Myanmar, Bangladesh need to boost ties

theSun

Opinion
Jubeda Chowdhury
04- 18- 2022

“ If Bangladesh and Myanmar improve their ties with each other, their dependence on China and India could be reduced and trade with other countries in Southeast Asia and South Asia could increase.”

Boats are seen carrying passengers to cross the Buriganga river in Dhaka, Bangladesh, February 16, 2021. REUTERSpix

MYANMAR and Bangladesh should bolster their ties with neighbourly spirit for various reasons.

Currently, the strained Myanmar- Bangladesh relations need to be ironed out.

Jan 13 marked 50 years of bilateral ties between Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Myanmar recognised Bangladesh as a sovereign state on Jan 13, 1972, but there weren’t any seminars, discussions, statements and such between the two to commemorate the special day.

Bangladesh: Closing Rohingya Schools and Shops is Cruel Copy

Islamic City
Apr 17, 2022
By: Habib Siddiqui

“Bangladesh’s decision to close schools for Rohingya refugee children violates the right to education on a massive scale,” said Bill Van Esveld, associate children’s rights director at HRW. “This cruel decision should be immediately reversed so that Rohingya children can get an education, which will be especially critical for their return to Myanmar when it is safe to do so.” (photo: UNICEF/Lateef - 24 August 2020). 

Bangladesh hosts over 1.1 million Rohingyas who fled neighboring Myanmar during a genocidal campaign by the security forces in 2017. Most of them live in and around Kutupalong and Nayapara refugee camps in the Cox’s Bazar region - which have grown to become the largest and most densely populated camps in the world.

Deportation of Rohingya woman from India sparks fear of renewed crackdown

THE GUARDIAN
Aakash Hassan
Thu 14 Apr 2022 

Hasina Begum was separated from her family and forced to return to Myanmar despite her refugee status. Hundreds of others now face expulsion  

Rohingya refugees at a makeshift camp on the outskirts of Jammu, India, last year. Photograph: Channi Anand/AP

The deportation of a Rohingya woman back to Myanmar has sparked fears that India is preparing to expel many more refugees from the country.


Hasina Begum, 37, was deported from Indian-administered Kashmir two weeks ago, despite holding a UN verification of her refugee status, intended to protect holders from arbitrary detention. Begum was among 170 refugees arrested and detained in Jammu in March last year. Her husband and three children, who also have UN refugee status, remain in Kashmir.

The Path Out of Genocide | Opinion

Newsweek
Tun Khin and Daniel P. Sullivan ,
Refugees International
On 4/6/22 

Five years since brutal attacks by Myanmar's military forced more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees to flee their homes, the United States has finally recognized those horrors as genocide. This determination is a historic and profound step toward justice for the Rohingya people. But those were words. Now we need action. This momentous assessment must serve as a catalyst to hold the Myanmar military accountable for its unceasing atrocities against people across Myanmar and to take urgent steps to end them.

US must follow up on Rohingya genocide declaration

ASIA TIME
Saqib Sheikh
April 7, 2022

The Biden administration should push for change on the ground rather than merely issuing statements  

Rohingya refugees gather at a market in Bangladesh’s Kutupalong refugee camp in Ukhia on May 15, 2020. Photo: AFP

The recent announcement by US President Joe Biden’s administration affirming that the Myanmar military was guilty of a genocidal acts and crimes against humanity directed at the Rohingya was largely welcomed by the Rohingya stateless diaspora. 

Activists and analysts, though, have commented on how late this decision has been made, coming nearly five years after the military operation in 2017 that resulted in a mass exodus of the Rohingya from their ancestral homeland in Rakhine state to neighboring Bangladesh as well as other countries in the region. 

ရိုဟင်ဂျာအရေးအခင်းတွင် အောက်ခြေစစ်သားများကို ထင် ရာစိုင်းခွင့်ပေးခဲ့ဟု တပ်အရာရှိပြော

Maynmar Now
ဇော်ရဲသွေး / Myanmar Now
Apr 2, 2022

ရိုဟင်ဂျာနှိမ်နင်းရေး ခေါင်းစဉ်အောက်တွင် စစ်တပ်အကြီးအကဲများက အတိုင်းအဆမဲ့ အကြမ်းဖက်မှုမျိုးစုံ လုပ်ခွင့်ပေးခဲ့သည်ဟု ထောက်ပို့အရာရှိအဖြစ် တာဝန်ထမ်းဆောင်ခဲ့သူ တပ်အရာရှိက ပြောသည်။ရိုဟင်ဂျာအ ရေးအခင်းတွင် စစ်တပ်က အောက်ခြေစစ်သားများကို ထင်ရာစိုင်းခွင့်ပေးခဲ့သည်ဟု ရခိုင်ပြည်နယ်မြောက် ပိုင်း တွင် တာဝန်ကျနေရာမှ ယခုနှစ်ဆန်းပိုင်းတွင် ထွက်ပြေးလွတ်မြောက်လာသူ ဗိုလ်ကြီးတစ်ဦးက ထုတ်ဖော်ပြော ကြားသည်။

The US has declared a Rohingya genocide. Does it matter?

RFA
Radio Free Asia
Commentary by Zachary Abuza
2022.03.23

The determination has no immediate legal impact, but it has important implications, Zachary Abuza says.

Unidentified men carry knives and slingshots as they walk past a burning house in Gawdu Tharya village near Maungdaw in Rakhine state in northern Myanmar, Sept. 7, 2017.AFP

On 21 March 2022, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken made a formal determination that Myanmar’s military committed genocide against the Rohingya population in 2017. He described the attacks as “widespread and systematic”, “with a clear and premeditated intention to destroy the Rohingya population.” This went beyond the U.S. government’s previous findings that the military had committed ethnic cleansing in the process of driving over 740,000 Rohingya across the border into neighboring Bangladesh.

 

India, China and the Rohingya issue

ASIA TIMES
by Pema Tseten
March 24, 2018 

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

Myanmar occupies a pivotal position in India’s strategic calculus as New Delhi establishes a connection with Southeast Asia through its “Look East” or “Act East” policy. The region has received the highest level of patronage under different Indian administrations. This was  intensified under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his “Neighborhood First” policy with an active focus on improving ties with India’s immediate neighbors.

China and India's game on Rohingya

the Independent

Md. Tareq Hasan
1 March, 2021

The biggest thing is that the Rohingyas were forced to flee from Myanmar 3 years ago, but Aung San Suu Kyi could not take any initiative to talk to the Bangladeshi authorities and take them back.

A military coup in Myanmar on February 1 could hamper the repatriation and resettlement of Myanmar's Rohingya population. The international community and world leaders are currently keeping a close eye on the situation in Myanmar and the Rohingya, but China and India, Myanmar's trusted allies, have a key role to play in this issue. But neither China nor India has yet commented on the Myanmar coup. What kind of impact the military coup in Myanmar could have on the Rohingya has given rise to a surprising question.

Wa an early winner of Myanmar’s post-coup war

ASIA TIMES

by Anthony Davis
February 22, 2022

UWSA consolidating a new Wa state that will bring Chinese influence near Thailand and set a self-rule model for other ethnic rebels  

UWSA special force snipers participate in a military parade in the Wa State's Panghsang, April 17, 2019. Photo: AFP / Ye Aung Thu

BANGKOK – The anniversary of the Myanmar military’s February 2021 coup has briefly refocused the fickle attentions of the international media with a flurry of “one year on” reporting on popular resistance and its prospects for success or failure.

Overshadowed by this central drama, meanwhile, another major power shift has been unfolding in the remote hills of northeastern Shan state with repercussions that may prove to be no less profound.

Opinion: At long last, the U.S. recognizes what the Rohingya already knew

The Washinton Post

By Wai Wai Nu
2022-03-22

Rohingya refugees walk through a shallow canal after crossing the Naf River as they flee violence in Myanmar to reach Bangladesh in Palongkhali near Ukhia on Oct. 16, 2017. (Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Images) 

Wai Wai Nu is a human rights and democracy activist, a former political prisoner, a visiting senior research fellow at the Human Rights Center at the University of California in Berkeley’s School of Law, and the founder and executive director of the Women’s Peace Network in Myanmar.

On Monday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken officially declared that the U.S. government defines the crimes perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya people as a genocide.

For me and many other Rohingya, this is an epochal moment. For too long, we have felt abandoned by the world. For years, we pleaded for help — but our calls went unanswered. The violence and suffering we endured were compounded by the realization that so much of the world preferred to look away. This collective memory has further traumatized us. How could no one care when they burned down our homes and slaughtered our people? How could the international community close its eyes when hundreds of thousands of us were forced to flee our country?

Rohingya refugees welcome US decision to call Myanmar atrocities a genocide

THE GUARDIAN
Alex Hern and agencies
@alexhern
Tue 22 Mar 2022

Refugees ‘very happy’ with declaration, while experts say ‘concrete steps’ must follow

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have welcomed the US move to designate atrocities committed by Myanmar’s military a genocide. Photograph: Allison Joyce/Getty Images

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have welcomed the announcement by the US that it considers the violent repression of their largely Muslim ethnic group in Myanmar a genocide.

“We are very happy on the declaration of the genocide; many many thanks,” said 60-year-old Sala Uddin, who lives at Kutupalong camp, one of the many in Cox’s Bazar district that are now home to about 1 million Rohingya.

‘Kill more’: Facebook fails to detect hate against Rohingya

NEW YORK POST
Associated Press
March 22, 2022 

Rights group Global Witness submitted eight paid ads for approval to Facebook, each including different versions of hate speech against Rohingya, which were all approved for publishing. AP 

 JAKARTA, Indonesia — A new report has found that Facebook failed to detect blatant hate speech and calls to violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority years after such behavior was found to have played a determining role in the genocide against them.

The report shared exclusively with The Associated Press showed the rights group Global Witness submitted eight paid ads for approval to Facebook, each including different versions of hate speech against Rohingya. All eight ads were approved by Facebook to be published.

 

The US Says Myanmar Committed Genocide in Assaults on Rohingya

THE I DIPLOMAT
Sebastian Strangio
March 21, 2022

The declaration is long overdue, but accountability for Myanmar’s military remains a long way off.

Yesterday, Reuters published an exclusive report claiming that the United States is intending to declare that Myanmar’s brutal treatment of the Rohingya Muslim population is a “genocide.” According to the article, which cited Biden administration officials with knowledge of the matter, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will make the long-anticipated designation today at an event at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where there is currently an exhibit detailing the plight of the Rohingya.

 

US Declares Myanmar’s 2017 Atrocities Against Rohingya A ‘Genocide’

BenarNews

March 22, 2022
By Shailaja Neelakantan

Displaced Rohingya in Myanmar. Photo Credit: Tasnim News Agency

The United States has declared as a genocide the Myanmar military’s 2017 deadly crackdown against the Rohingya Muslim minority that killed thousands and forced an exodus to neighboring Bangladesh, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Monday.

Human rights activists welcomed the move as overdue and essential for stepping up pressure on the military, and making it accountable for crimes against humanity. According to American investigators, the military was responsible for atrocities including mass killings, gang rapes, mutilations, crucifixions, and the burning and drowning of children.

Facebook failed to detect calls for violence against Rohingya after it played role in genocide, report finds

Morning Star
Tuesday, March 22, 2022

Rohingya Muslim children who crossed over from Myanmar into Bangladesh, wait squashed against each other to receive food handouts distributed to children and women by a Turkish aid agency at Thaingkhali refugee camp, Bangladesh, Saturday, October 21, 2017

FACEBOOK failed to detect dangerous hate speech and calls to violence against Myanmar’s Rohingya people, years after such posts were found to have played a determining role in the genocide against the Muslim minority, a report has found.

မြန်မာစစ်တပ်က ရိုဟင်ဂျာလူမျိုးတုံး သတ်ဖြတ်မှုကျူးလွန် ဟု အမေရိကန်အစိုးရ ဆုံးဖြတ်

ဧရာဝတီ

22 March 2022 

                                ၂၀၁၇ မောင်တောမြို့နယ်၊ ဂေါတုသာရရွာ မီးရှို့ခံရစဉ် / ဧရာဝတီ

မြန်မာစစ်တပ်က ရိုဟင်ဂျာများအပေါ် ကျူးလွန်သော ရက်စက်ကြမ်းကြုတ်မှုများသည် လူမျိုးတုံးသတ်ဖြတ်မှု နှင့် လူသားမျိုးနွယ်အပေါ် ကျူးလွန်သည့် ရာဇဝတ်မှု မြောက်ကြောင်း အမေရိကန် သမ္မတ ဘိုင်ဒင်အစိုးရက တရားဝင် ဆုံးဖြတ်လိုက်သည်။

ယင်းသည် အာဏာသိမ်း မြန်မာစစ်ကောင်စီကို အရေးယူရန် အားထုတ်မှုများအား အထောက်အကူ ဖြစ်နိုင် ကြောင်း ရိုဟင်ဂျာအရေး လှုပ်ရှားသူများက ပြောသည်။

အမေရိကန် နိုင်ငံခြားရေးဝန်ကြီး မစ္စတာ အန်ထော်နီ ဘလင်ကန်သည် ထိုဆုံးဖြတ်ချက်ကို ဝါရှင်တန်ရှိ အမေရိ ကန် လူမျိုးတုံးသတ်ဖြတ်မှု အမှတ်တရ ပြတိုက်တွင် တနင်္လာနေ့တွင် ကြေညာသည်။ ထိုပြတိုက်သည် လတ်တ လောတွင် ရိုဟင်ဂျာတို့၏ ဆိုးရွားလှသော ကံကြမ္မာနှင့် ပတ်သက်သည့် ပြပွဲတခု ကျင်းပနေသည်။

Why America Just Said Myanmar Carried Out a Genocide

The Atlantic

By Timothy McLaughlin

America finally used the word human rights activists had long argued applied to the campaign against Rohingya Muslims.

Four years ago, the State Department began an investigation into the Myanmar military’s brutal operation against the country’s Rohingya Muslims the prior year, which had resulted in scores of deaths and hundreds of thousands of Rohingya being pushed into Bangladesh. The report, spanning thousands of pages, was finalized when Mike Pompeo was still Secretary of State, and he ultimately opted to call the armed forces’ actions “ethnic cleansing,” a descriptive term not defined by international law.

The Rohingya crisis and questions of accountabilit

Taylor & Francis Online

Adam Simpsona Justice and Society, University of South Australia, Adelaide, AustraliaCorrespondence
adam.simpson@unisa.edu.au

Nicholas Farrelly
Pages 486-494 | Published online: 08 Sep 2020

ABSTRACT


There is no obvious end to the ongoing tragedy that faces the Muslim Rohingya communities of western Myanmar. Yet, with two important international legal cases underway at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court there are now important opportunities to maintain pressure on Myanmar’s government. Myanmar’s current government – a fusion of militarist, democratic, ethno-nationalist and conservative interests – has consistently sought to downplay the seriousness of the situation. This attitude, and the fraught, but politically effective, nexus between Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) and the military, has done much to encourage a culture of impunity among military and civilian decision-makers. Nevertheless, with crucial national elections scheduled for November 2020, and an economy battered by the global COVID-19 shutdown, Myanmar faces a confluence of grave challenges. Under these conditions, key decision-makers in Naypyitaw may hope that international scrutiny of violence against the Rohingya will fade. Given these court actions, however, this is unlikely. Whatever sympathy we may have for Aung San Suu Kyi’s predicament, she will not recover her reputation. And she will forever face hard questions about her inability to prevent, and, more importantly, refusal to condemn, ethnic cleansing.

Roving with Rohingyas….

Prothomalo
Guila Clara Kessous
Published: 08 Mar 2022

Life of Rohingya Women' by Rohingya artist Enayet Khan ,Courtesy

‘The crisis situation disproportionately affects women, girls and the most vulnerable and marginalized Rohingya refugee population groups by reinforcing, perpetuating and exacerbating pre-existing, persistent gender inequalities, gender-based violence and discrimination.’ – UN Women

The first time I was approached to work on the Rohingyas’ community was when a non-governmental organization approached me knowing my humanitarian work as an 'artivist ' (artist + activist). Indeed, as a UNESCO Artist for Peace, I am using performing art to help survivors suffering from post-traumatic stress disorderto better express themselves. This NGO saw my work in Congo with women victims of excision and decided to have me work in Bangladesh for the Rohingya women population especially.