WFP, Korea working together to help Rohingyas in Myanmar, Bangladesh

Dhaka Tribune

Tribune Desk
July 7th, 2021

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

Korean contribution to help WFP provide assistance for over 860,000 Rohingyas living at Cox’s Bazar camps

The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has received a contribution of $800,000 from the government of the Republic of Korea to support operations in Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Inside the Myanmar mountain camp where rebels train to fight for freedom from the junta

CNN
Exclusive by Sam Kiley,
July 8, 2021

Camp Victoria, Myanmar (CNN)Full-throated they belt out songs of victory, their boots adding the drumbeat as ranks of new recruits jog in formation through their jungle training camp.

There's no doubting the shining eyes of these young people united by an ideal -- freedom from the junta that's smothered democracy in Myanmar.

Nor, perhaps, hiding from the dark tragedy that may await them.

EDUCATION CANNOT WAIT ANNOUNCES US$250,000 IN EMERGENCY GRANT FUNDING IN RESPONSE TO DEVASTATING FIRES AT ROHINGYA REFUGEE CAMP IN BANGLADESH

 EDUCATION CANNOT WAIT

Photo: UNICEF/UN0431936/Saeed

With new funding, local non-profit BRAC and partners will rebuild learning centers, provide mental health services for vulnerable children and youth, and build back better

6 July 2021, New York – The massive March fires in the Cox’s Bazaar refugee camp in Bangladesh took 15 lives and affected more than 61,000 Rohingya refugees. In response to the devastating fires, Education Cannot Wait (ECW) announced today a US$250,000 first emergency response grant that will support non-profit BRAC and other local partners in rebuilding learning centers, and building back better from the tragic disaster that continues to put vulnerable refugee children and youth at risk.

While many major international non-profits and UN organizations have already stepped up their response to the fires, smaller organizations like BRAC lack the funds to fully rebuild.

In Myanmar, the military declares war on medical workers

Los Angeles Times

KRISTEN GELINEAU AND VICTORIA MILKO

ASSOCIATED PRESS

JULY 7, 2021

JAKARTA, Indonesia —

In this Feb. 28 image from video provided by Dakkhina Insight, medics attend to a man who appears to have a chest wound in Dawei, Myanmar.

(Dakkhina Insight via Associated Press)

The clandestine clinic was under fire, and the medics inside were in tears.

Hidden away in a Myanmar monastery, this haven had sprung up for those injured while protesting the military’s overthrow of the government. But now security forces had discovered its location.

A bullet struck a young man in the throat as he defended the door, and the medical staff tried frantically to stop the hemorrhaging. The floor was slick with blood.

In Myanmar, the military has declared war on healthcare — and on doctors themselves, who were early and fierce opponents of the takeover in February. Security forces are arresting, attacking and killing medical workers, dubbing them enemies of the state. With medics driven underground amid a global pandemic, the country’s already fragile healthcare system is crumbling.

Amid Coup Crisis, COVID-19 Hits New Daily Highs in Myanmar

THE I DIPLOMAT

By Sebastian Strangio
July 07, 2021

With health workers on strike and much of the public in open rebellion, a new wave of infections could prove devastating.

The coronavirus is rapidly spreading in crisis-hit Myanmar, with the country recording another record number of daily COVID-19 cases, suggesting that the political situation here is on the verge of being compounded by a grave public health emergency.

The regime’s health ministry reported records of 2,318 cases on Sunday and 2,969 cases on Monday, bringing the total number of infections since the start of the pandemic to 168,374, with 3,461 deaths.

Given the country’s unstable political situation, which has prompted sharp disruptions to COVID-19 testing and containment efforts, it is almost certain that these are underestimates. Yesterday, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported that hundreds of people have died of COVID-19 over the past 30 days in a single township in northwestern Myanmar.

အထောက်အထားမဲ့လို့ဆိုပြီး ရိုဟင်ဂျာ ၂၀ ဦး ထောင်ချခံရ

လွတ်လပ်တဲ့အာရှအသံ ( RFA )
မြန်မာဌာန | သတင်းများ 
2021-07-08

ဧရာဝတီတိုင်းမှာ ၂၀၂၁ ဇွန်လ ၂၁ ရက်နေ့က ဖမ်းခံရတဲ့ ရိုဟင်ဂျာတွေကို ဘိုကလေးမြို့မှာ ယာယီထိန်းသိမ်းထားစဉ် Photo: Citizen Journalist

ဧရာဝတီတိုင်း၊ ဘိုကလေးမြို့မှာ ပြီးခဲ့တဲ့ ဇွန်လ ၂၁ ရက်နေ့က အထောက်ထားမဲ့ ဝင်ရောက်လာလို့ဆိုပြီး ဘိုကလေး သစ်တောကြိုဝိုင်းအနီးမှာ ဖမ်းဆီးခံလိုက်ရတဲ့ ရခိုင်ပြည်နယ်က ရိုဟင်ဂျာ ၂၀ ဦးကို ပြီးခဲ့တဲ့ ဇူလိုင်လ ၁ ရက်နေ့က ဘိုကလေးမြို့နယ် တရားရုံးက ထောင်ဒဏ် တစ်နှစ်စီ အမိန့်ချလိုက်တယ်လို့ လိုက်ပါ ကူညီပေး ခဲ့သူတွေက RFA ကို ဒီနေ့ပြောပါတယ်။

ရိုဟင်ဂျာတွေကို တောင်ကိုရီးယားနဲ့ WFP ထောက်ပံ့မည်

လွတ်လပ်တဲ့အာရှအသံ ( RFA )
မြန်မာဌာန | သတင်းများ 
2021-07-06 

စစ်တွေမြို့ ဒုက္ခသည်စခန်းတခုက ရိုဟင်ဂျာဒုက္ခသည်များကို ၂ဝ၂၁ ဇူလိုင်လအစောပိုင်းက တွေ့ရစဉ်။
Photo: Reuters

မြန်မာနဲ့ ဘင်္ဂလားဒေ့ရှ်မှာ ရှိနေတဲ့ ရိုဟင်ဂျာအသိုင်းအဝန်းကို ထောက်ပံ့ကူညီပေးဖို့ WFP ကုလသမဂ္ဂ ကမ္ဘာ့ စား နပ် ရိက္ခာအဖွဲ့နဲ့ တောင်ကိုရီးယားနိုင်ငံတို့ ပူးပေါင်းဆောင်ရွက်နေကြတယ်လို့ ကုလသမဂ္ဂ လူသားချင်း စာနာမှုဆိုင်ရာ ညှိနှိုင်းရေးရုံး UNOCHA ရဲ့ မနေ့က ထုတ်ပြန်ချက်မှာ ဖော်ပြထားပါတယ်။ ဒီအတွက် တောင်   ကိုရီးယားနိုင်ငံက WFP ကို အမေရိကန်ဒေါ်လာ ရှစ်သိန်း ပေးအပ်ခဲ့ပါတယ်။

Why Myanmar may be heading for a full-scale civil war

THE WEEK
JOE EVANS
6 JUL 2021

Civilian death toll rises as military battles anti-coup resistance groups

Resistance fighter with improvised weapon in the southern city of Yangon
Stringer/Getty Images

Myanmar’s security forces have killed at least 25 people in clashes with opponents of the military junta in a township in the central Sagaing region.

Local people in Depayin say the violence erupted after “four military trucks dropped soldiers at the village early on Friday”, Reuters reports.

The alleged raid is the latest in a series of clashes as civilians “increasingly take up arms against the generals who seized power in a coup five months ago”, says Al Jazeera.

Military Junta Completes 5 Months, 800 Killed and 6000 Detained in Myanmar

THE CITIZEN
P.K.BALACHANDRAN 
5 JULY, 2021

On July 1, Myanmar’s military junta completed five months as the ruler of the country after the overthrow of the democratically-elected Aung San Suu Kyi government on February 1.

Over 800 were killed and 6000 detained in crackdowns targeting pro-democracy agitators from February 1 to June 30.

Military action is continuing against ethnic non-Bamar communities and non-Buddhist religious minorities in the North East and North West of the country.

The United Nations and the Western powers led by the United States continue to condemn the forcible take over. The US has imposed a series of new sanctions against the regime, including freezing US$ 1 billion in reserves that Myanmar’s Central Bank was holding at the New York Fed.

ရခိုင်တို့အတွက် AA လား၊ နစကလား၊ NUG လား

ဖက်ဒရယ်ဂျာနယ်
20 ဇွန်လ 2021

ပြီးခဲ့သည့် ဖေဖော်ဝါရီလ ၁ ရက်နေ့တွင် တပ်မတော်က NLD အစိုးရထံမှ အာဏာသိမ်းယူအပြီး မြန်မာနိုင်ငံ ကို နိုင်ငံတော်စီမံအုပ်ချုပ်ရေးကောင်စီ (နစက)အစိုးရအဖြစ်ဖြင့် အုပ်ချုပ်လျက်ရှိနေသည်။ယင်းသို့အုပ်ချုပ်နေ သည် မှာ ၂ လခွဲကြာမြင့်လာပြီးနောက် နစကအစိုးရနှင့် စင်ပြိုင်အစိုးရတစ်ရပ် မြန်မာနိုင်ငံတွင် ပေါ်ပေါက် လာခဲ့သည်။

တိုင်းရင်းသား တန်းတူရှိမှုကို ဖော်ဆောင်

ဖက်ဒရယ်ဂျာနယ်
နော်မန်ဒီ

 

လွတ်လပ်ရေးနဲ့ အတူ ဖွားဘက်တော် အဖြစ် “ပြည်တွင်းစစ်မီး” လည်း တစ်ပါတည်း ပါလာတာကြောင့် မြန် မာနိုင်ငံဟာ ပြည်တွင်းစစ်ဒဏ်ကို ခါးစည်းခံလာရတာ နှစ်ပေါင်း ၇၃ နှစ်ကြာတဲ့ အခုအချိန်ထိတိုင် ရပ်တန့်မယ့် အနေအထား မရှိသေးတဲ့ အပြင် ပိုမိုပြီး တိုးမြင့်, တောက်လောင်နေတဲ့ အခြေအနေဆိုးနဲ့ ရင်ဆိုင်နေရဆဲပါ။ ကမ္ဘာမှာ သက်တမ်း အရှည်ကြာဆုံး ဖြစ်တဲ့ မြန်မာနိုင်ငံက ပြည်တွင်းစစ်ဟာ နောက်ထပ် ဘယ်လောက် ကြာ မယ်၊ ဘာဖြစ်လာဦးမယ် ဆိုတာတွေလည်း ခန့်မှန်းလို့ မရနိုင်တဲ့ အခြေအနေမှာ ရှိနေပါတယ်။

Rohingya militancy group ARSA silently gets organized

BLITZ
Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury
July 3, 2021

Over one million Rohingya refugees, who fled extreme persecution in Myanmar may now pose serious threat to regional and international security. According to a vernacular news portal, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army or ARSA, which was formerly known as Harakahal-Yaqin has already turned into real nightmare to majority of the Rohingyas and Bangladeshi citizen.

Dhaka Post reporters Adnan Rahman and Joshim Uddin in their report said, Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) has already recruited over two thousand members from the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, where it has approximately 150 female jihadists. Majority of the ARSA recruits are based in Kutupalong and Balukhali areas in Cox’s Bazar and Teknaf district.

Myanmar: Roads to a Federal Army Are Twisted

modern diplomacy
M.D. Amin
July 2, 2021

The idea of a Federal Army for Myanmar is as old as the country’s struggle for democracy. The vision is a part of the larger picture of decentralization and democratization of the multiethnic nation of 54 million and was first seriously floated in 1988 as a counterweight to Tatmadaw and to rally the support of ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) during 8888 Uprising. The idea has recently received unprecedented momentum following the ousting of NLD-led civilian government on February 1, 2021. The formation of an EAO-supported People’s Defense Force (PDF) that amalgamates the Bamar youth with anti-junta ethnic rebels has sparked new optimism in this regard. Spontaneous attacks from civilian resistance fighters and other similar groups, such as Taze People’s Comrades, Kalay Civil Army and Chinland Defence Force have also contributed significantly to this growing interest.

Danger Awaited in Myanmar. So He Made a Daring Bid to Stay in Japan.

The New York Times

By Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno
July 3, 2021

After defying Myanmar’s military rulers at a soccer match, Ko Pyae Lyan Aung decided to seek asylum. But he was being watched.

Ko Pyae Lyan Aung at a practice field in Osaka, Japan.Credit...Shiho Fukada for The New York Times

OSAKA, Japan — The soccer player’s plane was at the gate. Ahead of him stood his last chance at safety.

The athlete, Ko Pyae Lyan Aung, had come to Japan with Myanmar’s national team. On the field, before the first match, he had flashed a gesture of defiance — the three-finger salute made famous by “The Hunger Games” — against the military junta that had ousted his country’s elected government. He was now afraid of what might happen if he returned home.

Myanmar protesters burn junta leader's images on his birthday

Reuters
July 3, 2021

Myanmar's military ruler Min Aung Hlaing presides over an army parade on Armed Forces Day in Naypyitaw, Myanmar, March 27, 2021. REUTERS/Stringer

July 3 (Reuters) - Protesters burned mock coffins and pictures of Myanmar's army ruler Min Aung Hlaing on Saturday in the latest demonstrations against the coup over five months ago that has plunged the Southeast Asian country into chaos.

"May you not rest in peace" and "may your birthday and deathday be the same," read the messages on funeral wreaths in Theinzayet township in eastern Mon state. Similar protests took place in many parts of Myanmar.

Norway's Telenor planning to exit Myanmar

TRT WORLD
02 July 2021


The telecom giant has booked massive financial losses in a country marred by a military coup and street protests.

Telenor is one of the largest telecom operators in Myanmar that has seen a flight foreign investment this year. (AP Archive)

Norway's Telenor, a major telecom operator in Myanmar, is weighing its future in the country after booking losses following a military coup and subsequent crackdown.

The company issued a statement on Friday it following reports that it was considering the sale of its unit in the country, Telenor Myanmar.

Telenor was pushed into deep losses in the first quarter after it was forced to write down all of its assets in Myanmar, taking their value from $769 million to zero.

Activists, Journalists Included in Myanmar Prisoner Release

THE I DIPLOMAT

By Grant Peck

July 01, 2021

The military gave no reason for the sudden release of prisoners, which included many detained since its February coup.

Myanmar’s government began releasing about 2,300 prisoners on Wednesday, including activists who were detained for protesting against the military’s seizure of power in February and journalists who reported on the protests, officials said.

Buses took prisoners out of Yangon’s Insein Prison, where friends and families of detainees had waited since morning for the announced releases. It is standard practice to take freed prisoners to the police stations where they were originally booked to complete the processing for their freedom.

Myanmar diplomats in US and Switzerland refuse to return home after criticising military junta

South China Morning Post

29 Jun, 2021

• Kyaw Moe Tun, Myanmar’s ambassador to the UN, said the 11 diplomats had joined the civil disobedience movement following the Feburary 1 coup
• ‘The military [has] already charged me high treason … So I definitely cannot go back [to Myanmar],’ he said

Anti-coup protesters march in Pabedan township near Yangon. Photo: AP

Eleven Myanmar diplomats in the United States and Switzerland are creating a united front as they seek to remain in their host countries in protest against the country’s military junta, refusing to return home, the country’s ambassador to the United Nations said on Monday.

Myanmar ambassador Kyaw Moe Tun said the 11 are among around 20 diplomats in seven countries who have joined the civil disobedience movement amid the continued use of violence against protesters by Myanmar security forces since the February 1 military coup.

India and Myanmar: A Chequered Relationship through History

MONEY LIFE

Saket Hishikar 

30 June 2021

Personal encounters, at times, have the power to draw one’s attention to events in far-flung lands. The news of a military coup in Myanmar in February this year reignited the memory of my personal encounters and an attempt to make sense of the event and its implications for India.

Anyone familiar with Mumbai suburbs knows about the magnificent Golden Pagoda at Gorai. The local tour guide at the centre informs visitors about the founder of the Vipassana Kendra and his promise to his guru in Myanmar to take back the technique of Vipassana to India as a mark of Myanmar’s gratitude towards India. But the Vipassana founder in his own style paid a tribute to Myanmar for preserving this Indian technique for over 2,000 year by constructing the golden pagodas in the traditional Myanmar interlocking style.

3 brothers shot by Rohingyas in Teknaf, police say

The Daily Star
Star Digital Report
June 30, 2021

Three locals, brothers, were hospitalised after being shot and critically injured by a group of armed Rohingyas in Teknaf, Cox's Bazar, police said.

The injured are Rahmatullah (30), Salamatullah (22), and Mohammad Hossain (18) -- sons of Habibur Rahman.

The incident happened at Jadimura Rohingya Camp no. 27 near Nature Park area in Hnila union of Teknaf upazila at 3:30am today, reports our correspondent quoting police.