VIVAnews - The Indonesian government will extend the staying permit of 400 Rohingya refuges who are now waiting in Aceh. This humanitarian aid will be given until a solution is resulted for this issue.

"The Indonesian government will have a bilateral cooperation with Mynmar that will be also involved UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration," said the presidential spokesperson Dino Patti Djalal after Myanmar Prime Minister General Thein Sein's visit at the Merdeka Palace.

In the previous ASEAN Summit, it is agreed that the solution of this issue is creating a regional agreed decision. It will involve the home country, transit country, and destination country.

For generations, the ethnic Muslim Rohingya have endured persecution by the ruling junta of Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist country.

The plight of the Rohingya, descendants of Arab traders from the 7th century, gained international attention over the past month after five boatloads of haggard migrants were found in the waters around Indonesia and the Andaman Islands.

But unlike the Kurds or the Palestinians, no one has championed the cause of the Rohingya. Most countries, from Saudi Arabia to Malaysia, see them as little more than a source of cheap labor for the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs.

"The Rohingya are probably the most friendless people in the world. They just have no one advocating for them at all," said Kitty McKinsey, a spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. "Hardly any of them have legal status anywhere in the world."

According to Malaysia's The Star newspaper, the Burmese asylum-seeker was riding his motorbike in Penang on the weekend when 

he clipped a car. Apparently he didn't have a motorbike licence, but instead of apologising and offering to pay for the damage, the 26-year-old panicked and fled. He is probably now languishing in an immigration detention camp.

The refugees and asylum-seekers in Malaysia fear the police and the government authorities with a deep and abiding anxiety. They have few rights, few avenues of appeal. They live in the community but they are not legally permitted to work or to send their children to government schools.

Lawmakers in Malaysia and Australia have spoken out against a deal between the two countries involving a swap of asylum seekers, with one Malaysian MP expressing doubts about promises from her country's prime minister that refugees coming from Australia will be properly treated.

Under a deal announced on Saturday between Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak and his Australian counterpart, Julia Gilllard, the next 800 asylum seekers to arrive in Australia will be sent to Malaysia for processing by UN officials, and in return Australia will accept 4,000 refugees—most of them Burmese—waiting in Malaysia for third-country resettlement over the next four years.

The deal is aimed at deterring “boat people,” many of them stateless Rohingya from Burma, from trying to enter Australia to seek asylum. But Australia has come under criticism from rights groups and politicians of both countries because Malaysia is not a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention and has an appalling record of mistreating asylum seekers.

By Tin Soe

Chittagong, Bangladesh: Ethnic groups living in the UK delivered a petition with 5,323 signatures calling for a UN Commission of Inquiry into crimes against humanity in Burma to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) on May 6, according to Tun Khin (a.k.a.) Ziaul Gaffar, President of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation in the UK (BROUK).

The Burmese military has long oppressed Rohingya and been involved in an ethnic-cleansing program to prevent the creation of a Rohingya state.

My life in Burma was very hard. My family house was demolished two times by authorities and as a result we had to move to my mothers native village. Every person in that village was subject to violent abuses, fines, extortion, military harassment and corporal punishment. I am aware that at least 100 villagers are still in detention and many have died in detention. My father was died for the subsequent detentions. My siblings were detained in 2008. 

There are 93,000 asylum-seekers and proven refugees in Malaysia, most of them living in the Klang Valley in and around the capital Kuala Lumpur.

They are not being held in camps, but are living in poor, largely rented, accommodation "in the community" while they await either assessment by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees or, if already assessed as refugees, await placement in another country.

The UNHCR is helping them with training, and to get work, so that they can look after themselves as far as possible. They are free within Malaysia's borders, but mostly lack travel documents to go beyond.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Myanmar is one of the neighboring countries of Bangladesh. There exists a close tie of export-import liaison between these two countries. Of late, the Rohingya issue has been creating a crack in the diplomatic relationship between the two countries. Thousands of Rohingyas (Myanmar's aboriginals) have been crossing into Bangladesh for a long time. Because of their illegal entrance, our local inhabitants are suffering much. Rohingyas are now causing serious social and economic disturbances. They are now creating violence in our land. Most importantly, many blacklisted criminals use the Rohingya-cover to disguise themselves from police. Moreover, they are sometimes used as the human and drug trafficking agents! So, it is very important for both the Myanmar and Bangladesh govt. to come forward and settle the matter.

Link : :http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=184650

A petition with 5,323 signatures calling for a UN Commission of Inquiry into crimes against humanity in Burma and organized by Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW) and Partners Relief and Development, was delivered to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) today.

The Head of the South-East Asia and Pacific Department at the FCO received the petition from a delegation including representatives from CSW, Partners Relief and Development, Burma’s National League for Democracy-Liberated Area (NLD-LA), and ethnic nationalities including Bwa Bwa Phan of the Karen Community Association UK, Van Biak Thang of the Chin Human Rights Organisation, Ring Du Lachyung of the Kachin National Organisation UK and Maung Tun Khin of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK.

Questions asked by Baroness Goudie at the House of Lords on 5th of April 2011
o ask Her Majesty’s Government what meetings United Kingdom government officials have had with representatives of the Rohingya ethnic minority in Burma.[HL8101]
The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Lord Howell of Guildford): The Government are deeply concerned about the situation facing the Rohingya people. Foreign and Commonwealth officials in London often meet with the Burmese Rohingya Organisation and the Arakan Rohingya National Organisation-most recently on 10 March 2011. Our embassy in Rangoon meets on a regular basis with a wide range of ethnic groups. The Government remain committed to advocating fundamental freedoms and greater respect for human rights for all ethnic groups in Burma including the Rohingya.

Asked by Baroness Goudie

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what representations they have made to the United Nations Department of Political Affairs to ensure that United Nations envoys to Burma meet and consult with ethnic Rohingya representatives.[HL8102]

Chiang Mai (Mizzima) – As World Press Freedom Day is marked around the world, journalists claim Burma’s new government has not ushered in freedom of the press but superficial change is in the air.

media-freedom1In 1991, the United Nations declared May 3 as World Press Freedom Day to raise awareness about press freedom and remind all governments about the need for a free press.

Over the decades, Burma has suffered from strict censorship. But under the new government of President Thein Sein, the Press Scrutiny and Registration Division (PSRD) under the Information Ministry recently lifted censorship of some journals and eased their tight control over media coverage of certain subjects.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US lawmakers called Tuesday on President Barack Obama to show greater urgency in setting up a UN probe into alleged war crimes in Myanmar, saying that widespread abuses were going unpunished.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in August last year that the United States would support a UN commission of inquiry, which could lead to charges against the military-backed regime in the country also known as Burma.

 Written by: Tanvi Pate

Only just in mid April, Thailand announced that it would close down nine refugee camps on its 1400 kilometres long eastern border with Myanmar. It’s important to consider as to why Thailand wants to end its twenty years humanitarian policy of assisting refugees? What kind of prospects might be faced by the refugees once they are back in Myanmar? What are the views of the Nongovernmental Organisations (NGOs) and what other options are in pipeline for the refugees that might enable them to escape this bleak scenario? This article considers these various questions and suggests some policy options for Thailand at the end.

Before moving forward onto other analysis it’s necessary to ponder upon the history and nature of the Burmese refugee problem that forced several hundred thousand Burmese into the Thai sanctuaries. 

 Syful Islam(Financial Express)

The government has turned down a US$33 million United Nations (UN) project aimed at reducing poverty in Cox's Bazar after it alleged that the scheme mainly targeted at the rehabilitation of Rohingya refugees in the country.

Four United Nations agencies - United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), World Food Programme (WFP), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) - initiated the project to cut poverty of the people living in Cox's Bazar's southern most sub-districts of Ukhia and Teknaf.

The sub-districts are home to more than 26,000 recognised and another 200,000 unrecognised Muslim Rohingya refugees who took shelter after fleeing decades-long persecution in northern Rakhine state of Myanmar.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Tired, poor, huddled people seeking jobs in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, America and Europe have died on the high seas, suffocated in vehicles, toiled in sweatshops, and been expelled to countries where dictators lock them up.

Human traffickers eagerly profit from migrant workers' poverty, ignorance and desperation, including many unemployed men and women who beg to be smuggled abroad despite knowing the risks.

Kaladan Press News
Maungdaw, Arakan State: Aung Zaw Win, the Upper House parliament member (MP) from Maungdaw Township, accompanied by three other State level MPs of Maundaw Township, visited Maungdaw on April 25 after the parliamentary meetings at Nay Pyi Taw and Sittwe, the capital of Arakan State, said a participant of the meeting who asked not to be named.

“It is the first time the MPs visited Maungdaw after the parliamentary meetings at Nay Pyi Taw and state level Hluttaw representative meetings to explain among the local people what they had done for the people, and the future plans and programs of the new democratic government.”

Upper House MP Aung Zaw Win, accompanied by the state level MPs U Mra Aung, U Tha Khin, U Janheingir (a) Aung Myo Myin, and an electrical engineer named U Tin Maung Win from Rangoon, visited Maungdaw Township.

4/29/2011  နိရဥၥရာ သတင္း

တာကလူး
 
ၾကံ႕ဖြံ႕ ပါတီသည္ ေပးထားေသာ ေရြးေကာက္ပြဲကတိကို မတည္ေၾကာင္း ေဒသခံမ်ားက စြပ္စြဲ ေျပာၾကားလိုက္သည္။

အဆိုုပါ စြပ္စြဲခ်က္ကုိ ယမန္ေန႕က ေမာင္ေတာျမိဳ႕နယ္ အလယ္သံေက်ာ္တြင္ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ေသာ လူထု ရွင္းလင္းပြဲ အျပီးတြင္ ေဒသခံ မြတ္ဆလင္မ်ားက ေျပာဆိုလိုက္ျခင္း ျဖစ္သည္။

“ သူတို႕က ကၽြန္ေတာ္တို႕ကို လြတ္လပ္စြာ ခရီးသြားခြင့္ေတြ ရေအာင္ လုပ္ေပးမယ္။ ႏိုင္ငံသား စိစစ္ေရး ကဒ္ေတြ လုပ္ေပးမယ္။ ပလီေတြကို ျပင္ခြင့္ရေအာင္ လုပ္ေပးမယ္။ ျခေသၤ့ (ခ်ိန္ေဟာ)ကို ေရႊးေကာက္ပြဲမွာ မဲေပးၾကပါဆိုျပီး သူတို႕က ေျပာသြားတယ္။ မေန႕က လူထု ရွင္းလင္းပြဲမွာေတာ့ ဒီကိစၥေတြကို ဘာမွ ေျပာမသြားဘူး” ဟု လူထု ရွင္းလင္းပြဲသို႕ တက္ေရာက္ခဲ့သူ တစ္ဦးက ေျပာသည္။

ၾက႕ံဖြံ႕ပါတီသည္ ယမန္ေန႕က လူထု ရွင္းလင္းပြဲကို အလယ္သံေက်ာ္ ေက်းရြာတြင္ ျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ျပီး လူေပါင္း ၂၀၀၀ ခန္႕တက္ေရာက္နားေထာင္ခဲ့သည္ဟု သိရသည္။

Only just in mid April, Thailand announced that it would close down nine refugee camps on its 1400 kilometres long eastern border with Myanmar. It’s important to consider as to why Thailand wants to end its twenty years humanitarian policy of assisting refugees? What kind of prospects might be faced by the refugees once they are back in Myanmar? What are the views of the Nongovernmental Organisations (NGOs) and what other options are in pipeline for the refugees that might enable them to escape this bleak scenario? This article considers these various questions and suggests some policy options for Thailand at the end.

Four United Nations agencies - United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), World Food Programme (WFP), United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) - initiated the project to cut poverty of the people living in Cox's Bazar's southern most sub-districts of Ukhia and Teknaf.

ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာနယ္စပ္က ျမန္မာဒုကၡသည္ေတြကို ထိုင္းအာဏာပိုင္ေတြအေနနဲ႔ အခုခ်ိန္မွာ ျပန္ပို႔မွာ မဟုတ္ဘူးလို႔ မိမိတို႔ ယုံႀကည္ေၾကာင္း လူဦးေရ ၊ ဒုကၡသည္နဲ႔ ေ႐ႊ႕ေျပာင္း အေျခခ်သူမ်ားအေရး ဆိုင္ရာ အေမရိကန္ လက္ေထာက္ ႏိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီး Mr. Eric Schwartz က ေျပာၾကားလိုက္ပါတယ္။

RFA နဲ႔ သီးသန္႔ ေတြ႕ဆုံေမးျမန္းစဥ္ ဧၿပီ ၂၅ ရက္ တနလၤာေန႔က အခုလိုေျပာတာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ 

Chittagong, Bangladesh: In April, the regular meeting of Burmese ethnic groups living in the UK was hosted by the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK, or BROUK, on April 23, according to Mr. Tun Khin, the president of BROUK.

“The Kachin, Chin, Karen, and Rohingya ethnic groups attended the regular meeting, and it was held at No 10 Station Road, Walmthamstow, London.”

"We must disclose who provided the Bangladesh passports to Burmese citizens and which travel agents are involved in the incident," he said.

In another incident, Bangladesh border security forces arrested 45 Burmese Muslims on Sunday in the border area of Teknaf as they were entering Bangladesh through border points along the Naff River, which demarcates the border between the two countries. 

The 45 Burmese citizens were handed over to Bangladesh police after their arrest by Border Guards Bangladesh. 

Link : http://www.narinjara.com/details.asp?id=2931