Many Rohingya gather in port city for Zakat, alms

Financial Express
May 09, 2021

File photo used for representation purpose

Despite the government's decision not to allow Rohingya people to go outside their camps at Cox's Bazar and Noakhali's Bhashanchar, scores of refugees from Myanmar's Rakhine have entered the port city in Ramadan and staying here for collecting Jakat.

Around 1.1 million Rohingyas entered Bangladesh in 2016 to escape Myanmar junta's crackdown on the minority Muslim community in Rakhine state.

Many more Rohingyas are either entering Bangladesh to avoid Myanmarese government's continued persecution in that country's Rakhine and other northeastern states or infiltrating Bangladesh from the neighbouring country for shelter, or for livelihood.

Forty Myanmar Junta Troop Deaths Reported After Clashes with Rebel Army and Local Militia

Radio Free Asia 

2021-05-08

The fledgling National Unity Government is trying to unify numerous local “People’s Defense Forces” that have sprung up across Myanmar.

Protester holding a placard supporting the Kachin Independence Army and Kachin Independence Organization during a demonstration against the military junta in Hpakant in Myanmar's Kachin state, May 3, 2021,

Handout from Kachinwaves website via AFP

A rebel army and a local militia have killed 40 Myanmar junta soldiers in two days of fighting this week in regions near the country’s northern and western borders, witnesses reported, in what would be the largest number of casualties inflicted on security forces since the Feb. 1 military coup.

The killing of 30 regime troops by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) in the northernmost state of Kachin, and of 10 junta soldiers in the neighboring Sagaing region by a newly formed township militia were reported by villagers Friday and have not been confirmed by the rebels or the military regime.

China alarmed after strategic oil pipeline station in Myanmar is attacked

Atul Aneja

Sat, May 08 2021

New Delhi, May 8: Alarm bells are ringing loud and clear in China after Myanmar protesters have attacked a monitoring station of a strategic pipeline that ferries oil to Chinas Yunnan province.

The Irrawaddy newspaper's website is reporting that security personnel guarding the pipeline's off-take station in Mandalay were killed. The sword and machete attack on the policemen was "undoubtedly part of Myanmar's growing popular armed resistance against the regime," the daily reported.

The Myanmar military has mounted a coup a February mounted a coup that toppled elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi, triggering a cascade of high-voltage protests.

Though the pipeline has not been damaged, the bold strike, nevertheless, has jolted Beijing. And there are reasons why China should be deeply concerned.

10 Japan firms may have links with Myanmar's military junta

KYODO NEWS 
May 9, 2021

TOKYO- At least 10 Japanese companies have had direct business ties with firms affiliated with Myanmar's military or have taken part in projects that could be sources of income for the junta, a Kyodo News investigative team found recently.

The results of the probe were released Saturday amid concerns that funding and business deals by Japanese state-run and private entities may be aiding human rights abuses by Myanmar's military government, while calls are growing in the United States and European countries, as well as from shareholders, to sever ties with the junta.

Photo taken in February 2021 shows beer shelves at a supermarket store in Yangon, where products from military-affiliated companies have been removed. (Kyodo)

Such entities include the Japan Bank for International Cooperation, construction firm Fujita Corp. and property manager Tokyo Tatemono Co.

US lawmakers push back Myanmar’s unity government over Rohingya issue

Dhaka Tribune

Tribune Desk

May 9th, 2021

File Photo: Myanmar's United Nations ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun

The lawmakers said they were not convinced with NUG’s policy on the mainly-Muslim ethnic minority

Several US lawmakers have voiced against the recognition of Myanmar’s newly formed pro-democracy National Unity Government (NUG) expressing concerns about the group’s exclusion of Rohingya issue.

In a virtual hearing titled the Unfolding Crisis in Burma, US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs members questioned Kyaw Moe Tun, Myanmar’s permanent representative to the United Nations regarding the NUG position on the Rohingya.

အထူးအစီရင္ခံစာတင္သြင္းသူႏွင့္ အခ်က္အလက္ရွာဖြေ ေရးအဖြဲ႕တို႔ႏွင့္ အျပန္အလွန္ ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲမ်ား၌ ျမန္မာအၿမဲ တမ္းကိုယ္စားလွယ္က ျပန္လည္တုံ႔ျပန္ေျပာၾကား

အထူးအစီရင္ခံစာတင္သြင္းသူႏွင့္ အခ်က္အလက္ရွာေဖြေရးအဖြဲ႕တို႔ႏွင့္ အျပန္အလွန္ ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲမ်ား၌ ျမန္မာ အၿမဲတမ္းကိုယ္စားလွယ္က ျပန္လည္တုံ႔ျပန္ေျပာၾကား

(၁၉-၉-၂၀၁၉ ရက္၊ ဂ်ီနီဗာၿမိဳ႕)
ဂ်ီနီဗာၿမိဳ႕၊ ကုလသမဂၢအေဆာက္အဦ၌ က်င္းပလ်က္ရွိသည့္ ကုလသမဂၢလူ႔အခြင့္အေရး ေကာင္စီ၏ (၄၂) ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ ပုံမွန္အစည္းအေဝးကာလအတြင္း ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရး အေျခအေနဆိုင္ရာ အထူးအစီ ရင္ခံစာတင္သြင္းသူႏွင့္ အျပန္အလွန္ေဆြးေႏြးမႈႏွင့္ လြတ္လပ္ေသာ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ အခ်က္အလက္ ရွာေဖြေ ရး အဖြဲ႕(FFM)၏ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံဆိုင္ရာ အစီရင္ခံစာအေပၚ အျပန္အလွန္ ေဆြးေႏြးပြဲတို႔ကို ၁၆-၉-၂၀၁၉ ရက္ႏွင့္ ၁၇-၉-၂၀၁၉ ရက္တြင္ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ရာ၌ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံအေပၚ အထူးအစီရင္ခံစာတင္သြင္းသူ၏ အျပဳသေဘာ မေ ဆာင္သည့္ ေဝဖန္သုံးသပ္ ေျပာၾကားမႈမ်ားႏွင့္ အခ်က္အလက္ရွာေဖြေရးအဖြဲ႕၏ မွ်တမႈမရွိသည့္ အစီရင္ခံစာ တို႔ႏွင့္ပတ္သက္၍ ျမန္မာအၿမဲတမ္းကိုယ္စားလွယ္ ဦးေက်ာ္မိုးထြန္း က တုံ႔ျပန္ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။

‘No time to lose’, stop flow of deadly weapons to Myanmar military now, urges UN rights expert

UN News
Peace and Security
7 May 2021

Unsplash/Zinko Hein People holding a vigil in Yangon, Myanmar (file photo).

The United Nations independent human rights expert on Myanmar on Friday called on countries that have not yet done so, to impose arms embargo on the country urgently, to stop the “massacre” of citizens across the country.

Myanmar: UN Expert Urges States To Impose Arms Embargo

SCOOP WORLD

Press Release: UN Special Procedures - Human Rights

Saturday, 8 May 2021,

GENEVA (7 May 2021) – The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Tom Andrews, today welcomed the call by a broad number of civil society organizations to impose an arms embargo on Myanmar’s military junta, and encouraged States to take their own actions immediately.

“Stopping the flow of weapons and dual-use weapons technology into the hands of the military junta of Myanmar is literally a matter of life and death. There is no time to lose,” said Andrews.

“I applaud the efforts of more than 200 organisations to bring this to the attention of the UN Security Council. Action to stop the flow of deadly weapons into the hands of those who are using them to massacre their own people is needed now.

Myanmar: If independent media dies, democracy dies

Asia Pacific Report

Pacific Media Watch -
May 8, 2021

Molotov, one of the emerging new media outlets in Myanmar. Image: Phil Thornton/IFJ

ANALYSIS: By Phil Thornton

As chaos flows in Burma, journalists are being forced to hide in plain sight by the Burmese military, writes senior journalist and Myanmar expert Phil Thornton.

Journalists in Myanmar are being hunted and arrested by the country’s military for trying to do their job. Independent media outlets have been raided, licences revoked and offices closed.

To avoid arrest, independent journalists have gone into deep hiding, taken refuge in ethnic controlled regions or fled to neighboring countries. The military and its paid informers trawl through neighborhoods, coffee shops and scan social media for evidence to justify arresting journalists.

Myanmar insurgents burn down another government outpost

IRISH EXAMINER
ASSOCIATED PRESS REPORTERS

FRI, 07 MAY, 2021 

Anti-coup protesters burn tires and chant slogans with banner read ”The Kamayut strike will be fight for to the end when we get victory” during the demonstration against the military coup in Kamayut township Yangon, Monday, May 3, 2021. (AP Photo)

Fighters from Myanmar’s Karen ethnic minority have burned down a government military outpost after capturing it without a fight when its garrison fled, a senior Karen officer said.

The position is about nine miles from a larger camp which the Karen National Liberation Army stormed and burned 10 days earlier.

The KNLA is the armed wing of the Karen National Union, the main political organisation representing the Karen minority, whose homeland is in eastern Myanmar.

Myanmar anti-coup cage fighter arrested as protests continue

Aljazeera
7 May 2021

Warrantless arrests reported across the country as military struggles to assert control amid defiant protest and mounting death toll.

The death toll from the military crackdown since the beginning of the coup in Myanmar has already reached 772, while 3,738 are currently detained or have been sentenced [File: Stringer/Reuters]

A popular mixed martial arts fighter who joined anti-coup protests in Myanmar has been wounded by a homemade bomb and later arrested following an alleged blast – among many others in at least three cities – as the military government struggles to assert control of the country amid a mounting death toll and defiant protests.

ASEAN Chair, Secretary General to Visit Myanmar

THE IRRAWADDY
8 May 2021

The ASEAN special meeting on Myanmar in progress in Jakarta on April 24.

Three weeks have elapsed since the historic special meeting of ASEAN leaders at the organization’s Jakarta-based Secretariat, and the bloc’s chair and chief now plan to have their feet on the ground in Myanmar after the end of Ramadan next week. They are scheduled to hold further talks with the military regime leader, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, and concerned senior officials.

The visit comes amid growing calls for more assertive ASEAN action in implementing the five-point consensus agreed in Jakarta on April 24. Some critics have interpreted the lack of immediate tangible action as the bloc’s effort to buy time for the military regime.

After Working With Myanmar’s Regime, Rakhine’s Major Party Remains Divided

THE IRRAWADDY
7 May 2021

An Arakan National Party meeting at the headquarters in Sittwe in 2018.

Rakhine State’s voters and some senior party members have questioned the convictions of the Arakan National Party (ANP), the largest ethnically Rakhine party, as it begins to cuts ties with Myanmar’s regime three months after taking a seat on the military’s governing council.

ANP policy leadership committee member and spokeswoman Daw Aye Nu Sein joined the State Administrative Council (SAC), on Feb. 3 in the wake of the military coup.

However, its central executive committee meeting in Sittwe on Tuesday decided to end the party’s association with the military council.

People Displaced by Burma Army in Karen State Facing Crisis – Aid Workers Call for Food, Medicine, Clean Water to be Urgently Delivered

Karen News
07May 2021

Karen villagers bombed from their homes by airstrikes are in urgent need of food, warm clothing, medicine, sanitation and clean water. Adding to the difficulties of getting humanitarian aid to the displaced are official restrictions put in place by Thai authorities.

Karen Civil Society Organizations, delivering and providing assistance to people fleeing the Burma Army have confirmed about 7,000 Karen villagers from Papun district, northern Karen State are hiding in the Thai-Burma border area. The villages were destroyed by the Burma’s air force in retaliation for seizure of a military base on the 27th of April by the Karen National Liberation Army. It is estimated as many as 3,000 displaced Karen are reported to have fled into Thailand.

Life at disaster’s edge: What it means to start over – again and again

The New Humanitarian

Mohammad Ahtaram
COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh

Freelance researcher who left Myanmar in 2017, now living in Bangladesh’s refugee camps

We Rohingya have grown all too accustomed to starting over with nothing – through catastrophic fires and monsoon floods, or after fleeing our homeland in terror

Abdu Rohim and his family are living proof. They were among at least 48,000 people whose homes were burnt to the ground in March when an uncontrollable fire spread through parts of Bangladesh’s refugee camps.

They lost everything. Abdu’s family, including three young children and his elderly parents, are rebuilding their lives over the ashes of their former home.

“My heart breaks when I see them trembling in the cool evening wind,” he told me.

Joint Multi-Sector Needs Assessment (J-MSNA): Bangladesh Rohingya Refugees - May 2021 [EN/BN]

Assessment
Source :ISCG
6 May 2021

IOM Bangladesh Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis Response - Monthly Situation Report (April 2021)

Situation Report
Source :IOM

6 May 2021

Beyond the Coup in Myanmar: A Northern View

JUST SECURITY
by Taylor Landis

May 6, 2021

(Editor’s Note: This article is part of a Just Security series on the Feb. 1, 2021 coup in Myanmar. The series brings together expert local and international voices on the coup and its broader context. The series is a collaboration between Just Security and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School).

Disclaimer: Taylor Landis is an independent human rights expert who worked in Myanmar from 2013 to 2020. She is serving as the author of this piece on behalf of an individual in northern Burma who wished to contribute to this series but cannot be identified due to the serious security threats she currently faces. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the unnamed individual in northern Burma and do not reflect those of any institution with which Taylor is affiliated.

Three Months After Coup, Myanmar Returns to the ‘Bad Old Days’

The New York Times

By Hannah Beech
May 6, 2021
阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版

Police are now stopping random people on the streets. A group of secret informers has reappeared. The killings continue, but so does the resistance.

Protesters running as security forces arrive during a crackdown, in Ahlone township, in April.Credit...The New York Times

Every night at 8, the stern-faced newscaster on Myanmar military TV announces the day’s hunted. The mug shots of those charged with political crimes appear onscreen. Among them are doctors, students, beauty queens, actors, reporters, even a pair of makeup bloggers.

Some of the faces look puffy and bruised, the likely result of interrogations. They are a warning not to oppose the military junta that seized power in a Feb. 1 coup and imprisoned the country’s civilian leaders.

As the midnight insects trill, the hunt intensifies. Military censors sever the internet across most of Myanmar, matching the darkness outside with an information blackout. Soldiers sweep through the cities, arresting, abducting and assaulting with slingshots and rifles.

Will The UN Impose an Arms Embargo on Myanmar?

albawaba News
May 6th, 2021 -

In this file photo taken on February 8, 2021, protesters gather to demonstrate against the February 1 military coup, in downtown Yangon. STR / AFP

Highlights

Hundreds on NGOs call the UN to impose arms embargo on Myanmar amid continuous clashes with protesters.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, among over 200 non-governmental organizations, have urged the United Nations Security Council to impose an arms embargo on the junta in Myanmar for its lethal crackdown on anti-coup protesters.

Also Read :The US Must be Tough With Myanmar's Junta - UN Envoy

“No government should sell a single bullet to the junta,” the NGOs said in a joint statement on Wednesday.

The military government has been ruling the country since ousting the civil government of Aung San Suu Kyi in a coup on February 1.