The Rohingya moment

By Eric Paulsen

Statelessness and Burma’s democratic transition.

Rohingya children in Maungdaw, northern Rakhine state. Images: Eric Paulsen

In the midst of the cautious excitement accompanying Burma’s seeming democratic transition, one of the key human rights issues that international leaders and Burma’s pro-democratic and ethnic activists have failed to address is the continuing statelessness and marginalisation of the Rohingya, the Muslim ethnic minority concentrated in northern Rakhine state, bordering Bangladesh. Rakhine (formerly known as Arakan), one of the poorest and most isolated states in Burma, is home to some 800,000 Rohingya, who are among the world’s most persecuted communities, on par with the Roma in Europe and the Hmong in Laos. They have remained stateless for decades, with neither home nor citizenship, popping up on the world’s consciousness only when a humanitarian crisis strikes. The most recent such crisis occurred in January 2011 when yet another boatload of Rohingya emigrants was detained in Thai waters, towed away by the Thai Navy and left to die in the open sea without an engine, food or water.

A family, who says they belong to the Burmese Rohingya Community from Myanmar

A family, who says they belong to the Burmese Rohingya Community from Myanmar, sit at a makeshift shelter in a camp in New Delhi May 14, 2012. Around 2,500 refugees from Myanmar have put up camps on a land near New Delhi's airport to demand refugee status, saying it will help provide them with better facilities, local media reported. REUTERS/Adnan Abidi (INDIA - Tags: POLITICS SOCIETY IMMIGRATION POVERTY)

Rohingya issue UNHCR delegation to visit BD

Senior Correspondent banglanews24.com DHAKA: A delegation of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) will visit here to settle the Rohingya problem between Bangladesh and Myanmar. Foreign Minister Dr Dipu Moni made the positive response as chief of UNHCR and High Commissioner António Guterres proposed to the Bangladesh foreign minister. Earlier in the day, the foreign minister had a bilateral meeting with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres on the sidelines of the OIC Ministerial Meeting at Ashgabat of Turkmenistan Sunday.

Rohingyas in Delhi Demand Full Refugee Status

Men, women and children from Burma's Rohingya minority group take shelter in a makeshift camp in New Delhi's Vasant Vihar neighborhood. (Photo: Zarni Mann / The Irrawaddy)

In an echo of the Occupy movement that attracted so much attention around the world last year, hundreds of Rohingya asylum seekers have camped out for nearly four weeks in front of the UN refugee agency’s office in an upscale New Delhi neighborhood to demand full recognition as refugees.

The protesters, who belong to a Muslim ethnic minority persecuted in Burma and shunned by Bangladesh, say they are being unfairly discriminated against by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) because they are denied services granted to refugees.

 

 

 

US-BASED ROHINGYA ORGANIZATION MEETS AMBASSADOR DEREK MITCHELL IN WASHINGTON

Prof. Dr. Wakar Uddin meets with Ambassador Derek Mitchell at the State Department.

Washington. D.C. Prof. Dr. Wakar Uddin, Director General of Arakan Rohingya Union (ARU) and Chairman of the Burmese Rohingya Association of North America (BRANA), accompanied by Nay San Oo, the Information Secretary of

 

 

 

အင္ဒို-အာရိယန္လူမ်ိဳးႏွင္႔ အာရကာန္(ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္)

အာရိယန္စစ္သည္မ်ား

ကမာၻေပၚရွိ လူသားမ်ိဳးႏြယ္စုအားလံုးသည္ မ်ိဳးႏြယ္စု တစ္စုတည္းက ဆင္သက္လာျခင္းမဟုတ္သလို မိမိတို႔လူမ်ိဳးစုတို႔၏ အေခၚအေဝၚႏွင္႔ အမည္နာမတို႔သည္လည္း ကမာၻဦးစ ကတည္းက ေခၚေဝၚ သက္ မွတ္ခဲ႔ျခင္း မရွိခဲ႔ေပ။ မိမိတို႔ ေနထိုင္ရာ ပတ္ဝန္က်င္ ေဒသ အလိုက္ လူသားတို႔၏ ဖြံ႔ျဖိဳးတိုးတက္မႈ ေခတ္ေရစီးေၾကာင္း အလိုက္ ဘာသာစကားႏွင္႔ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈမ်ားသည္ အစဥ္ေျပာင္းလဲလာ စျမဲ ပင္ျဖစ္သည္။ မတူညီတဲ႔ ဓေလ႔ ရိုးရာ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈမ်ား ေပါင္းစပ္ယွက္ႏြယ္ရာမွ ရိုးရာ ဓေလ႔႔ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ သစ္မ်ား ေပၚထြက္လာသလိုမတူညီတဲ႔ လူသားမ်ိဳးႏြယ္စုမ်ားၾကား ကုန္သြယ္ စီးပြားေရးအရေသာ္ လည္းေကာင္း
စစ္ရံႈးကိုလိုနီအျဖစ္သိမ္းသြင္းရာမွ ကိုလိုနီလက္ေအာက္ခံနိုင္ငံေန ျပည္သူမ်ားသည္လည္း ဘာသာစကား
ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ၊စာေပ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈႏွင္႔ မတူညီတဲ႔ လူမ်ိဳးစုမ်ား ေရာေႏွာေပါင္းစပ္ရာမွ လူမ်ိဳး စာေပ ယဥ္ေက်းမႈ
မ်ား ေျပာင္းလဲ သြားတတ္သလို လူမ်ိဳးစုသစ္၊ စာေပသစ္ႏွင္႔ လူ႔ယဥ္ေက်းမႈအသစ္မ်ားလည္းေပၚထြက္လာ
လာေလ႔ရွိသည္ကို ကြ်ႏ္ုပ္တို႔အားလံုးလက္ခံထားျပီးျဖစ္သည္။

Miracle Baby Born in Church holding small Holy Quran in Lagos :: News

FORTY-EIGHT hours after a mystery birth in Ijeshatedo, Lagos State, hundreds of Muslim faithful were still shouting Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar yesterday in the area.
A 32-year-old woman, on Monday, gave birth to a baby boy, clutching the Holy Qur’an in his right hand.
Since the birth, the mother of the child, Kikelomo Ilori, and her neighbours on Shonde Street have been receiving visitors wishing to catch a glimpse of the miracle baby and the Qur’an.
Local government chairmen, market women, policemen, Imams, chiefs and Muslim cleric were not left out.
Kikelomo lives with her mother.

In the heart of New Delhi, 2500 “refugees” who came in from the cold*

 

First, some “facts”. “Facts” within quotes because no one quite appears to know the “truth”. I am therefore relying on emails, first-person (albeit unverified) accounts, news-reports and of course, the wonderful world of internet..As you will realise after reading this, the whole thing appears mysterious – and raises more questions than answers. Earlier yesterday morning, I was alerted to this news-report (from the HT) by Sh Krishen Kak (emphasis added, throughout):

၁၉၆၁ ခုႏွစ္ထုတ္ ေမယုေရွ႔ေရးစာေစာင္၌ ေဖၚျပထားေသာ နိုင္ငံေတာ္ အၾကီးအကဲတို႔၏ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာတို႔အေရး မိန္႔ခြန္းမ်ား

၁၉၆၁ ခုႏွစ္ နိဳဝင္ဘာလ (၁၅)ရက္ေန႔ ေမယုနယ္ျခားခရိုင္ ေမာင္ေတာျမိဳ ႔၌ က်င္းပခဲ႔သည္႔ ဒုတိယ အၾကိမ္း မူဂ်ာဟစ္ လက္နတ္ခ် အလင္းဝင္ အခမ္းအနားၾကီးတြင္ ဒု-ကာကြယ္ေရး ဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္(ၾကည္)ဗိုလ္မွဴးခ်ဳပ္ ေအာင္ၾကီး ၊ ဒု-ကာကြယ္ေရးဦးစီးခ်ဳပ္(ေရ) ဗိုလ္မွဴးခ်ဳပ္ သန္းေဖႏွင္႔ နယ္ျခားေဒသအုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေရး အရာရွိခ်ဳပ္
ဗိုလ္မွဴးၾကီးေစာျမင္႔တို႔က ေမယုနယ္ျခား ခရိုင္ေန ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာလူထုၾကီးအား မိန္႔ၾကားခဲ႔သည္႔မိန္႔ခြန္းမ်ားအား မူရင္းအတိုင္း ေအာက္တြင္ အစဥ္လိုက္ေဖၚျပေပးထားပါသည္။

Why Rohingyas flee to abroad by sea route

Thirty year-old Ahmed (not his real name), is a Rohingya refugee. He and other refugees fled to Malaysia by the dangerous sea route frequented by Rohingya boatpeople, leaving from Bangladesh. They sought a better life after more than 20 years living in squalid conditions in small sheds in Bangladesh refugee camps, with no official status with the UNHCR and Bangladesh authorities,

BURMA: AHRC condemns death sentence for torture victim

(Hong Kong, May 10, 2012) The Asian Human Rights Commission has described the verdict of a court in Rangoon, sentencing a torture victim to death for his purported role in a bombing, as "farcical" and a "cut-and-paste" job, and has called for his release through the intervention of outside agencies.

District Judge Aung Thein presiding over a closed court in the central prison on Tuesday convicted the accused, Phyo Wai Aung, in four cases concerning the bombing of a festival in April 2010. The judge sentenced Phyo Wai Aung to death for abetting the murder of 10 people who died in the bombing, and to a total of 39 years in prison for a range of other offences.

 

 

ကေလးအေသမ်ား၏ ေသြးသားကို အမႈန္႔ႀကိတ္ ျပဳလုပ္ထားသည့္ ေဆးေတာင့္မ်ား တ႐ုတ္မႇ ေတာင္ကိုရီးယားသို႔ တင္သြင္းရာတြင္ ဖမ္းဆီးရမိ

 

ကေလးအေသမ်ား၏ ေသြးသားကို အမႈန႔္ႀကိတ္ ျပဳလုပ္ထားသည့္ ေရာဂါမ်ဳိးစံု ကုသႏိုင္သည္ဆိုေသာ ေဆးေတာင့္မ်ား တ႐ုတ္မႇ ေတာင္ကိုရီးယားသို႔ တင္သြင္းလာမႈကို ေတာင္ကိုရီးယား အေကာက္ခြန္အရာရႇိမ်ားက ဖမ္းဆီးရမိခဲ့ေၾကာင္း ေမလ ၇ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ ထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကညာခဲ့သည္။

ယင္းေဆးေတာင့္မ်ားကို တ႐ုတ္ႏုိင္ငံ အေရႇ႕ေျမာက္ပိုင္းတြင္ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္ၿပီး ကေလးအေလာင္းမ်ားအား အစိတ္စိတ္ပိုင္းကာ အေျခာက္ခံၿပီး အမႈန္႔ႀကိတ္ထားျခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း ကိုရီးယား အေကာက္ခြန္ဌာနက ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့သည္။

Burma’s troublesome census

May 10, 2012 By Francis Wade, DVB

BURMA has never been an easy place to conduct a head count. Dogged by protracted conflicts and populated by communities wary of outsiders, census-takers have had their work cut out in building an accurate dataset of a country rich in demographic diversity, but which for decades has largely been invisible to the world.
Thus the challenges that need broaching prior to a planned 2014 census are daunting. Early indicators were given in the country’s first nationwide census in 1891, five years after the British annexed Upper Burma – thousands had been displaced by colonial troops who fought to bring half the country under rule of the Empire, only adding to a fluid migration of communities that rendered internal boundaries meaningless. Upland tribes fiercely hostile to the presence of foreigners resisted classification, meaning that the majority of Shan state, for instance, was not counted (British expedition leaders risked joining the rows of skulls that adorned Wa villages, whom up until independence considered European heads coveted bounty).

Rohingya Refugees of hope

FOCUS Why does one flee one's country? How does it feel to be State-less? The Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, now camping in Delhi seeking UNHCR's help, share with SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY the trauma that led to their exit

Voicing protestRohingya refugees at Sultan Garhi dargah; (below) a temporary resident card and family list of a refugeePhotos: Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty

From among the crowd, Nazir Ahmad pushes ahead fellow camper Tayeba Begum to tell me her story. Frail framed Tayeba, with a vacant expression, casts a confused look. In broken Hindi, she begins, “I am 30; my husband is dead, I have two children with me, one 10, the other 8. We are from Arakan region of Myanmar, district Akyab.”

Tayeba entered India from Bangladesh two years ago, went to live in Jammu because some people from her village were already there. She makes a living out of rag picking.

 

 

Burmese stay in poor conditions, demand refugee status

 

Around 2,500 Myanmarese refugees have put up camps on a land near Sultan Gauri Ka Mazar in Rangpur near Mahipalpur.

They were camping at United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Vasant Vihar from April 9 and were shifted to the Mazar land on May 9.

The refugees are asylum seekers and are demanding a refugee status, saying it will help provide them with better facilities.

“We fled from our country as we were either fined, jailed or killed by the present government in Burma. All of us are from good families. We have left our land, houses, even family and fled the country,” said Ziaur Rahman, who has been residing in Delhi for over a year.

USDP campaigns for next election in Maungdaw

Maungdaw, Arakan State: The regional in-charge of Arakan state and two members of Parliament from Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) are going to organize the people of Maungdaw to support their party in coming next election at 2015 today, according to a politician from Maungdaw.

“The organizing group is Maung Oo, the regional in-charge of USDP in western Burma's Arakan State and its two Parliament members- U Aung Zaw Win and Htay win- who arrived in Maungdaw yesterday at about 4:45pm from Akyab.”

Rohingya Community Art fair held in Ireland

Rohingya Men and Women’s Group Art Project

The Rohingya community, originally from Burma, were resettled in Carlow in June 2009 as part of the UNHCR (United Nations high commissioner for refugees) resettlement programme. The community lived in refugee camps in Bangladesh from the early 1990’s.

The Rohingyas number approximately 1.5 million and have endured continued persecution and ethnic cleansing in Burma. About 1.5 million Rohingyas have been living in exile in many countries all over the world. The Rohingyas in Burma continue to suffer from several forms of persecution and human rights violations.

 

 

Rohingya Muslim brothers who were lost.

by...Shakir Rangsikul.

R is the same as that of Rohan. Located northwest of the coastal areas of Myanmar in the Bay of Bengal to 360 miles from the border with Bangladesh inthe 167 miles by land and sea.
For the Rohingya are living in the array is a long time and can not be said that the Rohingya live in this land for another one and it is not possible to tell, for example. with people living in Thailand have been when it was clear that the Rohingya, the culture and civilization of their own with the expectation that the former Bush Raleigh's Rohingya are from Moore. PathanMongol and Bengali in the early settlement of Muslims in the same time back in the 7th century, ethnic groups in Burma is the numours and more than 60% are the habitat of the group. More than 140 ethnic and ethnic Rohingya is includedas one of them. For Burma has a population of about 50 million people areMuslim, about 8 million people, about 3.5 million people Rohingya (bothdomestic and international refugees) for the Rohingya are a minority in the state in the well. The t.
Ground in Myanmar.