China-Mediated Plan to Repatriate Rohingya Refugees to Burma Advances Despite Fears of More Violence

DEMOCRACY NOW!
Nov 01, 2023

Burma is formalizing efforts to repatriate Rohingya refugees who’ve fled genocide and persecution since 2017. Burmese officials met with Rohingya refugee families in Bangladesh Tuesday to discuss the repatriation plan, which was negotiated by Burma, Bangladesh and China back in April. Burma has said it’s ready to accept the return of some 3,000 Rohingya refugees by December. But refugees have refused to go back, fearing further violence. Rohingya leaders said certain demands should be met, including resettlement to their own land and being granted citizenship. Rohingya community members have also said they’ve been threatened into accepting repatriation, while Burmese officials claim the move would be voluntary. About 1 million Rohingya refugees live in Bangladesh. 

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Burma–Bengal Crossings: Intercolonial Connections in Pre-Independence India

Devleena Ghosh
University of Technology, SydneyCorrespondence
Devleena.Ghosh@uts.edu.au
Pages 156-172 | Published online: 21 Mar 2016

Abstract

The large-scale movement of people between Burma and Bengal in the early twentieth century has been explored recently by authors such as Sugata Bose and Sunil Amrith who locate Burma within the wider migratory culture of the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and Southeast Asia. This article argues that the long and historical connections between Bengalis and Burmese were transformed by the British colonisation of the region. Through an analysis of selected literary texts in Bengali, some by well-known and others by obscure writers, this article shows that, for Indians, Burma constituted an elsewhere where the fantastic and superhuman were within reach, and caste and religious constraints could be circumvented and radical possibilities enabled by masquerade and disguise.

Introduction

Burma is a spectre that haunts the story of the east coast of India. Its geographical placement as one of India’s closest neighbours, sharing a thousand kilometres of common borders, is in contradiction to the elusive shadow that it intermittently casts on the emotional cartography of eastern India and, for the purposes of this paper, particularly Bengal. This lacuna in the shared and layered histories of the Eastern Indian Ocean has as much to do with shared colonial pasts as with the tendency of modern nation-states to treat relatively recent borders as sacred and inviolable, thereby denying all of the flows, movements, connections, fluidities and uncertainties that are the very stuff of human history and the imbrication of social, cultural and emotional worlds.

12th Frointer Force Regiment

12th Frointer Force

Regiment

This chapter is being re-produced with thanks from JOHN GAYLOR'S fine book 'SONS OF JOHN COMPANY'. JOHN GAYLOR, first came to India with the Royal West African Frontier Force and served in India and in Burma with the 82nd (West African) Division. He subsequently served with the London Scottish and the Special Air Service. He is the Secretary of The Military Historical Society and lives in retirement in Kent. This book is available from JOHN GAYLOR directly at £19.99 (UK) plus postage. He can be contacted at 30 Edgeborough Way, Bromley, Kent BRI 2UA Tel 44 (181) 3251391

Centre: 1923 MARDAN

1946 SIALKOT

Burma prepares the return, from mid-April, of a thousand Rohingya refugees

UK Daily News
Jason MooreMarch 22, 2023

A Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, June 2018. WONG MAYE-E / AP PHOTO

Burma has said it is ready for the return, from mid-April, of a thousand Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh under a pilot repatriation programme, a spokesman for the ruling junta said. Zaw Min Tun, Wednesday, March 22. “We will welcome the returning population in accordance with the agreement between the two countries”he said, adding that the first repatriation would concern “about a thousand people”.

Islam in Burma / Myanmar and Burmese Muslims (including Rohingya Muslims)

Who are Rohingyas?
Myanmar: Who are the Rohingya? - Al Jazeera
The Muslims of Burma: A Study of a Minority Group [PDF]
Rohingya Arakanese faces genocide in Burma
Stateless in Arakan
Rohingya: The Forgotten People of Our Time
Arakan's Muslims: A Snippet
Eyewitness: Report on the Situation of Muslims in Burma
The Rohingya Minority: Fundamental Rights Denied - Amnesty International, May 2004 [PDF]
Burmese refugees in Bangladesh: Still no durable solution - Human Rights Watch, May 2000
Crackdown on Burmese Muslims - Human Rights Watch, July 2002
Hidden Hands Behind Communal Violence in Myanmar: Case Study of the Mandalay Riots -            Justice Trust Policy Report (March 2015) [PDF]
HEAR OUR SCREAMS! Making a case for the Rohingya genocide [PDF]

Rohingya issue: Problem of ‘illegal foreigners’ in India

THE TIMES OF INDIA
August 21, 2022,
SD Pradhan in Chanakya 

The recent debate in the media on the status of Rohingyas have brought their intractable problem to the forefront. A look at the facts is relevant to the issue to understand its legal and security dimensions as also deep-seated hatred between the Burmese and Rohingyas.

The Rohingyas claim that they constitute an ethnic Muslim minority (predominantly Sunnis), who lived in Rakhine (earlier Arakan), speaking a distinct language since the 8th AD. There is evidence available that between 9th and 14th Century, they came into contact with Arab traders and got converted to Islam and the Mrauk U kingdom from 1429 to 1785, encouraged the settlement of Muslims in the Arakan area. According to Dr Francis-Buchanan a British geographer and physician, in 1785 Bamar- the ethnic Burmese group- occupied Rakhine and pushed out about 35,000 Rohingyas, who migrated to Bengal in British India to escape atrocities, while some others continued to stay there.

Secretary Antony J. Blinken on the Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity in Burma

Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State
Holocaust Memorial Museum
Washington, D.C.
March 21, 2022

SECRETARY BLINKEN:  Thank you very much, and good morning, everyone.  Stu, thank you for those very kind words, but also thank you for so many decades of extraordinary service to this country and to its ideals.

This is something of a sacred place for me.  Every time I walk through these doors, it has the same impact.  And so I’m grateful to Sara and her leadership of this institution; Naomi, who walked us through the extraordinary exhibit on the story, the plight of the Rohingya that we’ll be talking about today.  I urge everyone:  Come, see this.  Experience this.  It will speak incredibly powerful to you.

History of Buddhism in Burma A.D 1000 - 1300 By Dr. Than Tun

A History of Modern Burma By Michael W. Chaney

The Making of Modern Burma by Than Myint-U

The Making of Burma By Dorothy Woodman

The Allied Campaign in Northern Burma ( 1943-1944 ) by Stilwell and The Chindits.

Memories of Burmese Rohingya Refugees Contested Identity and Belonging by Kazi Fahmida Farzana

Forgotten Voices of Burma by Julian Thom

Burma Victory ( March 1944 - May 1945 ) by David Ronney

Burma Road ( 1943-1944 ) Stilwell's assault on Myitkyina Jon Daimond

End of First Englo-Burmese War by Anna Allott

 

British Burma in the New Century 1895-1918 by Stephen L.Keck

 

Burma is in a flux

The Manila Times

Akash Sahu
June 29, 2021

( COMMENTARY )

ART has a unique ability to transport the mind to the past, making it easier to draw inferences on current realities. The 1949 song 'Mere piya gye Rangoon' features popular Indian singer Shamshad Begum as a woman bewailing her husband, who has gone to Burma for better opportunities. It paints an early 20th century picture when hundreds of Indians flocked to the Burmese capital of Rangoon laden with economic potential. Europeans, Indians, Burmese and Chinese, sometimes with mixed ethnicities and plural religious faiths, thrived in the fast-growing city of Rangoon in a prospering Burma.

Burma and Bangladesh - Regional Crisis Response Fact Sheet #5, Fiscal Year (FY) 2021

Situation Report
Source :USAID
Posted7 Jun 2021

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