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BURMA TASK FORCE-USA (NEW YORK CHAPTER) SPEARHEADS RALLY IN NEW YORK CITY; BRANA AND SEVERAL ORGANIZATIONS SPEAKS AT THE RALLY
Prof. Dr. Wakar Uddin, Chairman of the Burmese Rohingya Association of North America and the Director General of Arakan Rohingya Union addresses before the rally organized by the Burma Task Force-USA (New York). On the Right: Dr. Shaikh Obaid of the Burma Task Force-USA (New York).







A large really in support of Rohingya political and human rights in Burma/Myanmar, took place in front of the United Nations building in New York City on September 8, 2012. The event was organized by the New York chapter of the Burma Task Force, in coordination with its members, the Burmese Rohingya Association of North America (BRANA) and Free Rohingya Campaign based in New York City. The major driving forces behind the rally in the organization by the Burma Task Force (NY) were Islamic Circle of North America (New York Chapter), Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA), Muslim Peace Coalition of USA, and Council of American-Islamic Relations-NY (CAIR). Over 500 people participated in the rally. Several dignitaries, Muslim leaders, human right advocates, and Rohingya activists from the United States also addressed the rally in solidarity with the Rohingya victims of Arakan in Burma, and the Rohingya community worldwide.

Dr. Shaikh Obaid of the Director of the New York Chapter of the Burma Task Force-USA presided the event with a keynote address followed by the speech by Nay San Oo, Information Secretary of BRANA and Co-founder of Free Rohingya Campaign; Prof. Dr. Wakar Uddin, Chairman of BRANA and Director General of Arakan Rohingya Union (ARU); and leaders and activists from several other organizations, including Al-Hajj Talib Abdur Rasheed, President of Islamic Leadership Council of New York Metropolitan Area, Mubasher Ahmed, Islamic Circle of North America, Abu Samia Siraj, Muslim Ummah of North America, Mazim, Jamaica Muslim Center, Imam Ayub Abdul Bhaqi, Chairman of the Social Justice Committee & Islamic Leadership of New York Metropolitan Area, Naji Al-Muntasir, Leader of Arab American Community, Mohiddin Yusuf Maung Sein & Shaukat Islam, Rohingya Concerns International, Abu Samia Siraj, the Muslim Umma of North America, and several community leaders and activists.

In the keynote speech, Dr. Shaikh Obaid emphasized the importance of the advocacy for the political and human rights of the Rohingya people in Burma, showing solidarity with the Rohingya victims, sustaining the current efforts by the international community, and mobilization of all sectors of the US Government to take the Rohingya crisis to the center stage in the international arena. Dr. Obaid also stressed the importance of the role of US Government, along with the international community, in bringing a resolution to completely stop the Rohingya genocide in Burma. Nay San Oo spoke the significance of sustained media coverage for constant flow of accurate and unbiased information to the international community, particularly to counter the negative publicity by the Burmese Government media and the sites of ultra-nationalist/racist Rakhine against Rohingya. Prof. Dr. Wakar Uddin vehemently demanded the Burmese Government to immediately stop the current on-going violence, particularly by the Burmese police and security forces who are arresting and committing cold-blooded murders of Rohingya people, and hundreds of rape cases and physical abuses against Rohingya women in Arakan. Among several issues, Dr. Uddin also demanded the Burmese President Thein Sein to publicly retract his recent statement of transferring the Rohingya (from their native Rohang of Arakan) to a third country or keeping them in camps. Dr. Uddin asked the international community to be vigilant about the hypocrisy and deceitful maneuvering by the hardliners in the Burmese Government as they are only waiting the international outcry against the Rohingya genocide to gradually dissipate, and then resume its old strategy to eliminate Rohingya population from Arakan state. He sent a clear message to the audience the civilized community of the world through his address: “we cannot afford to loose the current momentum, we cannot slow down, we cannot be distracted, and we must sustain this efforts to regain peace, justice, and all our rights in Burma”. He urgently appealed the United Nations not to accept the Commission of Inquiry appointed by the Burmese Government because the government itself and its police/security forces have been a party to the violence against Rohingya. He demanded the United Nations to send its own Commission of Inquiry, to resume and expand its various operations in Rohingya regions of Arakan, to send a peace-keeping force to protect the Rohingya from Rakhine and Burmese/Rakhine police/security forces, and to address political and human rights issues in the UN Security Council and General Assembly. Dr. Uddin stressed the urgent need to repeal the Burmese Military’s 1982 Citizenship Law (the Black Law) and restatement of Rohingya citizenship, based on the indigenity and history of the Rohingya people of Arakan, as the foundation to guarantee the political and human rights for the Rohingya in Burma. All the speakers had a resounding message to the people and the Government of US, and the international community: “Save Rohingya, Show Solidarity with Rohingya, Burmese Government Must Give Rohingya Back all their Rights, and Peace & Justice Must Prevail in Arakan, Burma!”




July 13, 2012 

Protested outside the Myanmar embassy in the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Friday to “stop the genocide” of Rohingya Muslims in the wake of deadly communal unrest.

Around 300 hard-liners from organizations participated in the event. “If embassy officials refuse to talk with us, I demand all of you break into the building and turn it upside down,” a leader on a loudspeaker told protesters, who shouted (God is Greatest).
“Every drop of blood that is shed from a Rohingya must be paid back. Nothing is free in this world,” the man shouted, as protesters carried banners .

The hard-liners left without entering the embassy and proceeded to a UN building to protest.
Communal violence between ethnic Buddhist Rakhine and local Muslims, including the Rohingya, swept Myanmar’s Rakhine state in June, leaving dozens dead and tens of thousands homeless.

Around 800,000 Rohingyas live in Myanmar and are considered to be some of the world’s most persecuted minorities.

Myanmar President Thein Sein told the UN on Thursday it was “impossible to accept the illegally entered Rohingyas, who are not our ethnicity,” saying they should be sent to refugee camps or be deported.

Decades of discrimination have left the Rohingya stateless, with Myanmar implementing restrictions on their movement and withholding land rights, education and public services, the UN says.
Source : Agence France-Presse
By Francis Wade

Last week a small NGO took a report detailing state discrimination against Muslim babies in Burma to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC). The Muslim minority in question, the Rohingya, has suffered for decades as a result of an outwardly racist governmental policy toward non-Buddhists in Burma, which has also seen Christian communities in Karen, Kachin and Chin states suffer relentless persecution.

The report details how Rohingya children are subject to racial profiling immediately after birth – those born outside of wedlock are placed on blacklists, and denied travel permits and access to education. While none of 750,000-strong population in western Burma’s Arakan state are registered as citizens, those children blacklisted suffer heftier treatment from authorities, and are unlikely to be able to marry when they grow up.

Burmese Rohingya refugees are pictured at an unregistered refugee camp in Bangladesh. 

A strict two-child policy for the Rohingya (and only the Rohingya) is also in place, and the same treatment detailed above applies to children born above that limit. The report says that families with unregistered children face constant threat of arrest, which is only avoided via “unending extortion” by government authorities.

“Despite signs of political reforms in the past five months, the [Burmese] government has reaffirmed specific deeply discriminatory policies against this minority group on national security grounds, using justifications of ‘illegal migration management’ and ‘control on population growth’,” said The Arakan Project, who submitted the report to the CRC. The organisation is one of the few that persistently attempts to spotlight the abuses against the Rohingya, and deserves huge commendation for its work.

As the recent furore over a BBC report that labels the Rohingya as Burmese shows, racism against the group is also widespread in Burmese society. Chat forums are filled with venomous attacks on the Muslim minority (some examples here), whom many Burmese claim are Bengali immigrants, with their dark skin often cited as proof that their origins lie outside of Burma. Advocacy groups counter this by arguing that in Arakan state Islam traces back to before the spread of the now dominant Theravada Buddhism.

Debating their origins however is somewhat extraneous to the inquiry we should be having – few ask why this deep-seated fear of the Rohingya exists among Burmese, and moreover how society there will reconcile the fact that current reforms are means to open up the country to the outside world, an inevitable by-product of which will be a greater foreign presence. Burma’s borders have historically been porous enough to allow huge migration of peoples into and out of the country, and while this has not always sat easily with Burmese (note the anti-Chinese riots in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and indeed current animosity at the huge presence of Chinese in places like Mandalay, many of whom, unlike the Rohingya, are granted legal status), its xenophobia needs to be addressed now more than ever as it attempts to join a globalised world.

In a country where persecution against ethnic minorities makes regular headlines, the plight of the Rohingya is woefully underreported. Moreover, very justifiable claims from Burmese across the spectrum of egregious abuses committed against them by the government do not stretch to the Rohingya, who are seen as foreign infiltrators and therefore not deserving of the world’s sympathy and assistance. That hypocrisy is publicly reinforced by the government – the head of The Arakan Project, Chris Lewa, told me that she came face to face with Burma’s representative at the UN upon submitting the report to the CRC:

“As the experts insisted on a reply, the Burmese [representative] Maung Wai took the floor and just claimed that he recognized that there was a problem in Northern [Arakan] state, which was illegal immigration. Not surprisingly, he said that there was no Rohingya in Myanmar and that Rohingya is not one of the 135 national races … Then a Committee member asked how he called them. He replied Bengali.”

Note also that current sitting ambassador to the UN, Ye Myint Aung, wrote in a letter to fellow diplomats during his prior tenure as Consul-General to Hong Kong that Rohingya were “ugly as ogres”.

Up to 400,000 are believed to be living in neighbouring Bangladesh, only 28,000 of whom can receive official assistance from the UN (Dhaka worries that additional assistance would act as a pull-factor for those Rohingya still in Burma). Each year hundreds make the perilous ocean voyage from Bangladesh to Thailand or Malaysia in search of work and safer refuge, often meeting grisly ends – in January 2009 Thai coastguards pushed a boat packed with around 190 refugees that had washed up on its southern coast back out to sea and left them to die.
Last year a boatload of Rohingya that only made it as far as southern Burma were brought ashore, and the 63 on board jailed on immigration charges.

The CRC is due to issue concluding observations on The Arakan Project’s report on February 3. How that will affect the fate of Rohingya, described by Medicins Sans Frontierés as one of the world minority groups “most in danger of extinction”, remains to be seen, but between the praise and condemnation of Burma’s government by the international community, their names are not uttered. Wisened Burma observers know that the country’s ills cannot be solved overnight, no matter how many ceasefires or reforms are enacted, and weeding out such entrenched and vitriolic discrimination from Burmese society will be a very long, very painful process.

Credit here


Rohingya have successfully submitted a memorandum to the British Government, appealing British intervention to the cause of Rohingya in Burma.

About 200 Rohingyas from Kuala Lumpur city took part in the event in time of the memorandum submission. Memorandum was handed over to the British High Commission in Jalan Ampang, Kuala Lumpur at 10:40am.

British High Commission welcomed 3 members delegation to enter High Commission premise, where Admin Officer Ms. Helen Paterson has received the Memorandum on behalf of British High Commissioner to Malaysia. During this time, both the High Commission Representative and Rohingya delegates exchanged views and opinions.
High Commissioner Representative advised the Rohingya delegates to approach to other diplomatic missions in order to focus the Rohingya issues and assured the Rohingya delegates that she and her High Commissioner would pass the memorandum to the concerned authorities of the British Government for due consideration.
At the event, Rohingya placed various kinds of posters including showing strong support to authentic media groups like BBC, VOA and RFA which always interested to broadcast Rohingya news and information.

3 Members of Rohingya delegates are Mr. Mohammad Sadek, Mr. Mohammed Rafique and Mr. Mohammed Amin who are the active members of the Rohingya organization in Malaysia, the National Democratic Party for Human Rights (NDPHR) exile, which is one of the elected parties in 1990s multi-party general election in Burma.

For further information, please feel free to contact:

Mohammad Sadek




















For Immediate Release
Date: September 16, 2011
Rohingyas ever biggest rally in Tokyo in protest of USDP Government The Burmese Rohingya Association in Japan (BRAJ) organized ever biggest rally in Tokyo in response to the USDP Government’s racist statement in parliament of Burma against Rohingyas.




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Credit : Zaw Min Htut (BRAJ)


























There were around 200 Burmese nationals democratic activists protested outside Burmese Embassy in London the United Kingdom on 15 September 2011 at 12:00 – 13:30 today. The demonstration was organised by Burmese Rohingya Association – UK. The demonstrators have demanded Rohingya’s nationality rights, Human Rights, Religious Freedom, Ethnic equality and Federal Democratic Government in Burma. Key speakers: Mr. Nurul Islam – Arakan Rohingya Organisation, Mr. Chris Ring Du Lachung – Kachin National Organisation, Mr. Ko Aung – 88 Student Generation, Mr. Van Biak Thang – Chinland Guardian News, A representative – Burma Democratic Concern, Mr. Mathew Jones – Christian Solidarity Worldwide, Waihnin Pwintthon – A daughter of Political Prisoner, Mrs. Nant Bwa Bwa Phan – Karen Community UK, Anna Roberts – Burma Campaign UK, Mr. Kyaw Zwa – Burma Muslim Association and Mr. Shwekey Hoipang – Chin Community UK. Mr. Tun Khin – Burmese Rohingya Association was Chairperson throughout the demonstration.

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    • Rohingya Exodus