Exodus of Thousands after Myanmar Unrest

Naharnet
AFP
03,June 2024

Thousands of displaced people have surged towards already overcrowded camps in western Myanmar, the U.N. said Saturday, after vicious new communal violence that has left dozens dead.

AA unable to confirm reported deaths of 100 Muslims at battlefront

Narinjara
Date: 15 March 2024 

The Arakan Army (AA) is yet to confirm the reports claiming that 70 to 100 Muslims, who were forcibly enlisted and deployed at frontlines, were killed at Ah Ngu Maw battlefront in Rathedaung township of Rakhine State.

BJP leader manifests hate against Muslim in Indian Parliament, only receives warning

Shia Wave
September 24, 2023 

BJP MP Ramesh Bidhuri, whose egregious communal comments in parliament have ignited massive outrage, received a warning today of “severe action” from Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla.

In a video from Lok Sabha, Mr Bidhuri repeatedly hurls abuses and Islamophobic slurs at Muslim MP Danish Ali while making a point.

4 Muslims youths from Sittwe sold to human traffickers

Narinjara
Date: 25 August 2023 

Four Muslim youths hailing from Sittwe township of Rakhine State were sold to the human traffickers even though a broker wrongly claimed that they would get jobs, alleged by the family members.

The youths have been identified as Mar Mauk Solin (16) from Owntawgyi (north) Muslim refugee camp, Halaya and Soyouk Tamin from Khaung Dukkar village and Tahay from Bodufa village.

Myanmar: A New Muslim Insurgency in Rakhine State

Crisis Group
15 December 2016 

Recent attacks by an émigré-led force of trained Rohingya fighters mark a dangerous turn. To remove a main root of the violence – Rohingya despair – the government must reverse longstanding discrimination against the Muslim minority, moderate its military tactics, and reach out to Myanmar’s Muslim allies. 

Executive Summary

The deadly attacks on Border Guard Police (BGP) bases in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State on 9 October 2016 and the days following, and a serious escalation on 12 November when a senior army officer was killed, signify the emergence of a new Muslim insurgency there. The current violence is qualitatively different from anything in recent decades, seriously threatens the prospects of stability and development in the state and has serious implications for Myanmar as a whole. The government faces a huge challenge in calibrating and integrating its political, policy and security responses to ensure that violence does not escalate and intercommunal tensions are kept under control. It requires also taking due account of the grievances and fears of Rakhine Buddhists.

Failure to get this right would carry enormous risks. While the government has a clear duty to maintain security and take action against the attackers, it needs, if its response is to be effective, to make more judicious use of force and focus on a political and policy approach that addresses the sense of hopelessness and despair underlying the anger of many Muslims in Rakhine State. Complicating this is that Aung San Suu Kyi has some influence, but under the constitution no direct control over the military.

The insurgent group, which refers to itself as Harakah al-Yaqin (Faith Movement, HaY), is led by a committee of Rohingya émigrés in Saudi Arabia and is commanded on the ground by Rohingya with international training and experience in modern guerrilla war tactics. It benefits from the legitimacy provided by local and international fatwas (religious judicial opinions) in support of its cause and enjoys considerable sympathy and backing from Muslims in northern Rakhine State, including several hundred locally trained recruits.

The hidden plight of Myanmar’s double minorities

Frontier 

Myanmar
CHRISTOPHER WIN
April 4, 2023
OPINION

Participants in a forum for youth of the Maramagri ethnic group in 2017. (Supplied)

 

Even after democratic reforms were launched in 2011, whenever I travelled from Rakhine State to Yangon, immigration officers would take me off the bus and force me to recite Buddhist prayers from memory. My national ID card identified me as a member of the predominantly Buddhist Maramagri ethnic minority group, but my South Asian features meant I had to prove my religion every time. Aside from the humiliating discrimination I suffered, the subtext was clear – if I had been Muslim, I wouldn’t be allowed to travel at all.

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]

The Rise of Muslim Millenarianism in Malaysia

THE I DIPLOMAT

Muhammad Haziq Bin Jani

March 02, 2022

Eschatological or “end-times” narratives have become increasingly popular among Malaysian Muslims.

Economic uncertainty and a fractured political landscape may be triggering a new wave of Islamic resurgence in Muslim-majority Malaysia. In the 1970s and 1980s, various strains of Islamist discourse penetrated civil society and the already identity-based political scene. During that period, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) declared the ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) kafir, while the latter co-opted the Islamist youth activist Anwar Ibrahim into its ranks and expanded the country’s religious bureaucracy.

Illegal entrant tests positive for COVID-19 in Maungdaw Twsp

DMG
DMG Newsroom

11 June 2021, Maungdaw

One of 19 Muslims in Maungdaw Township who entered Arakan State illegally from Bangladesh was found to have been infected with coronavirus, according to a source from the Maungdaw District People’s Hospital.

The person has been identified as 36-year-old Mamat Taw Yup from the Balukhali refugee camp in Bangladesh. He tested positive for the virus on June 10, according to the medical superintendent of the Maungdaw District People’s Hospital, Dr. Nu Kay Thi San.

Concern among Muslims over halal status of COVID-19 vaccine

ARAB NEWS
AP
December 20, 2020

• Spokespeople for Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca have said that pork products are not part of their COVID-19 vaccines
• But limited supply and preexisting deals worth millions of dollars with other companies means that some countries with large Muslim populations will receive vaccines that have not yet been certified to be gelatin-free

JAKARTA: In October, Indonesian diplomats and Muslim clerics stepped off a plane in China. While the diplomats were there to finalize deals to ensure millions of doses reached Indonesian citizens, the clerics had a much different concern: Whether the COVID-19 vaccine was permissible for use under Islamic law.

As companies race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine and countries scramble to secure doses, questions about the use of pork products — banned by some religious groups — has raised concerns about the possibility of disrupted immunization campaigns.

US voices concern on Bangladesh transfer of Rakhine Muslims

MYANMAR TIMES 

AFP
14 DEC 2020

Northern Rakhine refugees disembark from a Bangladesh Navy ship to the island of Bashar Char in Noakhali on December 4. Photo: AFP

The United States on Thursday voiced concern over Bangladesh's transfer of Northern Rakhine Muslim refugees to a low-lying island and said that any movement should be voluntary.

Bangladesh, which has taken in nearly one million refugees who fled a brutal offensive in neighboring Myanmar, has started the relocation of 100,000 of them from squalid camps on the mainland to Bhashan Char, a silt island frequently in the path of cyclones.

The Rohingya, Rising Asian Islamophobia and the Tenuous State of Muslim- Buddhist Relations in Contemporary Southeast Asia

OXFORD ISLAMIC ONLINE STUDIES
Asst. Prof. Dr. Imtiyaz Yusuf
Lecturer and Director Center for Buddhist-Muslim Understanding College of Religious Studies Mahidol University

A Brief History of the Rohingya

I heard about the case of the Arakan Muslims some thirty years ago, when few people knew about them. The first ever well-documented information and research about the Rohingya, who were described as insurgents, was done by an Israeli diplomat named Moshe Yegar. Yegar was posted as the Second Secretary at the Israeli Embassy in Rangoon (Yangon) in 1960s. His two books, titled: Between Integration and Secession: The Muslim Communities of the Southern Philippines, Southern Thailand, and Western Burma/Myanmar and The Muslims in Burma: A Study of a Minority Group, are indispensible in order to learn and research about the Rohingya and Muslims of Burma, both of whom have different historical trajectories (Yegar 1972).

UK accuses China of 'gross' human rights abuses against Uighurs

B B C

19 July 2020 

 China's ambassador Liu Xiaoming: "There is no such concentration camp in Xinjiang"

UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has accused China of "gross and egregious" human rights abuses against its Uighur population and said sanctions against those responsible cannot be ruled out.

Reports of forced sterilisation and wider persecution of the Muslim group were "reminiscent of something not seen for a long time", he told the BBC.

3 Rohingya Muslims killed in Myanmar shelling

AA

Kyaw Ye Lynn 

YANGON, Myanmar

29.02.2020 

Artillery shells land in Rohingya villages in western Rakhine state, official says 

At least three Rohingya Muslims were killed and at least 10 other villagers injured after an artillery shell hit a village in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state on Saturday, an official said.

The incident happened in two Rohingya villages in Mrauk-U township on Saturday shortly after Arakan Army -- a predominantly Buddhist ethnic group -- attacked a military convoy carrying out the regular patrol in the area.

'We have no dreams': Rohingya despair after deportation from Saudi Arabia

MIDDLWEAST EYE

Kaamil Ahmed

Kutupalong camp, Bangladesh

6 January 2020 

Bashir, 65, was deported from Saudi Arabia after working in the country for 20 years (MEE/Kaamil Ahmed)

As he scanned the Bangladeshi hills for the first time, Mohammed Faruque thought about how quickly he'd lost everything he'd spent years working for.

He was stepping off a bus empty-handed, joining his family in the foreign land they now lived in as refugees, a city of plastic sheeting in place of the ancestral villages that had been home in Myanmar.

Why it can be difficult being Muslim in Myanmar

B B C

27 August 2019

Since the Rohingya crisis erupted in 2012, some Muslims in Myanmar say they now face greater discrimination.

This video has been optimised for mobile viewing on the BBC News app. The BBC News app is available from the Apple App Store for iPhone and Google Play Store for Android. 

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Link :https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-49428191/why-it-can-be-difficult-being-muslim-in-myanmar

Integration should not be a one-way street

Frontier
MYANMAR
Opinion
Saturday, August 03, 2019
By THAN TOE AUNG | FRONTIER

Advocates of interfaith harmony gather at central Yangon's Mahabandoola Park in May 2016. (Steve Tickner | Frontier)  

It’s time for us to embrace the idea that you can wear a beard, kurta or hijab, and have a Muslim name, and still be fully Burmese.

ONE OF Burma’s most prominent monks, Sitagu Sayadaw, once observed that Muslims are “guests” and Buddhists are “hosts”, and that “the guests must obey the hosts”. Similarly, I have heard Buddhists say that Muslims in Burma (a name I use in preference to Myanmar) need to respect Buddhist culture and “assimilate” into it.

Aung San Suu Kyi meets with Hungary’s Orbán to lament their “growing Muslim populations”

Vox
By Alex Ward
@AlexWardVox
alex.ward@vox.com  
Jun 7, 2019

This continues the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s fall from grace.

Aung San Suu Kyi and Viktor Orbán meet in Hungary on June 5, 2019. MTI/Miniszterelnöki Sajtóiroda

Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who was once lauded internationally for her efforts to bring democracy to Myanmar, made a rare trip to Europe this week.

But the civilian leader’s purpose this time wasn’t to champion human rights and democracy. It was to meet with far-right Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán to lament the “continuously growing Muslim populations” in both of their countries.

The new Muslim citizens of Ramree Island

Frontier
MYANMAR
By MRATT KYAW THU | FRONTIER

 Pink-coloured Citizenship Scrutiny Cards (pictured) grant the bearer the rights of full Myanmar citizenship. (Nyein Su Wai Kyaw Soe | Frontier)

A village on Rakhine State’s Ramree Island is at the centre of a controversy around the granting of citizenship to thousands of Muslims, with some alleging corruption. 

MORE THAN 3,000 Muslims were issued citizenship cards last year in Rakhine State’s Ramree Township. In an unprecedented move, five immigration officers spent eight months in an isolated village to complete the process.

673- Muslim Minority-State Relations Edited by Robert Mason