US hints at looking into Rakhine genocide, Rohingya repatriation: FM

Prothum Alo------  

UNB
Dhaka
Published: 26 Jan 2021, 

Migrants who were found adrift at sea in a boat are repatriated across the Bangladesh-Myanmar border at Ukhia on the outskirts of Cox's Bazar on June 8, 2015. AFP

Bangladesh on Tuesday said there are indications that the new US administration under President Joe Biden will look into the issue of genocide of Rohingyas in the Rakhine State and hopefully will proactively take action for their safe return to Myanmar.

"It's good news. There are indications," Foreign Minister Dr AK Abdul Momen said, adding that Rohingya problem was created by Myanmar and its solution also lies with them.

He said Bangladesh is thankful of USA’s principled stand and steadfast humanitarian and diplomatic support to Bangladesh in dealing with the Rohingya crisis since August 2017.
                                                                             

'Whatever your politics, we must urgently learn the lessons from the Holocaust'

Mirror

John Howell MP and Tulip Siddiq MP
27 JAN 2021

 

Jews alighting from a train in the Nazis' Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in 1944 (Image: AFP/Getty Images)

 

As Members of Parliament who enter the House of Commons via different lobbies, we are no strangers to working with our differences. On some occasions, however, is it important for all Britons to see their representatives join hands and January 27 – Holocaust Memorial Day – is one of those moments.

Speaking as a Christian and a Muslim, respectively, we both know that marking Holocaust Memorial Day is more important than ever. Commemorating the millions of people who were murdered in the Holocaust, under Nazi persecution and in the genocides that followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur is vital for us to learn where persecution based on faith and identity can lead.

Will vaccine nationalism lead to the exclusion of Rohingya refugees?

The Daily Star  

Md Saimum Reza Talukder
January 27, 2021

An elderly Rohingya man carries his grandson in a refugee camp in Ukhiya, Bangladesh. Photo: AP

The World Health Organization (WHO) has adopted "leaving no one behind" and "equitable access to vaccines" as the basic principles for Covid-19 vaccination around the world. GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, has also set up "equitable and sustainable use of vaccines" and "leaving no one behind" as the core of their high-level strategy for worldwide immunisation. All these strategies are in alignment with the Sustainable Development Goals. However, global vaccination is not just a mere strategy or goal. This relates to the right to healthcare, which is an integral part of the right to life and must be ensured irrespective of nationality, religion, race, creed or culture.

မြန်မာနိုင်ငံတွင်း ရိုဟင်ဂျာတို့အပေါ် Genocide ကျူးလွန်မှု ရှိ-မရှိ စိစစ်ရေးကြီးကြပ်ဖို့ ကန်ဝန်ကြီးသစ် Blinken သဘောတူ

VOA
ဗွီအိုအေ (မြန်မာပိုင်း)
28 ဇန်နဝါရီ၊ 2021

အမေရိကန် နိုင်ငံခြားရေး ဝန်ကြီးသစ် Antony Blinken က အထက်လွှတ်တော် ကြားနာ စစ်ဆေးပွဲမှာ တုံ့ပြန်

အမေရိကန် နိုင်ငံခြားရေး ဝန်ကြီးသစ် Antony Blinken က သူ့ကို ရာထူး ရာထူး ခန့်အပ် ဖို့ အတည်ပြုရေး အ ထက်လွှတ်တော် ကြားနာ စစ်ဆေးပွဲမှာ ရိုဟင်ဂျာအရေးနဲ့ပတ်သက်ပြီး အခုလို တုံ့ပြန် ဖြေကြားခဲ့ပါတယ်။

Rohingya Brides Thought They Were Fleeing Violence. Then They Met Their Grooms.

VICE
Pari Saikia
25.01.2021

In a VICE World News investigation, Rohingya women share their harrowing stories of being sold to men in Kashmir.

IMAGE: OWI LUINIC/VIC

KASHMIR, India—Her baby cradled in her arms, Muskan recalls the winter night when she was duped into traveling more than 2,000 miles to be married to a man 30 years older than her.

“My legs were swollen and hurting because of the beatings and intense cold,” Muskan told VICE World News at her house in Kashmir, a stunning but conflict-ridden mountainous valley administered by India. “I felt miserable. I couldn’t see a way out.”

Five years have passed since she made the harrowing journey from her home in Myanmar. But Muskan can’t forget the horror of being held captive in the middle of the freezing winter, locked in a room without a toilet. The traffickers wouldn’t even let her and the other young trafficked women leave to use the bathroom. Muskan said their male captors beat them when they refused to marry complete strangers, often older men suffering from mental disabilities. Many of the marriages were arranged by families who struggled to find a caretaker for these men, she said.

Rohingya Relocation: 3rd batch goes to Bhasan Char on Jan 29-30

 The Daily Star

Mohammad Al-Masum Molla
January 26, 2021

This aerial view of Bhasan Char shows a portion of the housing facilities that has been built on the island to relocate the Rohingyas from Cox’s Bazar. The authorities say that the housing is ready to host 1 lakh Rohingyas. Photo: Star 

Almost 3,000 Rohingyas will be relocated to Bhasan Char by the end of this month, a top official said.

This would be the 3rd batch of the refugees to be relocated to the island.

"The relocation will take place on January 29 and 30," said the top official of Refugee, Relief and Repatriation Commissioner (RRRC), wishing not to be named.

The RRRC is undertaking the relocation process amid concerns from the international community that the island is a risky place to live.

The first batch of 1,642 Rohingyas was relocated to Bhasan Char on December 4. Over 1,800 others were relocated on December 29.

Rohingya youth killed at Palongkhali Rohingya camp

Dhaka Tribune

Abdul Aziz, Cox's Bazar

January 26th, 2021

File photo of a Rohingya camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh Syed Zakir Hossain/Dhaka Tribune

The 25 years old was killed amid a clash between two opposing Rohingya groups in the camp

A Rohingya youth was killed in a shootout between two groups at the Palongkhali Rohingya camp in Cox's Bazar.

The deceased was identified as Mohammad Jabed, 25, a resident of block D/4 of Tanjimarakhola Rohingya refugee camp in Palongkhali union of Ukhiya upazila.

The incident took place in block D/8 of Tanjimarakhola Rohingya refugee camp in Palongkhali union of the upazila around 3am on Monday.

ကပ္ေဘးကာလအတြင္း ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြ ေနရပ္စြန႔္ခြာထြက္ ေၿပးေနဆဲ

လြတ္လပ္တဲ့အာရွအသံ ( RFA )
ျမန္မာဌာန | သတင္းမ်ား
ေနမ်ိဳးထြန္း၊ စိုးသိမ္း
2021-01-27

 

ဖမ္းမိတဲ့ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြကို ပုသိမ္တကၠသိုလ္ ေတဇေဆာင္မွာ အသြားအလာကန႔္သတ္ထားရွိတာကို ၂၀၂၁ ဇန္နဝါရီ ၂၇ ရက္ေန႔က ေတြ႕ရစဥ္ ၊Photo: Soe Thein/RFA

ကမၻာ့ကပ္ေရာဂါ ကိုဗစ္ ၁၉ ကာလအတြင္း တစ္ေနရာကေန တစ္ေနရာ အသြားအလာ ကန႔္သတ္ထားေပမယ့္ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္က အေထာက္အထားမဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ မြတ္စလင္ေတြဟာ ေနရပ္စြန႔္ခြာ ထြက္ေျပးေနၾကဆဲ ျဖစ္ပါ တယ္။

အခုလို ပြင့္လင္းရာသီမွာ အလုပ္အကိုင္ အခြင့္အလမ္းအတြက္ ကုန္းလမ္း၊ ေရလမ္းေတြကေန မေလးရွားနဲ႔ ထိုင္းနိုင္ငံေတြကို သြားဖို႔ ႀကိဳးစားတဲ့အခါ အေတာ္မ်ားမ်ားက အလိမ္ခံရၿပီး လူကုန္ကူးခံရတဲ့ျဖစ္စဥ္ေတြ ရွိေနပါ တယ္။

၂၀၂၁ ခုႏွစ္ ဇန္နဝါရီတလထဲမွာတင္ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္က ထြက္ေျပးလာတဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ၁၆၀ ေက်ာ္ ဧရာဝတီတိုင္း နဲ႔ ရန္ကုန္တိုင္းေတြမွာ ဖမ္းဆီးခံခဲ့ရပါတယ္။

ဒီေန႔မနက္ကပဲ ဧရာဝတီတိုင္း၊ ပုသိမ္ၿမိဳ႕၊ ဒိုက္ထူ စစ္ေဆးေရးဂိတ္မွာ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ၁၃ ဦး ဖမ္းဆီးခံခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ ဖမ္းဆီးရမိသူေတြနဲ႔ ယာဥ္ေမာင္း၊ ယာဥ္ေနာက္လိုက္ စုစုေပါင္း ၁၅ ဦးကို စစ္ေဆးေနတယ္လို႔ ပုသိမ္ၿမိဳ႕နယ္ ရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႕မႉး ရဲမႉးတင္လွိုင္က ေျပာပါတယ္။

ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္ေတြ ဆႏၵထည္႔သြင္းစဥ္းစားၾကဖို႔ အာနန္ ေကာ္မရွင္၀င္တိုက္တြန္း

VOA
ဗြီအိုုေအ (ျမန္မာဌာန)
မဆုမြန္
27 ဇန္နဝါရီ၊ 2021

Bhasan Char ကၽြန္းသို႔ ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္မ်ား ေျပာင္းေရႊ႕သည့္ ျမင္ကြင္း။ (ဒီဇင္ဘာ ၄၊ ၂၀၂၀)

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ ပဋိပကၡအတြင္း တရားမွ်တမႈေတြရဖို႔ ေဖာ္ထုတ္တဲ့အခါမွာ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးခ်ိဳးေဖာက္ခံခဲ့ရတဲ့ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြရဲ႕အသံေတြကို နားေထာင္ေပးၾကဖို႔နဲ႔ ေနရပ္ျပန္ေရး ဒုကၡသည္ေတြရဲ႕သေဘာထားေတြ ကို လည္း ေမးပါလို႔ ကိုဖီအာနန္ေကာ္မရွင္အဖြဲ႔ဝင္တဦးက တိုက္တြန္းလို္က္ပါတယ္။ အခုဆိုရင္ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာဒုကၡသည္ ေတြဟာ ေနရပ္ရင္းကိုလည္း ျပန္ခြင့္မရေသး စခန္းေတြထဲမွာလည္း ေနထိုင္ရက်ပ္တည္းခက္ခဲလာတဲ့အတြက္ ပင္လယ္ထဲကကၽြန္းဆီကို သြားၾကဖို႔ ဆံုးျဖတ္ေနၾကရတယ္လို႔ ဒုကၡသည္ေတြက ေျပာပါတယ္။ အေသးစိတ္ကို VOA ျမန္မာပိုင္းသတင္းေထာက္ မဆုမြန္က စုစည္းတင္ျပထားပါတယ္။ 

Myanmar: 99 Undocumented Muslims Arrested In Yangon To Be Sent Back To Arakan State

eurasiareview  

DMG  

January 25, 2021 

Muslims arrested in Shwepyithar Township, Yangon Region. Photo Credit: DMG

Officials say they are planning to return 99 Muslims to Arakan State after they arrived in Yangon Region’s Shwepyithar Township without any documents and were arrested earlier this month.

Yangon Region lawmaker U Yan Aung Min told DMG that a letter had been addressed to the Union government through the regional government to send the 26 men and 73 women back to Arakan State via a ship from the Department of Marine Administration, which is part of the Ministry of Transport and Communications.

New IRC analysis: Domestic partners perpetrate 94% of gender-based violence against Rohingya women in Cox’s Bazar

International  

RESCUE  

Committee

Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh,
Press Release
January 25, 2021 

Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, January 25, 2021 — New data from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) reveals that 94% of Rohingya women and girls living in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, who have reported incidents of Gender-Based Violence (GBV), have experienced it at the hands of their partners.

Following the onset of COVID-19, lockdown measures were introduced in Cox’s Bazar that confined many women to their shelters, often shared with their abusers. Initial IRC data from between June - December 2019, captured before the virus took hold, indicated that 81% of women who reported GBV had experienced domestic violence. Alarmingly, new IRC analysis shows that this figure has risen to 94% between January - October 2020, as the effects of the lockdown were fully realised.

Since January 2020, screening data from IRC programming shows that an average of one in four women and girls screened at health facilities and women’s in Cox’s Bazar continue to report they are survivors of Gender-Based Violence (GBV), consistent with the findings of IRC’s June 2020 Shadow Pandemic report. Despite the enormous new challenges women and girls face in reporting - including reductions in the availability of NGO services, limitations on refugees’ freedom of movement, and for many GBV survivors, quarantine at home with their abuser - the data shows a spike in reported rates of physical assault as compared to other types of violence that coincide with the first month of lockdown. In reality this is likely a fraction of the overall number.

UPR ျမန္မာေဆြးေႏြးပဲြ လူနည္းစုေဒသလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ႏိုင္ငံတကာေထာက္ျပ

VOA
ဗြီအိုေအ (ျမန္မာပုိင္း)
25 ဇန္နဝါရီ၊ 2021

ရွမ္းျပည္နယ္ရွိ ယာယီစစ္ေရွာင္ဒုကၡသည္ စခန္းတခုမွာ ေတြ႔ရတဲ့ ျမင္ကြင္း။ (ဇန္နဝါရီ ၁၃၊ ၂၀၁၉)

 

ဒီမိုကေရစီအသြင္ကူးေျပာင္းၿပီး အရပ္သားအစိုးရ တက္လာေပမယ့္လည္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံတြင္း လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး အ ေၿခအေနေတြ အထူးသျဖင့္ လူနည္းစု လူမ်ိဳးအခြင့္အေရးေတြနဲ႔ပတ္သက္လို႔ စိုးရိမ္စရာေတြ ရွိေနေသးတယ္လို႔ ႏိုင္ငံတကာက ေဝဖန္ခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ ကုလသမဂၢလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာင္စီရဲ႕ ႏိုင္ငံအလိုက္လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး အေျခ အေန ပံုမွန္သံုးသပ္ေဆြးေႏြးပဲြ UPR လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မွာ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရဲ႕ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးနဲ႔ ပတ္သက္လို႔ ဒီကေန႔ သံုး သပ္ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့ၾကတာျဖစ္ၿပီး ႏိုင္ငံတကာရဲ႕ စိုးရိမ္မႈေတြကိုလည္းေတြ႕ရပါတယ္။

ျမန္မာ့အေရး လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာင္စီမွာ ေဆြးေႏြး

လြတ္လပ္တဲ့အာရွအသံ ( RFA )

ျမန္မာဌာန | သတင္းမ်ား
ခင္ေမာင္စိုး
2021-01-25

ကုလသမဂၢလူ႔အခြင့္အေရးေကာင္စီမွာ ဇန္နဝါရီ ၁၈ ကေန ၂၉ ရက္ေန႔အထိ က်င္းပေနတဲ့ အဖြဲ႕ဝင္နိုင္ငံေတြရဲ့ ၃၇ ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး အေျခအေန သုံးသပ္ၾကားနာပြဲမွာ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံရဲ့ အေျခအေနေတြကို မေန႔က ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့ၾကပါတယ္။ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအေနနဲ႔ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအေျခအေနေတြ ပိုမိုတိုးတက္ေအာင္ ေဆာင္ရြက္ဖို႔ နိုင္ငံတကာက ေတာင္းဆိုခဲ့ၾကတဲ့ ဒီအစည္းအေဝးမွာ အစိုးရကိုယ္စားလွယ္ျဖစ္တဲ့ ျပည္ေထာင္စုေရွ႕ေနခ်ဳပ္ ဦး ထြန္းထြန္းဦးက ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ စဥ္ဆက္မျပတ္ ဖြံ့ၿဖိဳး တိုးတက္မႈေတြကို ေဆာင္ရြက္လာနိုင္တာနဲ႔အမၽွ လူ႔အခြင့္ အေရးနဲ႔ အေျခခံလြတ္လပ္ခြင့္ ေတြလည္း တိုးတက္လာမွာျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ခ်ိဳးေဖာက္မႈေတြကို အ စိုးရက စုံစမ္းစစ္ေဆးေနတယ္၊ နိုင္ငံတကာ ကတိကဝတ္ေတြကို တာဝန္သိသိ အေကာင္အထည္ေဖာ္ဖို႔ အခ်ိန္ လိုပါတယ္။ အမုန္းစကား ျဖန႔္ခ်ိမႈ နဲ႔ ဘာသာေရးကို နိုင္ငံေရးအရ အသုံးခ်မႈေတြကိုလည္း အထူးအေလးထား တားဆီးပိတ္ပင္ေနပါတယ္ စသျဖင့္ ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ပါတယ္။

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.