Malaysia’s Rohingyas protest violence in Myanmar.

KUALA LUMPUR: Adding anger to an already tense situation in Myanmar, a group of 8 ethnic parties currently allied have said the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority are not considered an ethnic minority.

The statement by the group’s reiterated their position adopted in 2005.

It comes as the Rohingya minority in the country face waves of attacks and reported massacres in the Western Arakan area of the country.

“‘Rohingya’ is not to be recognized as a nationality,” said a statement by the National Democratic Front (NDF), saying it wanted its views to be known to “the people at home and in foreign lands” because of the sectarian violence that has erupted in Rakhine State, claiming nearly 80 lives since May 28.

Some 800,000 Rohingyas live in Burma, where the government considers them illegal immigrants and denies them citizenship. Most Burmese call Rohingya “Bengali.”

အီဂ်စ္ႏုိင္ငံ ျမန္မာသံရံုးေရွ႕တြင္ ျမန္မာျပည္ရွိ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာမြတ္စလင္မ္မ်ား အစုလိုက္အျပံဳလုိက္ အသတ္ခံရမူအေပၚ  အီဂ်စ္ႏိုင္ငံသားမ်ားက ဆႏၵျပ


Credit : Zaid- MMM ( Myanmarmuslim.net)

In my point of view, it’s yes and it’s going down very fast. Moreover, many people ignore to prevent and protect those who are pushing Burma down the drain and it’s likely being seen in the arena of Burma politics, many more are consciously or unconscious, directly or indirectly supporting it. Those pundits of politics who always like to point out whether things are politically correct or not are also surprisingly silent. This is not a good omen.

We all know the notorious system of apartheid, a racism in South Africa, segregating people based on their ethnicity. Who can’t go to which place, can’t take which transport, can’t go to which school, and can’t go into which career and so on. For the good of the country or any society, there’s no doubt and no brainer that different society must work together. Apartheid is a very disgusting and inhumane ideology and it has no place in today’s world; let’s forget about asking for it and propagating it, even accepting that system is extremely horrible.

However, in our country Burma, there now exists a political party that openly demands this system of apartheid and segregation. For 2 days waiting for any voice from any political leader or any ethnic leader, or any religious leader or any human right activist or any governmental or non-governmental organization, but in vain, there’s none. Nobody voice up this is a disgusting, horrible and sicken, atrocious and terrible thing. So the question comes is Burma going down in the drain. (Not to those who do not know the press release of RNDP yet.)

On RNDP’s press release 04/2012 dated 2012 May 25, sending back the illegal immigrants to their original country is not wrong and it’s acceptable. But regarding 6(b), instead of “taking legal actions against those criminals and lawbreakers, and working out to reconciliation and peaceful co-existence of all citizens”,

RNDP demands to segregate the Arakanese Buddhist and other Muslims (mostly Bengali descents) by separating the Muslims away from their places.

Those Burmese political, ethnic, social, religious and business leaders should answer what is this if not apartheid. Though they know this sicken and awful press release demand, being silent, and not condemning openly is certainly concerting to it and it’s a historical liability on all Burmese leaders. If in future, if there’re any similar occurrences, conquering the houses and businesses of different ethnic and religious minorities, how are the Burmese political leaders going to handle this issue?

It shows that those who demanding this kind not only understands the value of democracy and human rights, but also no intention of practicing any of it.

Leaders should learn from the lessons of Bosnia, Rwanda and alike. Prevent before it get worse. Get the country on the right path. The democratic forces urgently need to reorganize and reinforce in truth manner to ward off the hardliners of old guard who have been openly trying to set up the democracy-skinned quasi-civilian government permanently controlled by generals.

Daw Suu said today in France that this is a rare opportunity in 50 years and need to make use of it correctly. If not, Burma again will go down in the drain. Just another 50 years.

Aung Tin
June 28, 2012
___________________________________________________________________




If Myanmar Military and U Thein Sein’s government failed to stop the following APERTHEID Master-Plan on Muslims in Rakhine state, which is already started, the world leaders should request for the urgent UNSC meeting to discuss and rescue the oppressed people.

OIC member Muslim countries should WARN the Chinese and Russian governments not to use VETO in the coming urgent UNSC.

(NOTE: The Apartheid Rakhine party had also requested for the discussion with UN and other countries as stated in the last line, i.e. No 6 d.)


The following is the direct translation of the The Rakhine Nationalities Development Party RNDP’s Party Policy announcement of APERTHOID STYLE Post-Riots relocations.


The Official letter-head of
The Rakhine Nationalities Development Party
RNDP Head Quarters
(Complete with the flag, emblem, seal and Coat of arms)
The Rakhine Nationalities Development Party RNDP
Party Policy announcement of Post-Riots relocations
Announcement No. 04/2012

26 June 2012
Rakhine State and Rakhine people are suffering a lot of national difficulties because of the communal riots that started on 8 June 2012.

U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor MichaelPosner discusses the 2011 Human Rights Report on LiveAtState

Syed Zain Al-Mahmood in Teknaf
29 June 2012

Sectarian violence in Burma has sent Muslim Rohingya refugees fleeing across the border, but they find themselves unwelcome in neighbouring Bangladesh.


Nozir Hossain shows the scar he received while trying to protect himself on the day his sons were killed. Photograph: Syed Zain Al-Mahmood for the Guardian


Some sobbed quietly while others pleaded and raised their arms to heaven. Their children looked on with glassy stares, utterly exhausted after days at sea in an open boat. Soon they would be on the water again, escorted by a Bangladeshi coast guard vessel and pushed back into the waters of Burma where they knew violence still raged.

"The Mogh slaughtered my brothers. They will kill us all … please help us!" screamed a woman carrying a baby only a few months old, before she was hustled away by border guards.

The sectarian violence in Burma that has sent boatloads of refugeesfleeing to Bangladesh in recent weeks – and being firmly pushed back – has once again turned the spotlight on the plight of Burma's Rohingya minority.

There is no place the Rohingya people can call home. Burma passed a law in 1982 – criticised as discriminatory by human rights groups – that effectively rendered them stateless. Waves of ethnic violence since 1991, some of it state-sponsored, have pushed more than 250,000 Rohingyas into Bangladesh, where they live in squalid, makeshift camps with little or no access to healthcare or education.

Nozir Hossain, 70, knows well what it means to live in limbo. Hossain, who used to be a farmer in the Maung Daw area of Burma's Arakan state, has been living in an unauthorised camp in Teknaf, on Bangladesh's southern tip, since 2001.

Sitting in the tiny shack he shares with four others, Hossain described the day his family was forcibly uprooted. "The Mogh [ethnic Rakhine] surrounded our village at dawn," he recalled. "The Nasaka [Burmese border troops] were behind them. They set fire to the houses and chopped, hacked and shot at anyone who got in their way. Two of my sons were slaughtered in front of my eyes. When I flung up my arm to protect my head, a machete nearly took my hand off. I fell and lay in a pool of my sons' blood. The killers moved on, leaving me for dead."

Despite the horrors he has witnessed, Hossain hopes to go back to Burma one day. "There is nothing for us here," he said. "We would like to go back home … back to farming our land. I hope the government will be fair and give us our rights."



Hossain was repatriated to Burma in 2005, but he came back after finding his land occupied by Rakhine. He said both the Burmese and Bangladeshi governments are falsely characterising the position of the Rohingya.

"The Burmese government says we're Bangladeshi, but the Arakan is the only home we know. My father was born in Arakan and so was my grandfather. The Bangladesh government says we're illegal migrants. But we didn't enter Bangladesh secretly to work. We came to save ourselves and our families."

According to Bangladeshi historian Abdul Aziz, there have been Muslims in Arakan since Arab traders came to the region in the eighth century. "The poetry of 17th-century poets like Alaol clearly mentions Muslims in positions of power in the court of the Arakan king," Aziz said. "The writing of travellers like Ibn Batuta in the 14th century proves that Bengal was one of the wealthiest nations in the world while Arakan was infested with pirates. There was migration from Arakan to Bengal and not the other way round."

Despite centuries-old roots in the Arakan region, discriminatory policies have been imposed on the Rohingya since Arakan was annexed by Burma in 1784. According to the Arakan Project, an NGO, the Rohingya are subjected to severe restrictions on their movement and marriages, and to arrests, extortion, forced labour and confiscation of land.

"The Nasaka used to come and take away the men and boys," said Hossain. "They forced us to work as labourers without pay. This was only done to us, not to Rakhine or anybody else."

The Rohingya have not fared much better on the Bangladesh side of the border. The government in Dhaka has refused to allow the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to register Rohingya arrivals since 1992. This means all but 30,000 of the Rohingyas are denied refugee status. The unregistered Rohingyas – more than 200,000 by some estimates – are officially considered illegal migrants and cannot get food rations provided by the World Food Programme. They are also denied access to basic healthcare and education provided by the UNHCR and its partner organisations.

The Bangladesh government is determined to keep services to a bare minimum to avoid creating a "pull factor" – conditions that will attract more refugees – an official of the ministry of food and disaster management said, on condition of anonymity.

As part of government policy, the NGO Affairs Bureau in Dhaka has not approved project proposals in health, education and other sectors in Cox's Bazar district, even if it benefits the local Bangladeshi community. Last year, Dhaka rejected a $33m UN joint initiative to develop Cox's Bazar with special focus on education and health.



The government has also put a stop to the UNHCR's resettlement programme, under which 900 Rohingyas were resettled in third countries to restart their lives. Most went to Australia, the UK and Canada. In November 2010, the Bangladesh government suspended the programme, pending a review.

Life is grim even for those in the authorised refugee camp. Rohingya children in the camp are permitted to study up to primary level – fifth grade – but not beyond. "Keeping them motivated is the main challenge," said Shahin Islam, director of the Education for Refugee Children project run by Save the Children. "It's very easy for them to lose hope … they don't see a future ahead."

Many experts have questioned the view that registering more Rohingya nationals in Bangladesh will bring more refugees across the border. "People do not leave their homes and go to a foreign country just because there's a basic health clinic or primary schools," said Jing Song, the UNHCR spokesperson in Dhaka. "Knowing who the refugees are and where they are is the first step to a solution to this protracted refugee situation. It's not only to the benefit of refugees, but also to the benefit of the host country."

Source : Guardian Co.UK

က်ေနာ့အျမင္မွာေတာ့ ျမန္မာျပည္ဟာ ေျမာင္းထဲကုိ အရွိန္နွင့္ ဒလေဟာ ထုိးက်ေနျပီလုိ႔ ထင္တယ္။ ပုိဆုိးတာက မုိက္မုိက္မဲမဲ ေျမာင္းထဲတြန္းခ်သူေတြကုိ မတားဆီး၊ မကန္႔ကြက္တဲ့အျပင္ မသိက်ိဳးက်င္ျပဳေနတဲ့သူေတြက ထုႏွင့္ ထည္ႏွင့္ ရွိေနရုံတင္မက မသိမသာျဖစ္ျဖစ္၊ သိသိသာသာျဖစ္ျဖစ္၊ တုိက္ရုိက္ျဖစ္ျဖစ္၊ သြယ္ဝုိက္၍ျဖစ္ျဖစ္ အားေပးအားေျမွာက္ေနသူေတြႏွင့္ ျမန္မာ့ႏုိင္ငံေရးေလာက တစ္ခုလုံးမွာ ျပန္႔ႏွံ႔ေနတယ္လုိ႔ေတာင္ ထင္မွတ္စရာျဖစ္ေနပါျပီ။ ႏုိင္ငံေရးအရ မွန္ မမွန္(Political Correctness)ကုိ အျမဲေထာက္ျပေနတတ္တဲ့ ႏုိင္ငံေရး ပ႑ိတ္ေတြကလည္း အ့ံၾသစရာေကာင္းေလာက္ေအာင္ ဆြ႔ံအႏႈတ္ပိတ္ေနၾကတယ္။ ဒါက ေကာင္းတဲ့ အလားအလာ၊ ေကာင္းတဲ့ နိမိတ္(omen)ေတြ မဟုတ္ဘူးဆုိတာ ေသခ်ာလြန္းပါတယ္။


ေတာင္အာဖရိကမွာ နာမည္ဆုိးႏွင့္ ေက်ာ္ၾကားခဲ့တဲ့ Apartheid ဆုိတာကုိ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔အားလုံး သိၾကပါတယ္။ လူေတြကုိ မ်ိဳးႏြယ္အရ သီးျခားစီ ခဲြျခားထားျခင္း(Segregation)ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ ဘယ္လူမိ်ဳးေတြ ဘယ္ေနရာကုိ မလာရ၊ ဘယ္ေနရာမွာ မေနရ၊ ဘယ္ကားကုိ မစီးရ၊ ဘယ္စားေသာက္ဆုိင္မွာ မစားရ၊ ဘယ္ေက်ာင္းကုိ မတက္ရ၊ ဘယ္ေနရာမွာ ဘယ္အလုပ္ကုိ မလုပ္ရဆုိတဲ့ လူမ်ိဳးခ်င္း ခဲြျခားဆက္ဆံမႈ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ လူ႕အဖဲြ႕အစည္း၊ ျမိဳ႕ရြာ၊ ျပည္နယ္၊ ႏုိင္ငံအက်ိဳးအတြက္ အဖဲြ႕အစည္းေတြမွာ မတူညီေသာ လူအုပ္စုႏွစ္စုက အက်ိဳးတူ ပူးေပါင္းလုပ္ေဆာင္ဖုိ႔ဆုိတာကေတာ့ စဥ္းစားစရာပင္ မလုိေတာ့ပါ။ အင္မတန္ ရြံရွာစရာေကာင္း၊ ေၾကာက္စရာေကာင္းတဲ့ အယူအဆဆုိးျဖစ္တာမုိ႔ ယဥ္ေက်းတဲ့ ယေန႔လူ႔ကမၻာမွာ ဘယ္လုိလူသားဆန္တဲ့ လူသားမ်ိဳးကမွ က်င့္သံုးဖုိ႔ ေတာင္းဆုိတာ၊ လႈံ႔ေဆာ္တာ မေျပာႏွင့္ ဒီအယူအျမင္ကုိ လက္ခံပါတယ္လို႔ေတာင္ မေျပာရဲတဲ့ အင္မတန္ ဆုိးယုတ္သိမ္ဖ်ဥ္းတဲ့ အယူဝါဒျဖစ္ပါတယ္။



သုိ႔ေသာ္ က်ေနာ္တုိ႔ အမိျမန္မာျပည္မွာ ဒီဝါဒဆုိး segregationကို အတိအလင္း ေၾကျငာခ်က္ထုတ္ျပန္ ေတာင္းဆုိရဲတဲ့ ႏုိင္ငံေရးပါတီ ရွိေနပါျပီ။ ဘယ္ႏုိင္ငံေရးေခါင္းေဆာင္၊ ဘယ္တုိင္းရင္းသား ေခါင္းေဆာင္၊ ဘယ္ဘာသာေရးေခါင္းေဆာင္၊ ဘယ္လူ႕အခြင့္အေရးေခါင္းေဆာင္၊ ဘယ္အစုိးရဝန္ႀကီး၊ ဘယ္ႏုိင္ငံေရး၊ လူမႈေရးစတဲ့ အဖဲြ႕အစည္းကမ်ား ကန္႔ကြက္သံ ၾကားရေလမလားလို႔ ႏွစ္ရက္ၾကာေအာင္ ေစာင့္ဆုိင္းခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ရွက္စရာ ေၾကာက္စရာကုိ မရွက္မေၾကာက္ လုပ္သူက လုပ္တယ္။ ဘယ္သူကမွ မလုပ္သင့္ဘူးလုိ႔ တစ္ခြန္းဆုိသံ မၾကားရသျဖင့္ ျမန္မာျပည္ သြားျပီလားလုိ႔ ေမးခြန္းထုတ္ရျခင္းျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ (RNDP၏ ဤေၾကျငာခ်က္ကုိ မသိရွိေသးသူမ်ားအား မဆုိလုိပါ။)

RNDP (ရခုိင္တုိင္းရင္းသားမ်ား တုိးတက္ေရးပါတီ)က ၂၀၁၂ခု ေမလ (၂၆)ရက္ေန႔စြဲႏွင့္ ထုတ္ျပန္ေသာ ေၾကျငာခ်က္အမွတ္ ၀၄/၂၀၁၂မွာပါတဲ့ တရားမဝင္ ခုိးဝင္လာသူမ်ားကုိ အေရးယူတာ၊ မူရင္းႏိုင္ငံကုိ ျပန္ေစတာေတြကုိေတာ့ လုံးဝ သေဘာတူပါတယ္။ အျငင္းပြါးစရာ မရွိပါ။ သို႔ေသာ္ ေၾကျငာခ်က္ရဲ့ အမွတ္စဥ္ ၆(ခ)မွာ၊ တရားဥပေဒခ်ိဳးေဖါက္သူေတြ၊ ရာဇဝတ္မႈက်ဴးလြန္သူေတြကုိ ထိေရာက္စြာ အေရးယူေစျပီး ႏုိင္ငံသားအခ်င္းခ်င္း သင့္ျမတ္ေရး၊ ေအးခ်မ္းစြာ အတူယွဥ္တဲြ ေနထုိင္ႏုိင္ေရးကုိ မျဖစ္ျဖစ္ေအာင္ ဦးေဆာင္ေပးရမည့္အစား

ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္အတြင္းရွိ ျမိဳ႕ရြာမ်ား၌ ရခုိင္လူမ်ိဳးမ်ားႏွင့္ ဘဂၤလီလူမ်ိဳးမ်ား နီးကပ္စြာေရာေႏွာေနထုိင္မႈ မရွိရေအာင္ ဘဂၤလီလူမ်ိဳးမ်ားအား သင့္ေတာ္ရာ၌ ယာယီသီးျခားေနရာခ်ထားရန္

လုိ႔ေတာင္းဆုိထားပါတယ္။ ဒါကုိ Apartheid (Segregation) မေခၚရင္ ဘာလို႔ေခၚမလဲဆုိတကုိ ျမန္မာ့ႏုိင္ငံေရး၊ တုိင္းရင္းသားေရး၊ လူမႈေရး၊ ဘာသာေရး၊ စီးပြါးေရး ေခါင္းေဆာင္ႀကီးမ်ား ေျဖၾကပါ။ ဒီေလာက္ ဆုိးသြမ္းေဖါက္ျပန္တဲ့ ေၾကျငာခ်က္ကုိ ၾကားသိလွ်က္ႏွင့္ ႏႈတ္ဆိတ္ေနျခင္း၊ လူသိရွင္ၾကား မကန္႔ကြက္ မရႈံ႕ခ်ျခင္းသည္ သေဘာတူ(Consent)သည္ဟု ဆုိႏုိင္သျဖင့္ ယေန႔ ျမန္မာ့ေခါင္းေဆာင္ႀကီးမ်ားေပၚတြင္ သမုိင္းေၾကြးတင္သြားပါျပီ။ ေနာင္ ျမန္မာျပည္ရဲ့ အျခားေနရာေတြမွာ အလားတူျဖစ္ရပ္ေတြ ျဖစ္လာရင္၊ ျဖစ္လာေအာင္ လႈံ႕ေဆာ္ျပီး ဘာသာမတူ၊ လူမ်ိဳးမတူသူေတြရဲ့ အုိးအိမ္ေတြကုိ မတရားသိမ္းပုိက္လုိလွ်င္ ျမန္မာ့ႏုိင္ငံေရး ေခါင္းေဆာင္ႀကီးမ်ား ဘယ္လုိကုိင္တြယ္ေျဖရွင္းၾကမလဲ။


ဒီလုိေတာင္းဆုိသူေတြဟာ မိမိကုိယ္တုိင္က လုိလားပါတယ္ဆုိတဲ့ ဒီမုိကေရစီႏွင့္ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးဆုိတာကုိ နားမလည္ တန္ဖုိးမထားရုံတင္မက က်င့္သုံးလုိဟန္ပင္ မရွိေၾကာင္းကုိ အတိအလင္း ျပဆုိျခင္းျဖစ္တယ္။ ၁၉၄၈ခုႏွစ္မွာ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ ျဖစ္တည္လာပုံ၊ ႏုိင္ငံ စတင္တည္ေထာင္စ ကတည္းက ႏွစ္ႏုိင္ငံ နယ္စပ္ေတြမွာ လူမ်ိဳးေပါင္းစုံေတြ ျပန္႔ႏွံ႔ေနထုိင္ပုံ၊ တုိင္းျပည္နယ္နိမိတ္ ခဲြျခားသတ္မွတ္မႈႏွင့္အတူ ပါဝင္လာတဲ့ လူမ်ိဳးေတြကုိ တရုပ္၊ ထုိင္း၊ အိႏၵိယ၊ ျမန္မာစသျဖင့္ ႏုိင္ငံသစ္ေတြက လက္ခံေပးရပုံ (ခုိးဝင္သူေတြကို လကၡံေပးဖုိ႔ မေျပာပါ။) စသည့္ သမုိင္းျဖစ္ရပ္ေတြကုိ အေျခခံေလာက္မွ နားမလည္ျခင္းကုိ ျပပါတယ္။ ပုိဆုိးတာက (၂၁)ရာစုမွာ လူသားအေျခခံျပီး လူသားခ်စ္စိတ္ႏွင့္ တုိင္းျပည္ကုိ လက္ေတြ႕က်က် တည္ေဆာက္ရမည့္အစား စိတ္ဝမ္းကဲြျပားမႈေတြႏွင့္ မညီမညြတ္ျဖစ္ေစကာ တုိင္းျပည္ကုိ ေခ်ာက္ထဲထုိးခ်မည့္ အျမင္က်ဥ္းေျမာင္းေသာ ငါ့ဘာသာ၊ ငါ့သာသနာ၊ ငါ့လူမ်ိဳးဆုိတဲ့ မ်က္ကန္းမ်ိဳးခ်စ္စိတ္ကုိ တာဝန္မဲ့ လႈံ႕ေဆာ္ျခင္းျဖစ္တယ္။ ကိုယ့္ျပည္သူေတြကုိ အက်ိဳးျဖစ္ေအာင္ အသိညာဏ္ဖြင့္ေပးရမည့္အစား အက်ိဳးယုတ္ အသိကန္းေအာင္ အဆိပ္ခပ္ျခင္းျဖစ္တယ္။ (ေရွးေခတ္က ဟစ္ေအာ္လာၾကခဲ့တဲ့ အမ်ိဳး၊ ဘာသာ၊ သာသနာဆုိတဲ့ စကားမ်ိဳးကုိ လက္သုံးျပဳလုိ႔ မလုံေလာက္ေတာ့ဘူး။ ျမန္မာျပည္မွာ ခရစ္ယာန္၊ အစၥလာမ္၊ ဟိႏၵဴ၊ နတ္ကုိးမႈစသည္ကုိ စဲြျပီး လူမ်ိဳးေရးတရားလုပ္လုိ႔မရဘူး။ ကုိယ္ယုံၾကည္ရာ ကုိယ္ကုိးကြယ္ျပီး တုိင္းေရးျပည္ေရးမွာ ညီညီညြတ္ညြတ္ စုေပါင္းလုပ္ၾကဖုိ႔ ေဖေဖၚဝါရီလ(၁၁)ရက္ ပင္လုံညီလာခံမွာ လက္မွတ္မေရးထုိးမီ ဗိုလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္းက ကတိျပဳ ေျပာၾကားခ့ဲပါတယ္။ သံဃာေတာ္မ်ားက အမ်ိဳး၊ ဘာသာ၊ သာသနာဟု ဆုိျခင္းကုိ နားလည္ေပးႏုိင္ေသာ္လည္း လူမ်ိဳးေပါင္းစုံ၊ သာသနာ ေပါင္းစုံကုိ ကုိယ္စားျပဳရမည့္ ႏုိင္ငံေရးေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားက အမ်ိဳး၊ ဘာသာ၊ သာသနာဟု ေျပာလာမည္ဆုိလွ်င္ မိမိစီးေသာျမင္းကုိ အထီးမွန္း အမမွန္း မသိသူမ်ား ျဖစ္ရာ၏။ လြန္ခဲ့ေသာ (၆၆)ႏွစ္ကပင္ ဗုိလ္ခ်ဳပ္ေအာင္ဆန္းက ျပည္ေထာင္စုႏုိင္ငံ တည္ေထာင္ေရးအတြက္ လက္ေတြ႕မက်ဟုဆုိကာ ပယ္ခ်ခဲ့ေသာ အယူမွား၊ အျမင္မွားျဖစ္သည္ကုိ သတိခ်ပ္သင့္လွ၏။)

ေခါင္းေဆာင္ႀကီးမ်ားအေနႏွင့္ ေဘာ့စနီးယား၊ ရဝမ္ဒါစတဲ့ ႏုိင္ငံေတြက လူမ်ိဳးေရး အထိကရုဏ္းေတြကုိ ျပန္စဥ္းစားျပီး သခၤန္းစာယူၾကပါ။ အေျခအေနေတြ ပုိမဆုိးလာေအာင္ အခ်ိန္မီ တားဆီးၾကပါ။ တုိင္းျပည္ကုိ လမ္းေၾကာင္းမွန္ကုိ ျပန္တင္ေပးၾကပါ။ ျပန္လည္ေခါင္းေထာင္ဖုိ႔ အထင္အရွား ၿကုိးစားေနတဲ့ ဒီမုိကေရစီအေရျခံဳ စစ္အာဏာရွင္စနစ္ကုိ တစ္ႏုိင္ငံလုံးက တုိင္းရင္းသားေပါင္းစုံ ျပည္သူလူထု၏ နည္းမွန္လမ္းမွန္ျဖစ္ေသာ စည္းလုံးညီညြတ္မႈျဖင့္ အႏုိင္တုိက္ယူပါ။

အႏွစ္ငါးဆယ္မွာ ရေတာင့္ရခဲျဖစ္တဲ့ အခုလုိအခြင့္အခါမ်ိဳးကုိ မွန္မွန္ကန္ကန္ အသုံးခ်ႏုိင္ဖုိ႔လုိတယ္လုိ႔ ေဒၚစုက ယေန႔တင္ဘဲ ျပင္သစ္မွာ ေျပာလုိက္ပါျပီ။ မွန္မွန္ကန္ကန္ အသုံးမခ်ႏုိင္ရင္ေတာ့ ျမန္မာျပည္ ေနာက္တစ္ခ်ီ သြားျပီ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

ေနာက္ထပ္ အႏွစ္ ငါးဆယ္ေလးေလာက္ပါ။
ေအာင္တင္
ဇြန္လ(၂၈) ၂၀၁၂


*************************************************************************Burma to go down the drain

Apparently, Bangladesh's pushback of helpless Rohingyas from its territorial waters into those of Myanmar seems to have worked. Or has it? Given that 30,000 were afflicted in the latest eruption of ethnic violence in Rakhine state capital Sittwe, this may have been just a stalling operation.

Since no media is allowed in the troubled zone, there's no way knowing whether those sent back by us are safe. Perhaps, Bangladesh's stern approach has gone down well with the Myanmar authorities. For once, we could bite the bullet and let them float into the elements of nature, or shove them into the tunnel of uncertainty.

Clearly, all this is a palliative, and not a cure of the disease. Because the fundamental issue of statelessness of the Muslim minority in the Rakhaine state of Myanmar remains intact. Persecution and ethnic cleansing of varying intensity follow from this non-existent status of not even second class citizens.

So long as this seminal question of nationality is not resolved, Rohingyas in boatloads or trickles would keep coming in through the 200km long porous border between Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Thus, we find in the UNHCR's version, eight unregistered Rohingya refugees to every registered one. In contrast, government's ratio between listed and unlisted refugees stands at 15 to 1. This demographic pressure on an already densely populated part of Bangladesh is headed for snowballing with severe repercussions in the horizon.

One reputed international observer Derek Tonkin's position on this fallacy is unassailable: "The statelessness of the Rohingya is a breach of Article 15(1) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which provides that: 'Everyone has the right to a nationality'."

When a country is at the receiving end of fallout from either a willful persecution of the Rohingyas by the military as in 1978 and 1991 and internal ethnic violence as erupted lately, it has to defend its national interest. Bangladesh has every right to address the problem bilaterally, and if necessary, internationally. But a hands-on role is missing.

What is difficult to understand is Bangladesh government treating the latest dimension to the Rohingya question in a way that it can make all the difference between good and bad bilateral relations. Why must this be so; an issue has arisen and it must be dealt with, first compassionately and then by taking it up at the government-to-government level in a no nonsense manner.

Now, why have a short memory? In both times that the spates in Rohingya exodus were triggered by military operations in Myanmar, we arranged repatriation of the refugees by engaging the military authorities, post-1978 and 1991. We could work out a solution, incomplete that it might have been, albeit under the auspices of the UNHCR. Why then the latest upshot of ethnic raw nerves centering around a criminal act but allowed to proliferate as a religious-ethnic reprisal by the majority community under military watch should be handled like "glass with care" approach? By accident, if you like, the core issue has come to the fore, through a haemorrhage though. And if the wound is 'band-aided' now, it would bleed again.

In a sense, the international community is also playing kid glove with Myanmar authorities. The West is supersensitive to the cause of consolidating the pro-democracy and open economy gains and advancing the freedom and leadership of Aung San Suu Kyi to complete the process of Myanmar's opening to the world. So, why rock the boat?

Suu Kyi's appeal to reason, her sagacity, and persistent theme of reconciliation have inspired analogies with Nelson Mandela. This is something to draw on. One of the first Suu Kyi statements on her release from house arrest had been to call for speedy resolution of ethnic minority issues. We are looking to her to take a conscientious role in resolving the "nationality" issue of the Rohingyas. We are heartened by her expression of concern over "the handling of the situation by local Rakhaine authorities, in particular their failure to dampen anti-Muslim sentiment. Suu also calls on Buddhists to 'have sympathy for minorities'." (Xinhua)

Suu Kyi's growing international image is of value to the military who still retain the levers of power but understands the efficacy of withdrawal of sanctions on and investment in Myanmar. Pragmatism suggests they should swim with the current.

The two foregoing factors taken together, condition in Myanmar couldn't have been potentially more conducive than it is today towards settling all the ethnic minority issues that bristle the Myanmar body-politic.

There is a third element that the Myanmar government needs to consider to reshape its policy towards the Rohingyas. Ethnic groups like the Karen and Kachin are "insurrectionist" espousing the aspirations of small nations. While attempts are made to assimilate them into the Myanmar society, why should the innocent, armless Rohingyas be left behind?

The writer is Associate Editor, The Daily Star.

source here

Manar Ammar | 28 June 2012 |


                   Western Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims face food shortages and ethnic violence.

CAIRO: Egyptian rights activists announced their solidarity with the under attack Muslim Rohingya community in Arakan, Myanmar, and plan to protest outside the Myanmar embassy later on Thursday.



“We are against exterminating peoples for their religion or beliefs,” said the invitation to action.

“The Arakan region has seen some serious human rights violations since the beginning of June where Muslims were attacked by Buddhists.”

The activists plan to gather in the upscale Cairo neighborhood of Zamalek at 5 PM to protest the ethnic violence outside of the embassy.



Some 30 Rohingya have been killed in violent clashes in Myanmar as a result of ethnic violence with Buddhists in the Western area.

The stateless community has struggled to find a positive way of life as many fled violence in Myanmar in the early 1980s.

The Rohingyas said the flare up of violence in Myanmar has claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people in the past three decades and they want an end to the alleged atrocities.

They want a UN peacekeeping force as well as a medical team to be sent there immediately.

Many fear that thousands of Rohingyas may be heading towards a crisis situation without food, shelter and medication.

Source : BM

ေဌးလြင္ဦး

ကၽြႏ္ုပ္သည္ ၁၉၈၈ ခု ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီ ေတာင္းဆိုဆႏၵျပမႈတြင္ ေဒသဆိုင္ရာ ဦးေဆာင္ေဆာ္ၾသ လႈပ္ရွားခဲ့သူ တစ္ဦးျဖစ္သည္။ ေက်ာင္းသားတပ္မေတာ္ (ABSDF) ၏ ရဲေဘာ္ေဟာင္းတစ္ဦး ျဖစ္သည္၊ ႏုိင္ငံေရး အယူအဆ ေၾကာင့္ ဖမ္းဆီးခ်ဳပ္ေႏွာင္ ခံခဲ့ရသူ တစ္ဦး ျဖစ္သည္။

ႏိုင္ငံေရးဘ၀က်င္လည္မႈ၊ ေတာ္လွန္ေရးဘ၀ က်က္စားမႈမ်ား အေလွ်ာက္ တိုင္းရင္းသားတို႔၏ ဆႏၵႏွင့္ သေဘာ သဘာ၀တို႔အား တစ္စံုတစ္ရာ ကၽြမ္း၀င္သူဟု မိမိကိုယ္မိမိယံုၾကည္သည္။ လက္ႏွက္ကိုင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးတြင္ တစ္စံုတစ္ရာ ပတ္သက္ခဲ့ၿပီးေနာက္-၊ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံ၏ ႏိုင္ငံေရးႏွင့္ တိုင္းရင္းသားအေရးမ်ားကို လက္ႏွက္ကိုင္ ေျဖရွင္းေန၍ မရဟု ခံစားမိလာသျဖင့္- လက္နက္ကိုင္ေတာ္လွန္ေရးအစား ႏွစ္ဦးႏွစ္ဘက္ ေတြ႔ဆံု ညိႇဳႏိႈင္း အေျဖရွာေရးဘက္ကို အားသန္လာခဲ့သည္။ သို႔ျဖင့္ ကၽြႏု္ပ္၏ ႏိုင္ငံေရးသယ္ပိုး၀န္ေဆာင္ျခင္းမ်ား၌ ရည္ရြယ္ ခ်က္တို႔အား ၂၀၀၀ ခုႏွစ္မွ စတင္၍ လမ္းစဥ္ေျပာင္းလဲခဲ့သည္။

သို႔ျဖစ္၍ ကၽြႏု္ပ္အား သေဘာထားေျပာင္းသူ၊ စစ္အစိုးရဘက္သို႔ တိမ္းၫြတ္သူ စသည္ျဖင့္ ေျပာဆိုခံရမႈ မ်ားလည္း မ်ားစြာ ႀကံဳေတြ႔ခဲ့ရသည္။ သို႔ေသာ္ သူတို႔၏ ေျပာဆိုမႈမ်ားထက္ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္၏ အမိေျမ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံေတာ္ ႀကီး ၿပိဳကြဲသြားမည္ကို စိုးရိမ္စိတ္က အႀကီးအက်ယ္ လႊမ္းမိုးေနသျဖင့္- မည္သူ၏ စြပ္စြဲခ်က္မ်ားကမွ ကၽြႏ္ုပ္အား မထိေရာက္ခဲ့ေခ်။

ျပည္တြင္းစစ္ ျဖစ္ေနရျခင္းသည္ စစ္စားရိတ္မ်ားကုန္က်ျခင္း၊ ေသေက်ပ်က္စီးရျခင္း၊ သဘာ၀ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ပ်က္ စီးျခင္း၊ ရန္လိုမုန္တီးမႈ တိုးပြားျခင္းမ်ားႏွင့္ ညိႇမရႏိုင္ေသာ ျပသနာမ်ား ဆက္လက္ခိုင္မာေနျခင္းမ်ား အစဥ္ အရွိန္ အဟုန္ျဖင့္ တုိးလွ်က္သာ ရွိသည္။ ျပည္သူအမ်ား၏ စား၀တ္ေနေရးမွာ က်ဆင္းသည္ထက္ က်ဆင္းလာ ရျခင္းသာ အဖတ္တင္ေပသည္။ လူမ်ိဳးႏြယ္တိုင္းမွ တိုင္းရင္းသား ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားအေနျဖင့္ မိမိ၏ လူမ်ိဳးကို အမွန္တစ္ကယ္ ခ်စ္လွ်င္၊ တန္ဘိုးထားလွ်င္ - မိမိ၏ လူမ်ိဳးအား ပညာမဲ့ေနရသည့္ အျဖစ္၊ စီးပြားပ်က္ေနရသည့္ အျဖစ္၊ က်ီးလန္႔စာစား ေနေနရသည့္ အျဖစ္- တုိင္းတစ္ပါးသို႔ ထြက္ေျပးလွ်က္ ျပည့္တန္ဆာလုပ္စားေနရသည့္ အျဖစ္မ်ားမွ အျမန္ဆံုးကယ္တင္ရန္ စဥ္းစားရေပမည္။

သို႔ေသာ္ အင္အားႀကီးေသာ အုပ္စုမ်ားမွလည္း ႀကီးႏိုင္ငယ္ညႇင္း ျပဳလုပ္ေနသည္မ်ားကို ရပ္ဆိုင္းရေပမည္။ မိမိ က မိမိႏိုင္ငံဟု သတ္မွတ္ထားသည့္ နယ္နိမိတ္အတြင္းမွ တုိင္းရင္းသားအားလံုး၊ လူမ်ိဳးအားလံုး၊ လူသားအား လံုးအေပၚ တစ္ဦးတစ္ေယာက္ခ်င္းစီ၏ အေပၚ၌ လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးကို ေပးတတ္ရမည္။ လူမ်ဳိးႏြယ္တို႔၏ ယဥ္ေက်း မႈ ဓေလ့ထံုးတမ္းမ်ားအား နားလည္ေပးတတ္ရမည္။ မ်က္ႏွာလိုက္မႈ ကင္းရွင္းသည့္ ဥပေဒစိုးမိုးမႈအား က်ယ္ ျပန္႔ထိေရာက္စြာ ျဖန္႔က်က္ႏိုင္ရေပမည္။ သို႔အတြက္ လူမ်ားစု ျဖစ္ေသာ ျမန္မာမ်ားတြင္ ပိုမို၍ တာ၀န္ရွိေနေပ သည္။ မတရားသျဖင့္ ဖိႏွိပ္ခ်ဳပ္ခ်ယ္ျခင္း၊ ဥပေဒ၏ ခြဲျခားမႈမ်ားကို ခံရျခင္း၊ တိုင္းရင္းသားမ်ားအေပၚ မေတာ္ မတရား အတင္းအဓမၼေသြးေႏွာသည့္ ေပၚလစီမ်ား၊ အတင္းအဓမၼသာသနာျပဳသည့္ ေပၚလစီမ်ား၊ ဘာသာေရး လူမ်ိဳးေရး စိတ္၀မ္းကြဲေစရန္ ဖန္တီးေပးသည့္ ေပၚလစီမ်ားကို လံုး၀ ေဖ်ာက္ဖ်က္ပစ္ရေပမည္။ ထိုသို႔ျပဳလုပ္စီမံ ေပးႏိုင္ေသာ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား၊ ျပဳလုပ္စီမံလိုေသာ ေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ား ျမန္မာလူမ်ိဳးထဲမွာ ေပၚထြန္းလာရန္ အေရးႀကီးေပသည္။

Dr. Wakar Uddin with some members of the Foreign Affairs Committee at the Canadian Parliament

Dr. Wakar Uddin greeted by the Chair, Scott Reid, at the Canadian Parliament

2012-06-27

ျဗိတိန္ႏိုင္ငံ လန္ဒန္အေျခစိုက္ BROUK ေခၚ Burmese Rohingya Orgnization အဖြဲ႕ ဥကၠ႒ ဦးထြန္းခင္ဟာ မေန႔က ျဗိတိသွ် ပါလီမန္ အစည္းအေ၀းတစ္ရပ္မွာ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္တြင္းက ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြရဲ႕ အေျခအေနေတြကို တင္ျပခဲ့တယ္လို႔ အဲဒီအဖြဲ႕ရဲ႕ ေၾကညာခ်က္မွာ ေဖာ္ျပထားပါတယ္။


အဲသလိုတင္ျပခဲ့ရာမွာ လတ္တေလာ ျဖစ္ပြားခဲ့တဲ့ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္တြင္း ပဋိပကၡေတြဟာ အစိုးရအဖြဲ႕တြင္းက ျမန္မာျပည္အေျပာင္းအလဲကို မလိုလားတဲ့ သေဘာထားတင္းမာသူေတြနဲ႔ ရခိုင္အမ်ိဳးသား တိုးတက္ေရးပါတီ (RNDP) တို႔ရဲ႕ ေသေသခ်ာခ်ာ ျပင္ဆင္စီမံခဲ့တဲ့ လုပ္ရပ္ေတြျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ ျပီးခဲ့တဲ့ လပိုင္းေတြအတြင္း ရန္ကုန္နဲ႔ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္မွာ RNDP က ကမကထျပဳ ေဆာင္ရြက္ခဲ့တဲ့ အစည္းအေ၀းပြဲေတြ အပါအ၀င္ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ဆန္႔က်င္ေရး လႈပ္ရွားမႈေတြ တိုးတက္ မ်ားျပားလာခဲ့ေၾကာင္း ေျပာသြားပါတယ္။

ဒါ့အျပင္ ဦးထြန္းခင္က - ျပီးခဲ့တဲ့ ပဋိပကၡအတြင္း ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ အနည္းဆံုး (၆၅၀) ေသဆံုးခဲ့ျပီး၊ အနည္းဆံုး (၁၂၀၀) ေလာက္ ေပ်ာက္ဆံုးေနေၾကာင္း၊ ရြာ (၂၂) ရြာနဲ႕ ဗလီ (၁၄) ခု မီးရိွဴ႕ ဖ်က္ဆီးခံခဲ့ရျပီး ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ ရွစ္ေထာင္ေက်ာ္ ေနရာေျပာင္းေရႊ႕ ခံရေၾကာင္း၊ အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈေတြေၾကာင့္ ထြက္ေျပးလာတဲ့ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေလွ အနည္းဆံုး (၁၆) စင္းကို ဘဂၤလားေဒ့ရွ္က လက္မခံဘဲ ျပန္ႏွင္ထုတ္ခဲ့ေၾကာင္း၊ သမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္ ထုတ္ျပန္ခဲ့တဲ့ ညမထြက္ရ ကာဖ်ဴးအမိန္႔ဟာ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြ အေပၚမွာသာ သက္ေရာက္ေနေၾကာင္း ျဗိတိသွ် ပါလီမန္ အမတ္ေတြကို ေျပာဆိုခဲ့ပါတယ္။

ဒါ့အျပင္ အခုအခါ အဓိကရုဏ္းေတြ မရွိေတာ့ေပမဲ့ တခ်ိဳ႕ေနရာေတြမွာ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာအိမ္ေတြ မီးရိွဳ႕ခံေနရဆဲမို႔ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္မွာ ကုလသမဂၢ ေစာင့္ၾကည့္ေလ့လာသူေတြ ထားရွိဖို႔ လိုအပ္ေနေၾကာင္း၊ လုယက္မႈေတြ၊ အဓမၼ ျပဳက်င့္ခံရမႈေတြ ရွိေနေသးေၾကာင္း၊ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္က အၾကမ္းဖက္မႈေတြ ရပ္တန္႔ေအာင္ ျဗိတိသွ်အစိုးရနဲ႔ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ အသိုင္းအ၀ိုင္းအေနနဲ႔ ျမန္မာအစိုးရအေပၚ ထိထိေရာက္ေရာက္ ဖိအားေပးဖို႔ တိုက္တြန္းလိုေၾကာင္း Burmese Rohingya Orgnization uk အဖြဲ႕ ဥကၠ႒ ဦးထြန္းခင္က ေျပာဆိုခဲ့တယ္လို႔ ေၾကညာခ်က္မွာ ပါရွိတယ္။

အဲဒီအစည္းအေ၀းမွာ ကမာၻ႔ခရစ္ယာန္ ေသြးစည္းညီညြတ္ေရးအဖြဲ႕ အေရွ႕အာရွအဖြဲ႕ေခါင္းေဆာင္ Benedict Rogers နဲ႔ Arakan Project ညွိႏိႈင္းေရးမွဴး Chris Lewa တို႔က ဦးထြန္းခင္နဲ႔အတူ သက္ေသခံ ခဲ့ၾကတယ္လို႔ သိရပါတယ္။

By Francis Wade

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ စစ္ေတြျမိဳ႕ ျမိဳ႕မေစ်းၾကီးရိွ အစၥလာမ္ဘာသာဝင္မ်ား ပို္င္ဆိုင္သည့္ ေစ်းဆိုင္ခန္းမ်ားမွ ပစၥည္းမ်ားကို ယေန႔ ဇြန္၂၇ ရက္ေန႔မွ စတင္ျပီးေရႊ႕ေျပာင္းခိုင္းေၾကာင္း၊ ဆိုင္ရိွပစၥည္မ်ားကို ေရႊ႕ခိုင္းျပီးဆိုင္ခန္းေသာ့မ်ားအား ေစ်းအာဏာပိုင္မ်ားမွ သိမ္းယူလိုက္ၾကေၾကာင္းသိရိွရသည္။ စစ္ေတြ ျမိဳ႕မေစ်းရိွ ဆိုင္ခန္းမ်ား၏ ၃ ပံု ၂ ပံုခန္႔မွာ အစၥလာမ္ဘာသာဝင္မ်ားပိုင္ဆိုင္သည့္ ဆိုင္ခန္းမ်ား ျဖစ္ၾကေၾကာင္း ၊ မိမိတို႔ အဘိုး၊အဘြား၊ အေဖ၊အေမမ်ား လက္ထက္ကတည္းကမွ စစ္ေတြျမိဳ႕တြင္ေနထုိင္ လုပ္ကိုင္စားေသာက္လာခဲ့ၾကသူမ်ာ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း စစ္ေတြျမိဳ႕ခံတစ္ဦးမွ ေျပာၾကားပါသည္။

ယခုလို ႏွစ္ဘက္ အျပန္အလွန္ျဖစ္ပြားသည့္ ပဋိပကၡတြင္ အစၥလာမ္ဘာသာဝင္မ်ား ပို္င္ဆိုင္သည့္ ဆိုင္ခန္းမ်ားအား အဓမၼသိမ္းယူျခင္းမွာ တရားဥပေဒမဲ့ျပဳလုပ္ျခင္းျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း၊ အစၥလာမ္ဘာသာဝင္တို႔၏ ပို္င္ဆို္င္မႈမ်ားအား ဓါးျပတိုက္သည့္ အသြင္ေဆာင္ေၾကာင္း ႏိုင္ငံေတာ္အစိုးရအေနျဖင့္ စစ္ေတြျမိဳ႕အုပ္ခ်ဴပ္ေရး အာဏာပိုင္တို႔၏ တရားဥေပေဒမ့ဲ လုပ္ရပ္အား အျမန္ဆံုး တရားမွ်တစြာ အေရးယူေျဖရွင္းေပးေစဖို႔ အဆိုပါ စစ္ေတြျမိဳ႕ခံ အစၥလာမ္ဘာသာဝင္တစ္ဦးမွ ဆက္လက္ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ပါသည္။

၄င္းက ဆက္ျပီးေတာ့ အစၥလာမ္ဘာသာေတြ ရြာလံုးကၽြတ္ေနတဲ့ နာဇီရပ္ကြက္ဆိုရင္ ယခု ကြင္းျပင္သာရိွေတာ့ေၾကာင္း၊ နာဇီေစ်းဆုိလွ်င္လဲ မီးရိႈ႕ခံရျပီး မီးၾကြင္းမီးက်န္ ပစၥညး္မ်ားကို ပင္ ဘူဒိုဇာျဖင့္ထုိးျပီး အားလံုး အစေဖ်ာက္ပစ္ေၾကာင္းေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။

Arakan Riot News Update : June 27, 2012

Buthidaung Township:

Yesterday night, 4-Rohingya man was arrested by army personnel of Military Operation Command (MOC) No.15 of Buthidaung Township over the allegation that they have been involved in political matter. After arrest, they were brought to unknown place. The arrestees are: two sons of Master Abu Tayub, Imam Hussain, and Abin Chay. They all belong to Ward No.7 of Buthidaung Town. This is the first time arresting occurred in Buthidaung Township, after the sectarian riots have been broken out in Arakan State, said a villager from Buthidaung Township.
Heavy downpours at Buthidaung Township yesterday, the following villages such as—U Hla Pay, longa Daung, Sindaung and Alay Chaung— went under water and villagers have been facing many difficulties. There is no report about death, but the water is still remaining. While the monsoon shower kept many villagers stranded at home throughout the day since early morning.

Maungdaw Township: 

Written by Dr. Abdullah Ahsan 
Posted: 27 June 2012 08:17 


The Rohingyas in the western Myanmar state of Rakhine, formerly known as Arakan, have again been subjected to a major massacre. The Rohingyas happen to be a Muslim minority living in the Buddhist majority country. They have been victims of discrimination for many decades, particularly under the military junta, which ruled the country on the motto of nationalism. Interestingly, one should point out here, that Muslims of Arakan known as Mujahidin, constituted one of the three major forces that fought for the country’s independence in the 1940s. 

This is not the first time that Rohingyas have been targeted. According to Medecins Sans Frontieres, approximately 200,000 Rohingyas were expelled to neighboring Bangladesh in 1978, but almost all of them were forcibly repatriated back: about 10,000 died in the process and another 10,000 remained in Bangladesh. In 1982 Myanmar passed a law declaring most Rohingyas non-citizens. In 1991, again about 250,000 were pushed to Bangladesh. In September 1992 the government of Bangladesh closed down registration of new refugees, and immediately resorted to another round of repatriation. However, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and a number of other international humanitarian bodies strongly protested against the measure. Since then the UNHCR has negotiated with the government of Myanmar to repatriate back the refugees but it has succeeded only partially. Occasionally many of the repatriated refugees would return to Bangladesh. During this period many Rohingyas also migrated to a number of Southeast Asian and West Asian and North African (WANA) countries. But generally speaking, Rohingyas remain stateless people and according to one UN report they are “one of the world’s most persecuted minorities.” 

The current influx of Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh began when a rumor was spread that a Buddhist Rakhine woman was raped and murdered by three Rohingyas and a number of Rakhines attacked a bus carrying Muslim passengers in early June. Violence spread rapidly and hundreds and thousands of Rohingyas began to flee. Rakhine thugs seem to enjoy the tacit support of the law enforcement agencies. The Myanmar government has banned the media in the area. Neighboring Bangladesh also took a stubborn stand by not only preventing the refugees from entering the country, but also by not allowing the media to interview the refugees. The upshot of it all is a humanitarian disaster. 

According to one analysis the origin of the current conflict may lie much deeper in the geo-politics of the area. China reportedly has invested heavily in the area and enemies of China are trying to destabilize the situation in order to weaken the country’s economic role in Myanmar. This is part of a larger agenda to thwart China’s economic ascendancy. (see landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2012/06/new-front-myanmers-role-in-geopolitics.html) 

What is shocking in this whole episode is the stand taken by the country’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. She doesn’t seem to have been moved at all by this unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Another shocking phenomenon is the statement by the US Charge d’ Affairs in Myanmar who praised the government’s role in the crisis. Has the international community lost its conscience? 

What should be done to overcome the crisis? Violence should stop immediately. The state government in Rakhine and the central government under Thein Sein have a big role to play in this. The law should be applied without bias and wrongdoers should be punished, regardless of their ethnicity or religion. At the same time, Thein Sein should initiate measures to grant citizenship to the Rohingyas. 

Myanmar’s fellow ASEAN states should quietly encourage Thein Sein to move in this direction. 



Dr. Abdullah Ahsan, 
Vice-President, 
International Movement for Just World (JUST). 
Petaling Jaya, Malaysia.