July 27, 2025

News @ RB

Announcement of New Website: Rohingya Today (RohingyaToday.Com) Dear Readers, From 1st January 2019 onward, the Rohingya News Portal 'Rohingya Blogger' will be renamed and upgraded as 'Rohingya Today'. Due to this transition to a new name, our website will be available at www.rohing...

Rohingya News @ Int'l Media

Maung Zarni, leader of the Free Rohingya Coalition, speaks at a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan in Tokyo on Thursday. | CHISATO TANAKA By Chisato Tanaka, Published by The Japan Times on October 25, 2018 A leader of a global network of activists for Rohingya Mu...

Myanmar News

By Sena Güler | Published by Anadolu Agency on December 1, 2018 Maung Zarni says he will boycott Beijing-sponsored events until the country reverses its 'troubling path' ANKARA -- A human rights activist and intellectual said he withdrew from a Beijing-sponsored forum in London to pro...

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Article @ RB

Oskar Butcher RB Article October 6, 2018 Every night in an unassuming shop space located in Mandalay’s 39thStreet, Lu Maw and Lu Zaw – the remaining members of the Burma’s most famous comedy trio, the Moustache Brothers – present their show: a curious combination of comedy, political sa...

Article @ Int'l Media

A demonstration over identity cards at a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh in April, 2018. Image: NurPhoto/SIPA USA/PA Images. By Natalie Brinham | Published by Open Democracy on October 21, 2018 Wary of the past, Rohingya have frustrated the UN’s attempts to provide them with documenta...

Analysis @ RB

By M.S. Anwar | Opinion & Analysis The Burmese (Myanmar) quasi-civilian government unleashed a large-scale violence against the minority Rohingya in the western Myanmar state of Arakan in 2012. The violence, which some wrongly frame as ‘Communal’, was carried out by the Burmese armed forces...

Analysis @ Int'l Media

By Maung Zarni, Natalie Brinham | Published by Middle East Institute on November 20, 2018 “It is an ongoing genocide (in Myanmar),” said Mr. Marzuki Darusman, the head of the UN Human Rights Council-mandated Independent International Fact-Finding Mission at the official briefing at ...

Opinion @ RB

Rohingya refugees who fled from Myanmar wait to be let through by Bangladeshi border guards after crossing the border in Palang Khali, Bangladesh October 9, 2017. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj MS Anwar RB Opinion November 12, 2018 Some may differ. But I believe the government of Bangladesh is ...

Opinion @ Int'l Media

By Maung Zarni | Published by Anadolu Agency on December 15, 2018 US will not intercede, and Myanmar's neighbors see it through economic lens, so international coalition for Rohingya needed LONDON -- The U.S. House of Representatives Thursday overwhelmingly passed a resolution ca...

History @ RB

Aman Ullah  RB History August 25, 2016 The ethnic Rohingya is one of the many nationalities of the union of Burma. And they are one of the two major communities of Arakan; the other is Rakhine and Buddhist. The Muslims (Rohingyas) and Buddhists (Rakhines) peacefully co-existed in the A...

Rohingya History by Scholars

Dr. Maung Zarni's Remark: The best research on Rohingya history: British Orientalism which created the pseudo-scientific biological notion of "Taiyinthar" or "real natives" of #Myanmar caused that country's post-colonial cancer of official & popular genocidal Racism.  This co...

Report @ RB

(Photo: Soe Zeya Tun, Reuters) RB News  October 5, 2013  Thandwe, Arakan – Rakhinese mob in Thandwe started attacking Kaman Muslims on September 28, 2013. As a result, 5 Kaman Muslims were mercilessly killed and 1 was died in heart attack while escaping the attack. 781 Kaman Mus...

Report by Media/Org

Rohingya families arrive at a UNHCR transit centre near the village of Anjuman Para, Cox’s Bazar, south-east Bangladesh after spending four days stranded at the Myanmar border with some 6,800 refugees. (Photo: UNHCR/Roger Arnold) By UN News May 11, 2018 Late last year, as violent repressi...

Press Release

(Photo: Reuters) Joint Statement: Rohingya Groups Call on U.S. Government to Ensure International Accountability for Myanmar Military-Planned Genocide December 17, 2018  We, the undersigned Rohingya organizations worldwide, call for accountability for genocide and crimes against...

Rohingya Orgs Activities

RB News December 6, 2017 Tokyo, Japan -- Legislators from all parties, along with Human Rights Now, Human Rights Watch, and Save the Children, came together to host the emergency parliament in-house event “The Rohingya Human Rights Crisis and Japanese Diplomacy” on December 4th. The eve...

Petition

By Wyston Lawrence RB Petition October 15, 2017 There is one petition has been going on Change.org to remove Ven. Wira Thu from Facebook. He has been known as Buddhist Bin Laden. Time magazine published his image on their cover with the title of The Face of Buddhist Terror. The petitio...

Campaign

A human rights activist and genocide scholar from Burma Dr. Maung Zarni visits Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi Extermination Camp and calls on European governments - Britain, France, Sweden, Norway, Italy, Denmark, Hungary and Germany not to collaborate with the Evil - like they did with Hitler 75 ye...

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Editorial by Int'l Media

By Dhaka Tribune Editorial November 5, 2017 How can we answer to our conscience knowing full-well what the Myanmar military is doing to the innocent Rohingya minority -- not even sparing children or pregnant women? Despite the on-going humanitarian crisis involving Rohingya refugees ...

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10 Things You Need to Know Myanmar's Persecuted Muslim Minority

(Photo: AP)

By Kyaw Min
December 20, 2013

By 1990, 15 years before I went to prison, the ruling generals had been in power in Burma for more than 40 years. In those days I was an elected member of the Burmese Parliament. Then in 2005, my family and I were arrested by the police. My wife, son and two daughters and I spent the next seven years in prison. They said our "crime" was declaring our rights as ethnic Rohingya. My jailers told me that speaking up for the Rohingya was giving Myanmar "a bad name" internationally.

In 2010, when the military leaders released pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest, I thought Burma was beginning to change for the better. Soon they announced political and economic reforms and they relaxed some restrictions on the press. A human rights commission was set up, under government control.

Some foreigners thought these small steps meant that the military was letting go its grip on Myanmar. The U.S. acted quickly to reward the generals. That was a signal to international investors to start looking for new markets in my country. In 2011, while my family and I were still in prison, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Burma. Then came an important visit by President Obama in 2012. That was followed by the U.S. decision to reduce trade sanctions and travel restrictions against Burmese leaders. Then early this year, my family and I were finally freed from prison.

But two years after all the talk about Burma's "transition to democracy," my Rohingya people are still being persecuted. Today, the Rohingya are where they were in 2005 when the police came to our house and took us away: we are stateless people, whose homes can be burned by mobs as the police stand by as idle witnesses.

10 Things You Need to Know About the Rohingya People
  1. Burma has a Buddhist majority. Less than 9 percent of the population is Muslim but we are more than a million people.
  2. We are an ethnic people who practice Islam and speak the Rohingya language. Most of us live in the state of Rakhine, where my great grandparents and their great grandparents were born.
  3. In the last 18 months, Buddhist mobs have terrorized Muslims throughout Burma. More than 200 Muslims have been killed and mosques, homes and businesses have been burned, all while the authorities turned a blind eye. Today, almost 150,000 Rohingya are trapped in dirty refugee camps, living in bad tents, with not much food and not enough medicine. The police prevent them from coming and going as free people. Some refugees are killed under mysterious circumstances or simply disappear forever. Sometimes the bodies are dumped in unmarked graves. It is like a big outdoor jail. Many Rohingya people have tried to escape to other countries. Last month, 70 men, women and children drowned in an overloaded boat that should never have gone to the deep sea. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch and others have condemned "human rights violations" against the Rohingya.
  4. When the army seized power in 1962, it introduced discriminatory laws and Jim Crow rules. The Buddhist majority said Rohingyas were unwanted intruders. Today they call us "Bengalis" in the absence of any proof to make it seem we are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. It makes us feel like "aliens" in our own country.
  5. The Rohingya were full citizens of Burma until 1982. In that year a new law by the military government took away citizenship from Rohingya on the false accusation that they came to this country only after 1823 British occupation of Rakhine State.
  6. Today in Myanmar, we are not allowed to marry or have more than two children without government permission.
  7. Nobel prize winners like Nelson Mandala and Desmond Tutu and His Highness the Dalai Lama have spoken up for the Rohingya. Unfortunately, Aung San Su Kyi, our Burmese Nobel Laureate who is expected to contest for the presidency in the 2015 election, has not stood up for these persecuted people.
  8. The general census, which begins in a few months, may make things worse. The government says it will give the 135 so-called ethnic peoples a code number so each group to be counted in the census. But the government refuses to give us a code number. Instead, Rohingyas will be registered under the "foreigner" column, which some day may allow us to be deported from our own country.
  9. We need protection from mob attacks and property loss, surprise arrests and a court system that is stacked against us -- all for the "crime" of being Rohingya. The United Nations recognizes our plight. On November 19th, the U.N. third committee passed a resolution telling Myanmar to give us back our citizenship. But the Burmese government rejected the resolution and accused the U.N. of violating its sovereignty.
  10. It is sad but now the U.S. is considering military and financial aid to its newest friend: Myanmar. Before that happens, Americans should demand that the Rohingya, Myanmar's most vulnerable people, receive full citizenship and equal protection under the law.
U Kyaw Min is Chairman of Democracy and Human Rights Party (DHRP).

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