As US pressures Dhaka, Rohingya Crisis Looms on the Horizon

THE GEOGRAPHIC (TGP)
Mehjabin Maliha Hossain
September 2, 2023

With the election approaching, Dhaka is busy greeting foreign delegates and observers. The foreign observers are all invariably pressing for a free and fair election. It appears a balanced goal of the Westerners holding to their deep convictions of democracy and freedom. However, the policy is riddled with inconsistency and only appears subordinate to the geostrategic goals. The esteemed values of democracy and freedom are not sacrosanct per se — rather only viewed from a narrow geostrategic prism. 

Momen: Resettlement of few Rohingyas in US not a solution

Dhaka Tribune

UNB
December 8, 2022 

File photo: Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen briefs reporters on the recent Bangladesh visit of his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi, at a press conference in Dhaka on August 7, 2022 Mahmud Hossain Opu/Dhaka Tribune

Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen on Thursday said resettlement of a few Rohingyas in the US is “not a viable solution”, rather the solution is repatriation to their homeland in Myanmar's Rakhine state.

While talking to reporters, Momen said the United States is taking a few Rohingyas as a follow up to his discussion with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The foreign minister said Bangladesh is requesting big countries to take at least 100,000 Rohingyas each, to share Bangladesh's burden.

U.S. sanctions target Myanmar junta-linked businessman for procuring Russian-made weapons

REUTERS
Simon Lewis
October 7, 2022

A slogan is written on a street as a protest after the coup in Yangon, Myanmar February 21, 2021. Picture taken with iPhone panoramic mode. REUTERS/Stringer//File Photo

WASHINGTON, Oct 6 (Reuters) - The United States on Thursday imposed sanctions on a Myanmar businessman and two others involved in procuring Russian-made weapons from Belarus for the junta that seized power in the Southeast Asian country early last year, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said.

The military staged a coup in February 2021, detaining democratic leaders including Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, then violently suppressed protests, sparking a spiraling conflict.

US Announces Sanctions on Myanmar Military-Linked Arms Broker

THE I DIPLOMAT

By Sebastian Strangio

October 07, 2022

Aung Moe Myint and his Dynasty International company are accused of procuring Russian-made arms from Belarus for the military.

The United States has announced a further round of sanctions on Myanmar’s military government, targeting three individuals and one entity “for their roles related to the procurement of Russian-produced military arms from Belarus for the Burmese regime.”

In a statement announcing the sanctions, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the sanctions “aim to target those abetting the military’s ability to carry out human rights abuses.”

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. 

U.S. issues sanctions on alleged arms dealers for Myanmar junta

REUTERS
Simon Lewis, Chris Gallagher
March 25, 2022

WASHINGTON, March 25 (Reuters) - The United States on Friday imposed sanctions on alleged arms dealers and companies it said were involved in procuring weapons for Myanmar's junta, coordinating with similar measures from Canada and Britain.

The U.S. measures targeted three alleged arms dealers and two companies linked to them, as well as a conglomerate operating in the defense sector owned by alleged arms dealer Tay Za, who was already under U.S. sanctions, the U.S. Treasury said.

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?

Myanmar Junta Hits Back at U.S.’s Rohingya Genocide Declaration

Bloomberg
Khine Lin Kyaw
22 March 2022,

• Foreign Ministry says ‘never engaged in any genocidal actions’
• Shadow government urges U.S. to refer situation to ICC

Rohingya refugees wait for food distribution at the refugee camp of Balukhali in Bangladesh in Sept. 2017.Photographer: Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images

Myanmar’s military government on Tuesday rejected U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s declaration that the Min Aung Hlaing-led military committed genocide against the Rohingya minority in 2016 and 2017.

The Foreign Affairs Ministry said in a statement that “Myanmar has never engaged in any genocidal actions” and harbors no “genocidal intent” for any group. Blinken’s remarks were “politically motivated and tantamount to interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign state.”

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.

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.

Reports: US to declare Myanmar’s 2017 atrocities against Rohingya a ‘genocide’

RFA

By Shailaja Neelakantan for BenarNews
2022.03.20

The move will bring greater scrutiny on the Myanmar military, says a Rohingya activist.

Ten Rohingya men with their hands bound kneel as members of the Myanmar security forces stand guard in Inn Din village of Rakhine State, Myanmar, Sept. 2, 2017.

The United States is set on Monday to declare 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, news agencies reported.

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

Myanmar Rohingya violence is genocide, US to say Published

 B B C

2022-03-21

Rohingya Muslims are continuing to flee Myanmar

The Biden administration is to declare that Myanmar's military has committed genocide against the Rohingya minority, US officials have said.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to make the announcement when he visits the Holocaust Museum in Washington later on Monday.


Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar since the military crackdown that began in 2017.

More than 6,000 people were killed in the first month of the onslaught.

Not a Single Muslim Country Has Supported the US, Israel Too Treads a Delicate Line

T H E
C I T I Z E N
M.K.BHADRAKUMAR |
2 MARCH, 2022

The world community is aghast over the acute tensions between the United States and its NATO allies on one side and Russia on the other, which is poised critically on the brink of a military confrontation, the likes of which the world didn’t see in the entire Cold War era.

The shocking part is that it has become a no-holds barred struggle that is being fought tooth and claw, as hidden racial and religious prejudices lying just below the surface have welled to the surface in the Western world.

ေဖ့စ္ဘုတ္ကို ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္မ်ား တရားစြဲမႈ အလား အလာ

VOA
ဗီြအိုေအၿမန္မာပိုင္း
ဝင္းမင္း
11 ဒီဇင္ဘာ၊ 2021  

ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ႏုိင္ငံ ကုတုပေလာင္ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းတြင္းမွ ႐ုိဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္မ်ား။ (ဧၿပီ ၁၊ ၂၀၂၀)

႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြအေပၚ အၾကမ္းဖက္တဲ့အထိ အမုန္းတရားေတြ ျပန႔္ပြားေစတဲ့ ေရးသားေဖာ္ျပမႈေတြ၊ သတင္း မွား ေတြကို ေဖ့စ္ဘုတ္က ထိထိေရာက္ေရာက္ အေရးယူ မကိုင္တြယ္ခဲ့ဘူးလို႔ စြပ္စြဲၿပီး ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြက Meta ကုမၸဏီကို ေဒၚလာ ၁၅၀ ဘီလ်ံ ေလ်ာ္ေၾကးေပးဖို႔ အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စုမွာ ၿပီးခဲ့တဲ့ တနလၤာေန႔က တရားစြဲတင္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီစြဲဆိုမႈေၾကာင့္ လူအေျမာက္အျမား ေသဆုံးခဲ့တဲ့ ျဖစ္ရပ္အေပၚ နည္းပညာကုမၸဏီႀကီး တခုအတြက္ နာမည္ဆိုး က်န္ခဲ့လိမ့္မယ္လို႔ ၿဗိတိန္အေျခစိုက္ ျမန္မာ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာမ်ားအဖြဲ႔ ဥကၠ႒ ဦးထြန္းခင္က ေျပာပါတယ္။ ကိုဝင္းမင္းက ဆက္သြယ္ေမးျမန္း တင္ျပထားပါတယ္။

Rohingya genocide: Facebook faces massive $200 bn legal action in UK, US

Ahamedabad Mirror
06-12-2021

Rohingya genocide: Facebook faces massive $200 bn legal action in UK, US 

 

Lawyers in the UK and the US on Monday initiated coordinated legal campaigns against Facebook, now known as Meta, on behalf of Rohingya Muslims for its alleged role in facilitating the genocide perpetrated by the Myanmar regime and extremist civilians against the Rohingya people.  

 

According to the lawyers, Facebook contributed to the 2017 genocide of Rohingya Muslims by allowing hate speech against the persecuted minority to be propagated in Myanmar. The United Nations had described the violence as "a textbook example of ethnic cleansing".

UN and US condemn Myanmar military after protest reportedly turns deadly in Yangon

CNN

By Pierre Meilhan and Cape Diamond,
December 6, 2021

Protesters walk down the street to protest against the military coup and demand the release of deposed civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

(CNN)At least five people were killed in Myanmar when a vehicle plowed into anti-junta protesters this weekend, according to local media. The attack took place in a Yangon township, news outlet Myanmar Now reported Sunday, citing protesters and eyewitnesses. 

One reporter who witnessed the incident told CNN that it was a military vehicle that rammed demonstrators. 

US, China tread warily as Myanmar burns

THE STRAIT TIMES
Tan Hui Yee
Indochina Bureau Chief 

AUG 16, 2021,

Volunteers in Myanmar helping a Covid-19 patient with his oxygen supply in the town of Kale last month.PHOTO: REUTERS

Power Play is a weekly column that looks at various facets of US-China rivalry and its implications for Asia.

BANGKOK - Last Tuesday, a group of young people cornered by the Myanmar junta chose a likely death over arrest. They jumped out of a high-rise building in Yangon. The youth were quickly lionised on social media, where those resisting the Feb 1 military coup vowed vengeance.

Link : Here

Two men arrested in US over alleged plot to kill Myanmar's UN ambassador

CNN
Helen Regan and Jamie Crawford,
August 7, 2021

Myanmar UN Representative speaks after issuing plea to the world 04:35

(CNN)Two Myanmar citizens have been charged in New York with allegedly plotting to kill or injure Myanmar's ambassador to the United Nations, Kyaw Moe Tun, the US Attorney's Office said Friday.

The duo are accused of conspiring with an arms dealer in Thailand who sells weapons to the Myanmar military, to "seriously injure or kill" the ambassador "in a planned attack on a foreign official that was to take place on American soil," said Audrey Strauss, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in a statement.

U.S. says plot against Myanmar U.N. envoy fits 'disturbing pattern'

REUTERSMichelle Nichols
August 7, 2021

Myanmar's ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun addresses the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, March 11, 2019. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo/File Photo

NEW YORK, Aug 7 (Reuters) - The United States on Saturday condemned a thwarted plot to attack Myanmar's U.N. ambassador in New York, saying it fits a "disturbing pattern" of authoritarian leaders and their supporters seeking to persecute opponents around the world.