Barred From U.S. Under Trump, Muslims Exult in Biden’s Open Door

The New York Times

Declan Walsh
Jan. 23, 2021

Few foreigners welcomed President Biden’s election victory as enthusiastically as the tens of thousands of Muslims who have been locked out of the United States for the past four years.

A protest in New York in 2017 in opposition to President Donald J. Trump’s executive order preventing people from several majority Muslim countries from entering the country.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times 

 

NAIROBI, Kenya — As the results of the American presidential election rolled in on Nov. 4, a young Sudanese couple sat up through the night in their small town south of Khartoum, eyes glued to the television as state tallies were declared, watching anxiously. They had a lot riding on the outcome.

A year earlier, Monzir Hashim had won the State Department’s annual lottery to obtain a green card for the United States only to learn that President Donald J. Trump, in his latest iteration of the “Muslim ban,” had barred Sudanese citizens from immigrating to the United States.

Bangladesh to buy Myanmar rice, putting aside Rohingya crisis

REUTERS
Ruma Paul
APAC
January 24, 2021 

General view of a rice field in a valley in Nyaung Shwe, Shan state, Myanmar, November 6, 2019. REUTERS/Ann Wang

 

DHAKA (Reuters) - Bangladesh will buy 100,000 tonnes of rice from Myanmar, putting aside a rift over the Rohingya refugee crisis as the government races to overcome a shortage of the staple food for the country’s more than 160 million people.

High rice prices pose a problem for the Dhaka government, which is ramping up efforts to replenish its depleted reserves after floods last year ravaged crops and sent prices to a record high.

Muslim-majority Bangladesh and mostly Buddhist Myanmar have been at odds over the more than 1 million Muslim Rohingya refugees in camps in southern Bangladesh. The vast majority of them fled Myanmar in 2017 from a military-led crackdown that U.N investigators said was executed with “genocidal intent” - assertions that Myanmar denies.

Entire education system in Cox's Bazar under threat: CCNF

The Daily Star

Star Online Report
January 23, 2021 

With a blank look on her face, a Rohingya child stands outside her shelter at Balukhali camp in Cox's Bazar on Sunday. File photo/Anisur Rahman

Cox's Bazar CSO-NGO Forum (CCNF) has called for taking up special rehabilitation programmes for local educational institutions and students affected by the Rohingya influx in Cox's Bazar in 2017.

The network of 50 local NGOs and civil society organisations also demanded introduction of education for Rohingyas with Myanmar curriculum to make Rohingya repatriation sustainable.

The CCNF made the call in a statement on the occasion of International Day of Education on January 24.

Indonesia seeks a safe return of Rohingya to Myanmar

mizzima

Mizzima
24 January 2021

File) Rohingya refugees take rest after disembarking from a boat at Rancong Beach, Lhok Seumawe, North Aceh, Indonesia, 07 September 2020. Photo: EPA

This week Indonesia called on Myanmar to create safe conditions in Rakhine state for the return of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, as Southeast Asian foreign ministers met and expressed support for the repatriation plan, according to RFA.

At the same time, a regional parliamentarians group criticized the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for “pushing the return of the Rohingya refugees” to “a place that is completely unsafe.”

Around 1 million Rohingya refugees live in camps in Bangladesh, over 700,000 having fled from fighting in Rakhine State in 2017.

Myanmar committed Rohingyas repatriation under 2017 agreement with Bangladesh

The Indian Awaaz

INDIAN AWAAZ

23/01/2021

AMN/ WEB DESK

 

 

Myanmar Minister for International Cooperation Kyaw Tin has said that Myanmar is committed to start the repatriation of Rohingyas under the 2017 agreement with Bangladesh. The Minister pointed out that Myanmar had taken back Rohingyas in 1978 and 1992 on the basis of mutual talks.

According to a press release issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) of Bangladesh yesterday, Myanmar minister said in a letter to the Bangladesh Foreign Minister that Myanmar is committed to resolve all issues of mutual interest peacefully with it.

He expressed the hope that the tripartite meeting between Bangladesh, Myanmar and China held on January 19 would help in starting the repatriation of Rohingyas to Myanmar.

Earlier, Bangladesh had expressed ‘cautious optimism’ at the tripartite meeting held between Bangladesh, Myanmar and China.

News Analysis: Myanmar's words not enough at all

Dhaka Tribune  

Humayun Kabir Bhuiyan
January 24th, 2021

Ships of Bangladesh Navy carry Rohingya people to Bhashan Char in Noakhali on Tuesday, December 29, 2020 Mahmud Hossain Opu/Dhaka Tribune

 

If Myanmar had lived up to its oral and written pledges, the Rohingyas would have been back home in Rakhine a year ago

For the last few days, apparently optimistic words with respect to the beginning of the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of persecuted Rohingyas sheltered in Cox's Bazar are coming from the hierarchies of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Actually, these are not their words. They are just relaying the words that Myanmar has said to them. 

After a tripartite meeting among Bangladesh, Myanmar and China, Foreign Secretary Masud Bin Momen said that Dhaka was cautiously optimistic about Rohingya repatriation from the second quarter of 2021.

Rohingya case may face delay at The Hague

AA

Riyaz ul Khaliq

ANKARA

24.01.2021 

Myanmar raises objections to Gambia's eligibility in Rohingya case before International Court of Justice 

File Photo

 

A final decision at the UN’s top court in the legal battle against Myanmar for the alleged genocide of Rohingya Muslims could be delayed, as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is first set to rule on objections filed by Myanmar.

A legal summary prepared by the New York-based Global Justice Center, shared with Anadolu Agency, stated that Myanmar has raised objections over whether the western African country of Gambia was eligible to file the November 2019 case alleging that Myanmar’s atrocities against the Rohingya in Rakhine state violate the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

“The ICJ’s final ruling on whether Myanmar violated the Genocide Convention, and what reparations are therefore necessary, will be delayed by the time it takes for the court to hear arguments and decide on the preliminary objections, a delay of likely at least a year,” the center said.

Rohingya Crisis: Dhaka seeks active global support

The Daily Star 

January 24, 2021
Unb, Dhaka

Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen. File photoForeign Minister AK Abdul Momen. File photo

Bangladesh has sought effective and proactive support from the international community to find a solution to the Rohingya crisis apart from management of the huge displacement.

"We need effective and proactive support from the international community to manage this huge displacement," said Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen.

He said the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) provides a voluntary, non-binding and government-led process to discuss all possible solutions.

The minister also said they had the firsthand experience as Bangladesh is hosting 1.1 million Rohingyas who were forcibly displaced from their ancestral home and a good number of Bangladesh population was regularly displaced due to erratic climate change every year.

Indonesia Urges Myanmar to Create Safe Conditions for Rohingya Repatriation

THE I DIPLOMAT

Sebastian Strangio
January 22, 2021

Conditions in Rakhine State are unlikely to be amenable to the safe return of refugees any time soon. 

Indonesia has called on the government of Myanmar to create safe conditions for the return of hundreds of thousands of Muslim Rohingya refugees currently living in Bangladesh. The country’s Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi issued the call at a news conference on January 21, after an online meeting of foreign ministers from the 10 nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

“Indonesia earnestly hopes that the Myanmar government can immediately create favorable conditions in Rakhine State so that repatriation can be done voluntarily, safely, and in a dignified manner as soon as possible,” Retno said.

Rohingyas to be repatriated as per 2017 deal: Myanmar minister writes to FM Momen

The Daily Star

UNB, Dhaka
January 22, 2021

Myanmar is committed to begin the repatriation of Rohingyas as per the bilateral agreement signed with Bangladesh in 2017, said Myanmar's International Cooperation Affairs Minister Kyaw Tin in a recent letter to Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen.

A Rohingya refugee repairs the roof of his shelter at the Balukhali refugee camp in Cox's Bazar on March 5, 2019. File photo: Reuters

Kyaw hoped to begin the repatriation of Rohingyas to Myanmar soon.

A tripartite talk between Bangladesh, Myanmar and China regarding the Rohingya repatriation was held on January 19.

Biden Administration to Probe Rohingya Genocide Claim

THE I DIPLOMAT

Sebastian Strangio
January 21, 2021

What would it mean for the U.S. government to officially declare the Myanmar atrocities “genocide”?

The incoming Biden administration is reportedly planning to launch an interagency review to determine whether Myanmar’s fierce persecution of its Muslim Rohingya minority amounts to genocide. The plan was revealed by incoming Secretary of State Antony Blinken during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee earlier this week, during which he said that if confirmed, he would oversee the review process.

The review would examine events that have taken place since August 2017, when the Myanmar army, or Tatmadaw, launched a brutal “clearance operation” in Rakhine State in the west of the country. Justified as a response to scattered attacks by Rohingya militants, the offensive saw soldiers and vigilantes torch villages, shoot civilians, and drive an estimated 750,000 desperate people over the border into Bangladesh.

There is compelling case to be made that the actions of the Myanmar military amount to genocide, as defined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, which defines the crime as an “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” The United Nations’ human rights chief has previously described the military’s actions as possible “acts of genocide,” while formal charges of genocide were later brought against Myanmar by The Gambia in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. In January 2020, the ICJ declared that there was prima facie evidence of breaches of the Genocide Convention, warning that the estimated 600,000 Rohingya remaining in Myanmar were “extremely vulnerable” to attacks by the military.

Myanmar: Trafficking issues, plight of Rohingyas in Thailand

ORF  OBSERVER RESEARCH FOUNDATION

Monitors
Jan 21 2021

South Asia Weekly | Volume XIV; Issue 3
News and analyses from South Asia this week.

Enot Poloskun — iStock/Getty

Sreeparna Banerjee

In an appalling event, last week, 19 Rohingyas and a Thai woman accused of housing them were arrested for illegal entry into Thailand. Another group of 100 Rohingyas were uncovered from Yangon in Myanmar. Both these groups were bound to travel to Malaysia in search of a better life. In addition, there are reports that around 33 Thai officials along with civilians will be charged with disciplinary action for facilitating human-trafficking along the Thai-Myanmar border.

This discovery comes at a time when people of Thailand are accusing migrant workers from Myanmar as being responsible for the rising number of the Covid-19 cases in the country. After two months of hate-speech and confusion, Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha was tactful in stating that the recent infections were due to foreign workers smuggled across Thai border and had nothing to do with Myanmar migrants per say. On a positive note, this entire event also uncovered the difficult conditions that the migrant workers, especially those from Myanmar, are facing in Thailand.

US: President Joe Biden signs order to end Trump's Muslim travel ban

Business Standard

ANI | US
January 21, 2021

Hours after taking the office, Biden on Wednesday signed 17 executive orders memorandums and proclamations including ending the Muslim travel ban

US President Joe Biden signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, after his inauguration as the 46th President of the United States 

 

In a blow to his predecessor Donald Trump's actions to limit immigration, US President Joe Biden on Wednesday has ended the 'Muslim travel ban', which blocked travel to the United States from several predominantly Muslim and African countries.

Hours after taking the office, Biden on Wednesday signed 17 executive orders memorandums and proclamations including ending the Muslim travel ban.

He has directed the State Department to restart visa processing for individuals from the affected countries and to develop ways to address the harm caused to those who were prevented from coming to the United States because of the ban, The New York Times reported.

ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာအေရး နိုင္ငံတကာဖိအား ေလၽွာ့ခ်နိုင္မယ့္ နည္းလမ္း

MCN TV NEWS CHANNEL

2021 Jauary 2021

❖   ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာအေရး နိုင္ငံတကာဖိအား ေလၽွာ့ခ်နိုင္ဖို႔ ေဒသခံ နိုင္ငံေရး အင္အားစုအသီးသီးနဲ႔ ညႇိႏွိုင္းေဆာင္ ရြက္ ဖို႔က NLD အစိုးရ ဒုတိယသက္တမ္းမွာ ဘယ္ေလာက္ အေရးအႀကီးဆုံး ျဖစ္ေနပါလဲ။

❖ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္အေျခစိုက္ ရခိုင္အမ်ိဳးသားပါတီ ANP ရဲ့  မူဝါဒေရးရာဦးေဆာင္ေကာ္မတီဝင္ျဖစ္သလို ေျမပုံ ၿမိဳ႕ နယ္ ျပည္သူ႔လႊတ္ေတာ္ကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ဦးေဖသန္နဲ႔ ေမးျမန္းတင္ဆက္ေပးထားပါတယ္။

Link : Here

သမ္မတ Biden လက်ထက် ဖြစ်လာနိုင်တဲ့ ကန်-မြန်မာဆက် ဆံရေး ပုံစံ

VOA
ဗွီအိုအေ (မြန်မာဌာန)
မစုမြတ်မွန်
22 ဇန်နဝါရီ၊ 2021 

 အမေရိကန်သမ္မတသစ် Joe Biden ရဲ့ ဦးစားပေးအစီအစဉ်တွေထဲမှာ ကမ္ဘာတဝန်းက ဒီမိုကရေစီမဟာမိတ်တွေ နဲ့ ဒီမိုကရေစီ ပြန်လည်ခိုင်မာအောင်လုပ်ပြီးတော့ အမေရိကန်ရဲ့ စံတန်ဖိုး ဒီမိုကရေစီမြှင့်တင်ဖို့အတွက်လည်း ပါဝင်ပါတယ်။ ဒီမိုကရေစီနဲ့ လူ့အခွင့်အရေး ကိစ္စတွေ ပြန်လည်မြှင့်တင်တဲ့အခါမှာ လူ့အခွင့်အရေးအားနည်း တယ် လို့အမြင်ခံနေရတဲ့ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံနဲ့ဆက်ဆံရေးမှာရော ဘယ်လိုဖြစ်လာနိုင်ပါသလဲ။ နိုင်ငံတကာ ငြိမ်းချမ်း ရေးနဲ့လုံခြုံရေးဆိုင်ရာ အမေရိကန်အခြေစိုက် Stimson Center တတ်သိပညာရှင်များအဖွဲ့က သုတေသီ ကိုအမ ရသီဟကို မစုမြတ်မွန်က ဆက်သွယ် မေးမြန်းထားပါတယ်။

ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြကို ေက်းရြာအုပ္စုအလိုက္ျပန္လက္ခံေရး ထပ္မံေဆြးေႏြးဖို႔ရွိ

 B B C

ဘီဘီစီၿမန္မာပိုင္း
၂၁ ဇန္နဝါရီ ၂၀၂၁

ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြကို စစ္တေကာင္းက ေရလယ္ကၽြန္း ဘာဆန္ခ်ားကို စစ္သေဘၤာနဲ႔ ပို႔ဖို႔ ၂၀၂၀ ဒီဇင္ဘာလကုန္က ျပင္ဆင္ေနစဥ္

ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္နိုင္ငံေရာက္ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ေျမာက္ပိုင္းက ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ေနရပ္စြန႔္ခြာသူေတြကို ျပန္လည္လက္ ခံေရး မွာ ေက်းရြာအုပ္စုအလိုက္ျပန္လည္လက္ခံေရးဆိုတဲ့ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ဘက္က ေျပာဆိုခ်က္ကို ျပန္လည္ ေဆြးေႏြး ဖို႔ ရွိတယ္လို႔ နိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီးဌာနရဲ့ အျမဲတမ္းအတြင္းဝန္ ဦးခ်မ္းေအးက ဘီဘီစီကို ေျပာပါ တယ္။

ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ေရာက္ ေနရပ္စြန႔္ခြာသူေတြ ျပန္လည္လက္ခံေရးနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ၿပီး ဇန္နဝါရီ ၁၉ ရက္က ျမန္မာ၊ ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္ နဲ႔ တ႐ုတ္၊ သုံးပြင့္ဆိုင္ အြန္လိုင္းအစည္းအေဝး လုပ္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။

Biden executive order repeals Trump travel ban

 Washington Examiner

Anna Giaritelli, Homeland Security Reporter

January 20, 2021

 Memorable Moments from Past Presidential Inaugurations

 

President Biden rescinded the Trump administration's travel ban against citizens from seven countries just hours after being sworn into office.

Biden on Wednesday afternoon repealed the first executive order that former President Donald Trump signed upon arriving at the White House in January 2017. The move was one of 17 reversals aimed at altering policies Trump put into effect.

That ban on travel affected countries in northern Africa and the Middle East: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Sudan. It was the first of three the Trump administration would set into action on the basis that those countries did not adequately vet travelers headed to the United States.

Biden to review whether Rohingya persecution genocide

AA

Michael Gabriel Hernandez 

WASHINGTON 

20.01.2021 

Incoming president's pick to lead State Department says he would oversee process should he be confirmed by Senate 

Antony Blinken, President-elect Joe Biden's nominee to lead the State Department 

 

The incoming Biden administration will launch an interagency review to determine whether Myanmar's persecution of its Rohingya minority amounts to genocide, President-elect Joe Biden's nominee to lead the State Department said Tuesday.

Antony Blinken said during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that if confirmed, he would oversee the process.

OPINION - Leading UN member-states fail to end Rohingya abuse

 AA

Maung Zarni
LONDON
20.01.2021

China-brokered tripartite meeting will bring no solution for either Bangladesh or Rohingya refugees

With an air of renewed optimism, Bangladesh side has widely reported on the Beijing-brokered meeting yesterday to resuscitate the repatriation process of 1 million Rohingya.

In sharp contrast, today's [Wednesday's] Global New Light of Myanmar, Naypyidaw's official mouthpiece, completely downplayed the significance of this resumed virtual meeting by sticking the news of the "Tripartite Informal Vice Ministerial Meeting" on page 6, under "National" news and allocating less a quarter of a page, at the bottom.

WFP Bangladesh | Rohingya Refugee Response Situation Report #45 - December 2020

Situation Report
Source WFP
Posted 20 Jan 2021