into his shack before opening fire, according to his brother, Habib Ullah, who was with Mr. Mohib Ullah at the time. The shack was stacked high with papers documenting massacres of Rohingya, the Muslim minority native to neighboring Myanmar.

Agenda: World must not forget Rohingya crisis

The Herald
By Agenda ,By Dr Abdullah Yusuf

31st August

Dr Abdullah Yusuf, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of Dundee

THE horrifying situation in Afghanistan should act as a reminder of other grave humanitarian crises engulfing the world. I have spent the past few years researching the impact of other conflicts, many of which have been all but been forgotten by the international community.

It is now four years since the Myanmar military embarked upon a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing that forcibly displaced around a million Rohingya Muslims into Bangladeshi refugee camps. The persecution of the Rohingya is not new, but the scale and magnitude of the displacement since August 2017, is unprecedented. More than 700,000 refugees fled following actions internationally described as genocidal.

FOUR YEARS ON, ROHINGYA STUCK IN BANGLADESH CAMPS YEARN FOR HOME

Wisconsin Muslim Journal 
Aug 31, 2021

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY
Aljazeera

PHOTO CREDIT: FAISAL MAHMUD/AL JAZEERA

Mohammad Islam, who lost his younger brother at the hands of the Myanmar military, said he is thankful to the Bangladeshi government for providing shelter.

Dhaka/Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh – Early last month, Rakibul Alam’s makeshift home built of blue tarpaulin and bamboo turned into a muddy mess when heavy monsoon rain hit southern Bangladesh.

Alam, his wife and their three children withstood knee-deep water inside their home for two days but were forced to evacuate when the fragile roof fell in due to excessive downpours.

The 35-year-old Rohingya refugee has changed home thrice in the past four years and learned to live inside shacks in one of the 34 refugee camps – together forming the world’s single largest refugee camp – in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar bordering Myanmar.

Arakan Army Seeks to Build ‘Inclusive’ Administration in Rakhine State

THE I DIPLOMAT
Kyaw Hsan Hlaing
August 31, 2021

The armed group’s decision to include Muslim Rohingya representatives in local administration marks a sharp break with a succession of central governments.

Seven months since the military coup in Myanmar, the political wing of the rebel Arakan Army (AA) has significantly expanded its administrative and judicial mechanisms across Rakhine State in western Myanmar, with hundreds of its personnel now effectively administering the region independently of the military junta that rules in Naypyidaw. The group is also attempting to involve the state’s entire population, including the Rohingya Muslims, in the governance of what it hopes will become an autonomous Rakhine State.

On April 11, 2020, the 11th anniversary of the formation of the AA, Gen. Maj. Twan Mrat Naing, the army’s commander-in-chief, outlined the concept of the “way of Rakhita,” which he described as “the struggle for national liberation and the restoration of Arakan’s sovereignty to the people of Arakan.” This refers to the restoration of the independent Arakan kingdom that ruled significant parts of western Myanmar until 1824, when it was conquered by the Burmese kingdom based in Mandalay.

With Myanmar’s press muzzled, experts warn of surge in environmental crimes

MONGABAY
Carolyn Cowan
27 August 2021

• Myanmar’s military authorities have followed their Feb. 1 coup with a sweeping clampdown on press freedom, including the arrest of reporters, closing of news outlets, and driving of journalists underground or into exile.
• Industry experts say the measures have effectively criminalized independent journalism in the country.
• As conflict and violence spreads throughout the country, monitoring forests, illegal logging and the associated illicit trade on the ground is increasingly risky. Satellite platforms that monitor forest loss will likely become increasingly useful.
• With the loss of the independent press watchdog a reality, experts say they fear the circumstances are ripe for overexploitation of natural resources.

China Doesn’t Want Myanmar’s NLD Dissolved: Informed Sources

The Irrawaddy

27 August 2021

Chinese President Xi Jinping (right) and Myanmar’s detained State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi (left) at the launch ceremony for events to mark the 70th anniversary of China-Myanmar diplomatic relations in Naypyitaw in January 2020. / Myanmar State Counselor’s Office

China has voiced concern over the Myanmar military regime’s plan to dissolve the National League for Democracy (NLD), the party that won the junta-annulled 2020 general election in a landslide, several informed sources told The Irrawaddy. Chinese officials have conveyed to the regime’s leaders Beijing’s message that it wants to see the NLD continue to exist as a political party, they said.

Politicians close to the NLD and several China-Myanmar watchers said the Chinese recently told Myanmar officials that China will continue to support Myanmar and maintain border trade and infrastructure projects on one condition: that the junta keeps the NLD alive.

Afghanistan, Myanmar Crises Test India’s ‘Neighborhood First’ Policy

The Irrawaddy
JAYANTA KALITA
26 August 2021

Myanmar military chief Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaing (left) and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi meet in New Delhi in 2019. / Snr-Gen Min Aung Hlaing’s website

Two of India’s key neighbors—Myanmar to the southeast and Afghanistan to the northwest—are in turmoil. The biggest South Asian power and the world’s largest democracy, India has over the years engaged with these two nations to varying degrees to aid in their democratic transitions.

But coincidentally, history is repeating itself and democracy is in disarray in both countries—the military has seized power in Myanmar by overthrowing a democratically elected government and the Taliban insurgents have taken over in Afghanistan.

We must focus on building Rohingya and host community resilience

The Daily Star
Robert Chatterton Dickson
Wed Aug 25, 2021 

Rohingya refugees stretch their hands to receive aid distributed by local organisations at Balukhali makeshift refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, September 14, 2017. Photo: Reuters/Danish Siddiqui

This month marks the fourth year since the flight of more than 730,000 Rohingya from Myanmar's Rakhine State to Bangladesh after a military-led crackdown. The exodus followed decades of systemic disenfranchisement, discrimination, targeted violence and persecution against the Rohingya in Myanmar.

The Coup And The Crisis In Myanmar

OWP
The Organisation for World Peace
Evelyn Elliott
August 14, 2021

Myanmar, a nation whose young democracy began only a decade ago, is currently facing a threat it may not recover from. On February 1st of 2021, the military of Myanmar staged a coup d’état in the Southeast Asian country, overthrowing the democratic government and issuing a year-long state of emergency. Orchestrated under the idea that the nation’s November election was fraudulent, a claim that lacks any substantial evidence, the armed forces took control and arrested senior members of the elected National League for Democracy (NLD) party. The situation was exacerbated by the detention of Aung San Suu Kyi, a pro-democracy activist and Nobel Prize winner, who led the NLD. The country’s state of emergency has been extended for another two years under the direction of Min Aung Hlaing, a leading army general who declared himself to be the nation’s prime minister at the beginning of August. Now, after months of violence and oppression, Myanmar is confronted with the same military regime that it suffered under previously.

New ASEAN Envoy to Myanmar Pledges to Meet With Opposition, Detained Activists

THE I DIPLOMAT
Sebastian Strangio
August 10, 2021

The envoy’s mission relies on good faith commitment on the part of the junta, but this remains unlikely.

ASEAN’s newly appointed special envoy to Myanmar says he will insist on meeting with jailed politicians, including Aung San Suu Kyi, in line with the Five-Point Consensus agreed by the Southeast Asian bloc in April.

Second Foreign Minister of Brunei Erywan Yusof was formally appointed by ASEAN last week, after protracted negotiations among the bloc’s 10 member states. Speaking to reporters on Saturday in his first public remarks about the role, he said a plan to visit Myanmar was “in the pipeline,” and would be confirmed once he had consulted with all countries and actors concerned.

Asean too late for Myanmar?

Bangkok Post

EDITORIAL
BANGKOK POST EDITORIAL COLUMN

The appointment of Brunei's Second Foreign Minister Erywan Yusof as Asean special envoy to Myanmar last week is better late than never.

The special envoy's appointment is part of a five-point consensus that was agreed upon by Asean leaders during an April 24 meeting searching for a solution to the Myanmar crisis following the Feb 1 coup that ousted the elected civilian government under Aung San Suu Kyi who has been detained together with other civilian officials.

The delay in the envoy's appointment is described by the international media as due to internal wrangling within the group; with Indonesia and Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines opting for a proactive approach; while the rest, including Thailand, preferring quiet diplomacy which is almost synonymous with sitting on the problem while violence is being committed.

They Wait Hours to Withdraw Cash, but Most A.T.M.s Are Empty

New York Times
Richard C. Paddock
阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

Aug. 7, 2021

Myanmar has been crippled by a cash shortage since the military seized power six months ago, plunging the Southeast Asian nation into a financial crisis.

People lining up to withdraw cash in Yangon, Myanmar, in March. Since the military seized power in a coup six months ago, the Southeast Asian nation has been brought to its knees by a critical lack of cash.Credit...The New York Times

The customers, desperate for cash, began lining up at the A.T.M. at 3:30 a.m. By dawn, the queue had swelled to more than 300 people. By noon, when temperatures had reached 100 degrees, many were still waiting, hoping this would be the day they could finally withdraw money from their own bank accounts.

ASEAN’s humanitarian aid to Myanmar must not legitimise military junta: Progressive Voice & FORUM-ASIA

TOC

The Online Citizen
Asia, Civil Society
04/08/2021

“ASEAN and the international community must recognize and engage with the NUG, and disengage with the junta in provision of humanitarian assistance to prevent them from weaponizing humanitarian aid."

 Protesters hold a banner supporting the National Unity Government (NUG) during a demonstration against the military coup in Yangon on 11 July 2021 (Source: AFP)

The Association of the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the rest of the international community must provide humanitarian assistance through the COVID-19 Task Force set up by the Ministry of Health under interim government of Myanmar – the National Unity Government (NUG) – and Ethnic Health Organisations, as well as through cross-border channels, local humanitarian networks, ethnic service providers, and community-based organisations, said Progressive Voice and the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA) in a joint statement on Wednesday (4 Aug).