Amnesty blasts Myanmar military's ‘utter disregard’ for civilians in Rakhine

 Myanmar Now

Published on Oct 13, 2020

Rights group says it has new evidence of indiscriminate attacks on civilians 

An IDP camp in Rathedaung, Rakhine, that houses over 700 people (Kaung Mrat Naing/Myanmar Now) 

Myanmar’s military has shown an “utter disregard” for civilians caught up in its conflict with the Arakan Army (AA), Amnesty International said on Monday.

Citing witness testimonies, satellite images, and videos obtained from within Rakhine state, the group said in a report it had found “new evidence of indiscriminate attacks on civilians.”

“The Myanmar military’s utter disregard for civilian suffering grows more shocking and brazen by the day,” said Ming Yu Hah, Amnesty’s deputy regional director for campaigns. 

“The UN Security Council must urgently refer the situation in Myanmar to the International Criminal Court,” she added.

Rohingya fear deportation after Saudi Arabia calls on Bangladesh to give minority passports

M&E

MIDDLE EAST EYE

Areeb Ullah  

Date: 14 October 2020

 

Riyadh threatens Dhaka with curbing migration if it fails to adhere to its request, which could be disastrous for Bangladesh's economy

Rohingya refugees living in Malaysia shout slogans during a protest against the treatment of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, in Kuala Lumpur on 8 September 2017 (AFP)

 

Rohingya living in Saudi Arabia are worried that Riyadh will deport them, after the kingdom threatened Bangladesh with a migration ban unless Dhaka gave Bangladeshi passports to members of the persecuted minority.

Last month, Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen confirmed in a Dhaka press conference that Riyadh had made the request for Bangladesh to give Rohingya living in Saudi Arabia Bangladeshi citizenship.

UN voices ‘deep alarm’ over violence against children in Myanmar

UNB

UNB News,Dhaka
October 15, 2020,

             A settlement in Rakhine province, northern Myanmar. Photo:UN News (File)

UN agencies in Myanmar have voiced “deep alarm” over an alarming increase in reports of killings and injuries of children in Myanmar.

The UN agencies also expressed "sadness and shock" over the killing of two boys, allegedly used as human shields by security forces in the country’s northern Rakhine State, earlier this month.

In a statement, the UN agencies -- co-chairs of the UN Country Taskforce on Monitoring and Reporting on Grave Violations against Children in Myanmar (CTFMR) -- called for a “full, transparent, and expedited investigation into the incident” and for anyone responsible for the use and killing of the children to be held accountable.

USAID Mission Director Aler Grubbs Remarks at the virtual launch of Myanmar’s Beneficial Ownership Disclosure Website

 

 

 

 

 

 

U.S.Embassy in Burma
October 14, 2020

Remarks as Prepared for USAID Mission Director Aler Grubbs

at the virtual launch of Myanmar’s Beneficial Ownership Disclosure Website

 

Honorable Deputy Minister U Maung Maung Win, Director General U Thant Zin Lwin, National Coordinator U Aye Lwin, representatives of the Government of Myanmar, representatives of civil society, representatives of the private sector, distinguished guests. I am glad to join for this important launch of Myanmar’s newly upgraded Beneficial Ownership Disclosure Website. Thank you for your continued effort and partnership to improve transparency and accountability in Myanmar’s extractives industry.

မြန်မာရွေးကောက်ပွဲပြီးပါက ရိုဟင်ဂျာများနေရပ်ပြန်ရေး အမေရိကန်က ထပ်မံညှိနှိုင်းမည်

Myanmar Top News
October 15, 2020

နိုဝင်ဘာ ၈ ရက်တွင် မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ၌ကျင်းပမည့်အထွေထွေရွေးကောက်ပွဲပြီးပါက မြန်မာနိုင်ငံသို့ ရိုဟင်ဂျာများ နေ ရပ်ပြန်ရေးနှင့် ရခိုင်ပြည်နယ်တွင် လူ့အခွင့်အရေးချိုး ဖောက်မှုများအတွက် အမေရိကန်နိုင်ငံက မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ နှင့်အသစ်တဖန်ပြန်လည်ညှိနှိုင်းပေးမည်ဟု ဘင်္ဂလားဒေ့ရှ်ဒုတိယနိုင်ငံခြားရေးဝန်ကြီး ရှာရီယာ အာလမ်က ဗုဒ္ဓ ဟူးနေ့တွင်ပြောသည်။

“ရိုဟင်ဂျာတွေနေရပ်ပြန်စေချင်တယ်”ဟု အမေရိကန်ဒုတိယနိုင်ငံခြားရေးဝန်ကြီး စတီဖင် ဘီဂန်နှင့် ဒါကာမြို့ တွင် တွေ့ဆုံမှုအပြီး သတင်းထောက်များကိုပြောသည်။

႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာအေရး ႏုိင္ငံတကာ အလွဴရွင္ညီလာခံက်င္းပမယ္

VOA

ဗြီအိုုေအ (ျမန္မာဌာန) 

15 ေအာက္တိုဘာ၊ 2020

ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ႏိုင္ငံ ကုတုပေလာင္ ဒုကၡသည္စခန္းမွာ ဆုေတာင္းပြဲက်င္းပေနတဲ့ ႐ုိဟင္ဂ်ာမ်ား။ (ၾသဂုတ္ ၂၅၊ ၂၀၁၉)

အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စု၊ ၿဗိတိန္၊ ဥေရာပသမဂၢ (EU) နဲ႔ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားဆိုင္ရာ ကုလသမဂၢ မဟာမင္းႀကီး႐ုံး (UNHCR) တို႔ ပူးေပါင္းၿပီး ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာ အက်ပ္အတည္း ေျဖရွင္းေရး အလွဴရွင္မ်ားဆိုင္ရာ ညီလာခံကို ေရွ႕အ ပတ္ထဲ က်င္းပမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ အဲဒီညီလာခံကို ဗီဒီယိုကတဆင့္ ေအာက္တိုဘာလ ၂၂ ရက္ေန႔မွာ ျပဳလုပ္ သြားမွာ ျဖစ္ၿပီး ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြနဲ႔အတူ ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြကို လက္ခံထားတဲ့ လူမႈအသိုင္းအဝိုင္းေတြနဲ႔ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအတြင္း အိုးအိမ္ စြန္႔ခြာ ေျပာင္းေ႐ႊ႕ ေနထိုင္ေနရသူေတြကို အကူအညီ တိုးျမႇင့္ေပးဖို႔ ကမာၻ႔ႏိုင္ငံ  ေတြကို တိုက္တြန္းသြားမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

Rohingya crisis: Exiled blogger describes Myanmar violence

DW
Date:

 

Rohingya activist and blogger Nay San Lwin has been documenting torture and subjugation faced by his people in Myanmar. His blog has become one of the most reliable sources on the brutal crackdown against the Rohingya.Long before the suffering inflicted on Myanmar's prompted global outcry, Nay San Lwin's website, Rohingya Blogger, provided daily updates on the Muslim minority's everday plight.

အိုင္စီစီေရာက္ တပ္မေတာ္သားႏွစ္ဦးကို ျပန္ေတာင္းယူ မယ္ လို႔ အစိုးရ ေျပာ

လြတ္လပ္တဲ့အာရွအသံ ( RFA )

ျမန္မာဌာန | သတင္းမ်ား
သက္စုေအာင္
2020-10-14

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ေျမာက္ပိုင္းမွာ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာအေျမာက္အမ်ားကို ကိုယ္တိုင္သတ္ျဖတ္ခဲ့တယ္လို႔ ဝန္ခံထားတဲ့ တပ္ မေတာ္သားႏွစ္ဦးဟာ၊ လက္ရွိ နိုင္ငံတကာရာဇဝတ္ခုံ႐ုံး အိုင္စီစီကို ေရာက္၊ မေရာက္ အျငင္းပြားမႈေတြ ရွိေန ၿပီး၊ တကယ္လို႔ ေရာက္ေနတယ္ဆိုရင္ ျမန္မာအစိုးရအေနနဲ႔ သူတို႔ႏွစ္ဦးကို သံတမန္နည္းနဲ႔ တရားဝင္ ျပန္ ေတာင္းယူသြားမယ္လို႔ သမၼတ႐ုံး ေျပာခြင့္ရ ဦးေဇာ္ေဌးက ေျပာလိုက္ပါတယ္။

နိုင္ငံတကာဥပေဒေရးရာ ကၽြမ္းက်င္သူေတြကေတာ့ တစ္ျခားနိုင္ငံကို ေရာက္ရွိေနတဲ့ သုံ႔ပန္းကို ျပန္ေတာင္းဖို႔ ဆိုရာမွာ၊ ႏွစ္နိုင္ငံသေဘာတူစာခ်ဳပ္ လက္မွတ္ထိုးတာမ်ိဳးမရွိတဲ့အတြက္ လက္ေတြ႕မျဖစ္နိုင္ဘူးလို႔ သုံးသပ္ ပါတယ္။

IOM, UK Emergency Medical Team Continue COVID-19 Health Support for Refugees, Locals in Cox’s Bazar

IOM UN Migration
Date:10/13/20

Cox’s Bazar – From the outset of the COVID-19 health crisis in Bangladesh, humanitarian agencies in Cox's Bazar have worked around the clock to prepare to effectively respond to the outbreak in the district, which hosts one of the largest refugee settlements in the world.

Key to this enormous effort includes enhancing existing partnerships and seeking new collaborative opportunities to address the lack of technical expertise and strained human resources in an already complex refugee crisis.

Hate Speech Against Rohingya in Myanmar Election Has Worrisome Precedents

RADIO FREE ASIA
2020-10-13

Rohingya candidate Abdul Rasheed, a member of the Democracy and Human Rights Party who was barred from running in Myanmar's upcoming elections, sits in the party's office in Yangon, Aug. 12, 2020. Rights groups decried his disqualification as discriminatory and a symptom of the 'ongoing genocide' against the persecuted ethnic minority group.

AFP

Online and offline hate speech targeting Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims has reared its head in the run-up to national elections in November, as some candidates and others target the largely disenfranchised and despised ethnic minority group to gain support from voters.

Can a Lawsuit Stop a Genocide?

COMMONWEAL

By Paul C. Saunders

October 13, 2020

 

The case against Myanmar 

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh (Alamy/Mahady Hasan Riad)

On January 23, 2020, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, informally known as the World Court, rendered a historic judgment. The decree ordered the government of Myanmar to comply with several directives: to take measures to prevent genocide against the Rohingya people; to ensure that its military refrain from acts prohibited by the Genocide Convention; and to preserve evidence and submit a report to the court within four months, detailing compliance with the court’s order. The unanimous decision by the fifteen-judge court represented only the third time that the Genocide Convention has been invoked before the World Court in a contentious case—and the first case ever to consider the claims, under the convention, of non-contiguous, non-warring countries.

Anti-migrant sentiment fanned on Facebook in Malaysia

REUTERS

By Rozanna Latiff, A. Ananthalakshmi
October 14, 2020

 

 

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - As coronavirus infections surged in Malaysia this year, a wave of hate speech and misinformation aimed at Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar began appearing on Facebook.

FILE PHOTO: Rohingyas living in Malaysia protest against the treatment of Myanmar's Rohingya Muslims near the Myanmar embassy in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia September 8, 2017. REUTERS/Lai Seng Sin/File Photo

Alarmed rights groups reported the material to Facebook.

But six months later, many posts targeting the Rohingya in Malaysia remain on the platform, including pages such as “Anti Rohingya Club” and “Foreigners Mar Malaysia’s Image”, although those two pages were removed after Reuters flagged them to Facebook recently.

Bangladesh: Teen injured in Rohingya clashes dies

AA

SM Najmus Sakib 

DHAKA, Bangladesh 

13.10.2020 

File Photo

A 14-year-old boy became the latest victim of days of violence inside Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh’s southern Cox’s Bazar district, officials said on Saturday.

The victim was identified as Ziabur Rahman, son of Mohammad Arif Ullah, and a resident of the Kutupalong refugee camp.

“The boy died on Saturday morning. His parents say he was abducted after a clash on Oct. 3 and was released after a few days in injured condition. He died today at a hospital in Cox’s Bazar,” Khalilur Rahman Khan, the camp manager, told Anadolu Agency.

Myanmar: New evidence of attacks in Rakhine state

AA

SM Najmus Sakib

DHAKA, Bangladesh
13.10.2020

UN Security Council must urgently refer situation in Myanmar to International Criminal Court, says Amnesty International

Human rights organization Amnesty International announced Monday that it has gathered fresh evidence of indiscriminate attacks on civilians in western Myanmar amid an escalation in an ongoing armed conflict between the country’s military and the Arakan Army.

The evidence suggests that the Myanmar military burned villages and wounded and killed civilians in Rakhine in early September.

ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံသို႔ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာမ်ားေနရပ္ျပန္ေရးၾကန္႔ၾကာမႈအေပၚ တ႐ုတ္ႏိုင္ငံစိုးရိမ္ေန

OCTOBER 12, 2020
ဒါကာ၊ ေအာက္တိုဘာ ၁၂

ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာမ်ား ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္မွေနရပ္သို႔ျပန္မည့္လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မ်ား အထမေျမာက္ ေသးသည့္အတြက္ စိုးရိမ္ ေၾကာင္း ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္နိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာတ႐ုတ္သံအမတ္ႀကီး လီဂ်င္မင္းက တနဂၤေႏြေန႔ တြင္ေျပာသည္။

ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္နိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီး ေအေက အဗၺဒူ မိုမန္ႏွင့္ ေတြ႕ဆုံရာတြင္ေျပာျခင္းျဖစ္သည္။

ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံသို႔ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာမ်ား ျမန္ဆန္၊ ေရရွည္တည္တံ့သည့္ေနရပ္ျပန္မႈျဖစ္နိုင္ေစရန္ တ႐ုတအစိုးရေထာက္ပံ့ ေပးေရး မိုမန္ကေတာင္းဆိုသည္။

Amnesty urges UNSC to take Myanmar to ICC for military abuses

JURIST 

Becca Salamacha | U. Pittsburgh School of Law, US
October 12, 2020 

 

Amnesty International urged the UN Security Council Monday to take action against Myanmar for military abuses. Amnesty’s condemnation of Myanmar’s military action follows after reports of intensified violence between Myanmar’s military and Araken Army that led to civilian casualties.

Ethnic Rakhine in Bangladesh Protest against Myanmar’s ‘Military Aggression’

RADIO FREE ASIA

Sharif Khiam
Dhaka
2020-10-12

Members of the ethnic Rakhine community in Bangladesh hold banners as they protest in Dhaka against what they say is Myanmar’s military aggression in Rakhine state, Oct. 11, 2020.
Sharif Khiam/BenarNews

Hundreds of Bangladeshis from the mainly Buddhist, ethnic Rakhine minority group staged a rare, if not unprecedented, protest over the weekend against Myanmar’s alleged military aggression in Rakhine state, saying their community there faces operations aimed at ethnic cleansing, much like the stateless Rohingya.

An armed conflict between Myanmar government forces and the Arakan Army (AA), an ethnic Rakhine rebel group fighting for greater autonomy for the Rakhine people, intensified in early 2019. This past March, Myanmar declared it a terrorist organization.

OP-ED: Bangladesh is being held hostage

Dhaka Tribune  

Anis Alamgir

October 12th, 2020

Abandoned by all BIGSTOCK

With little support from the international arena, what is the future of the Rohingya in Bangladesh?

On October 5, Vikram Doraiswami, the newly appointed Indian High Commissioner to the country, arrived in Bangladesh. He told reporters at the land port in Akhaura: “Bangladesh is one of India’s closest friends, and thus we are eager to continue and enhance our bilateral relationship with this neighbouring country.”

Beijing is now more interested in keeping Bangladesh as a development partner through the continuous effort of distancing Dhaka from Delhi. Recently, Sino-Indian relations with Bangladesh are looking great, but the reality is different.

Rohingya Refugees, Workers Raise Funds to Help Ethnic Rakhines Displaced by War

RADIO FREE ASIA

2020-10-12 

Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, are shown raising funds for ethnic Rakhine displaced by fighting in Myanmar, Sept. 28, 2020.
Photo provided by citizen journalist

Rohingya Muslims both in refugee camps in Bangladesh and in cities in Myanmar are raising humanitarian relief funds for Buddhist Rakhine people displaced by fighting in their northern Myanmar state, easing traditional hostility between the two ethnic groups, sources say.

Collected funds are going to provide refugees with shelter and food amid a surge of coronavirus infections in Rakhine state, where fighting between government troops and the ethnic Arakan Army (AA) has killed nearly 300 civilians and driven more than 220,000 from their homes since late 2018.

Rohingya: Dhaka wants Suu Kyi to join talks in Beijing

Dhaka Tribune 

 UNB
October 12th, 2020 

Myanmar's leader Aung San Suu Kyi leaves the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the top United Nations court, during court hearings in a case filed by Gambia against Myanmar alleging genocide against the minority Muslim Rohingya population, in The Hague, Netherlands December 12, 2019 Reuters

Chinese Ambassador to Bangladesh Li Jiming proposed a tripartite meeting between foreign ministers of the three countries - Bangladesh, Myanmar and China

Bangladesh wants Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi to be present at a tripartite meeting in Beijing, as proposed by China to discuss Rohingya repatriation issues.

"It will not be done without her presence. She should be there," Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen conveyed to China.

Suu Kyi, state counsellor of Myanmar, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize but she has subsequently been widely criticised for doing nothing to stop the rape, murder and genocide in Rakhine, refusing to condemn the Myanmar military or acknowledge accounts of their atrocities.

The foreign minister said the number one objective of Bangladesh is to see the repatriation of the Rohingyas to their place of origin in Rakhine State.