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By admin, on 31 May 2011
 The Myanmar Ethnic Rohingya Human Rights Organisation Malaysia (Merhrom) is deeply concerned over the Australian government’s plan to deport 800 asylum seekers to Malaysia.
This raises a few fundamental questions. Why does the Australian government, which is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, want to deport the 800 asylum seekers to Malaysia, which is not a signatory to the Convention? Who are the 800 asylum seekers and where do they come from? What kind of protection can the Malaysian government give them? How long is the UNHCR identification process and where will they be placed during the whole process? Who will be the 4000 refugee that will be resettled to Australia? How long will the Australian government send the asylum seekers to Malaysia and how will Malaysia manage them when the number increases over the years?
Mon, May 30th, 2011 3:29
Subir Bhaumik
bdnews24.com India correspondent 
Dhaka, May 30 (bdnews24.com)—The parliamentary standing committee on foreign affairs feels the country's missions in the Middle East and North Africa region should have been more alert ahead of the people's upsurge in the 'Arab Spring'.
"That would have helped our government evacuate the large Bangladeshi population residing in the Middle East-North Africa region in good time, but that did not happen," said Mostafa Faruk Mohammad, Awami League lawmaker and senior member of the parliamentary standing committee, on Monday.
"Our people got caught up in the uprisings and the conflict that followed," Mostafa Faruk added.
He is a former High Commissioner to many countries including India. 
Date: 30/05/2011
The Secretary General of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Prof Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu reiterated the OIC’s solidarity with the Rohingya people and reassured them of the support of the Organisation.

In his speech which was delivered by Mr. Talal Daaous Director of the Department of Muslim Minorities in OIC, the Secretary General highlighted the importance of the Meeting of Senior Leaders of Arakan Rohingya Union (ARU) and the Euro-Burma Office (EBO) which takes place in the OIC headquarters on 30 and 31 May 2011.

Misha Hussain – Women News Network – WNN: 17 May, 2011
 Twenty-six year old Rohingya mother, Rashida Begum, is seven months pregnant. She and her four children have lived in Katupalong makehift refugee camp for four years. Image: Misha Hussain

(WNN) DHAKA, Bangladesh: Mothering in the Kutupalong makeshift refugee camp in the southwest of Bangladesh is about as tough as it gets. Those who live in the camp experience each day what it means to be undocumented and ‘meaningless.’ Without the right to work, to carry money, or to receive humanitarian aid, ethnic Burmese women and children bear the brunt of the international community’s unwillingness to tackle a 20-year-old issue. Some mothers are as young as the age of 16. Many suffer, along with their children, from acute malnutrition, hunger and starvation. Many have little access to education or healthcare.
Undocumented Burmese Rohingya refugees are in a growing state of crisis in Bangladesh as authorities prevent international aid measures to help them. Relief agencies such as MSF – Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) and Physicians for Human Rights are now facing their lowest ebb with cooperation from Bangladesh government authorities as they attempt to bring medical aid and higher food nutrition into Kutupalong camp. Another aid organization, Islamic Relief Worldwide, has recently pulled out due to inability to receive required permits to assist those in need inside camp.
In March this year, East Timor officially submitted its application to the Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) secretariat to join the organization. If the application is successful, Timor Leste will become ASEAN`s 11th member.
To date East Timor’s application has gained considerable support from a number of the ASEAN member states like Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Philippine, Malaysia including Indonesia, the former occupier of East Timor from 1975-1999. Indonesia has been vocal in advocating for East Timor’s bid to join ASEAN despite the historical animosity between the two countries, dating back to East Timor’s separation from Indonesia in 1999.
However, East Timor’s chance of joining ASEAN has been increasingly uncertain after Singapore voiced its objection. It is argued that currently East Timor is still experiencing a lack of capable human resources which enable the country to effectively take part in at least the 1000 or more ASEAN meetings that are held annually. They further argued that economically East Timor is not ready to compete both regionally and internationally, hence preparations are needed prior to the ascension.
By JOSEPH ALLCHIN,Published: 25 May 2011
UNHCR chief Navi Pillay has warned Australia against the asylum seeker deal (Reuters)
Canberra’s controversial plan to send asylum seekers detained on Australian soil to Malaysia as part of a “refugee swap” is illegal, according to the head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Speaking to Radio Australia on a visit to the country this week, Navi Pillay said that the deal, which is yet to be finalised, would likely violate refugee laws. “They cannot send refugees to a country that has not ratified it,” she said, adding that individuals are not protected in Malaysia, which is not a signatory either to the UN refugee convention nor the UN convention on torture.
VOA News



Photo: Reuters>>Burma's pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi looks at pictures of herself at a photo exhibition held at the National League for Democracy's office in Rangoon, Burma, May 23, 2011
Burma's opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has condemned the use of rape as a weapon of terror in conflicts.

Burma's pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi looks at pictures of herself at a photo exhibition held at the National League for Democracy's head office in Rangoon, Burma, May 23, 2011 In a recorded video address to a conference in Montebello, Canada, the Nobel Peace Prize winner said rape is used in her country as a weapon against those who want to live in peace, but also want to assert their basic human rights. She said the armed forces use rape to intimidate ethnic nationalities and keep the Burmese people divided. 

Aung San Suu Kyi was released in November after having spent most of the past two decades in some form of detention.
Voice of America
Human-rights groups say more than 20 political prisoners being held in the country’s notorious Insein prison began a hunger strike last week protesting inadequate nutrition for all inmates and calling for fundamental rights.

Human-rights groups say at least 33 political prisoners in the notorious Insein prison near Rangoon began a hunger strike last week, when a group of women prisoners protested a government amnesty that reduced overall prison sentences by one year.
 by Nurul Islam

Rohingyas have become stateless within the state. The military regime has put up two options before the Rohingya people: either to accept a Barman melting pot and become Buddhist, or migration to alien lands. None of Rohingya could agree to an arrangement that compromises their religious identity. The ancestral land, Arakan is dear and sacred to them. The new form of persecution is increasing every day. It is only the return of Democracy that is likely to break the age-old repressive rule of the Barman over the Rohingyas of Myanmar."

CNN) -- CNN has won an Amnesty International Media award for its documentary World's Untold Stories: Locked up and Forgotten.
The winning half-hour film, presented by CNN's Nairobi correspondent David McKenzie, highlights the negligence and social taboos suffered by Kenya's mentally disabled community, who live a life hidden away in slums and remote villages across the country.
Deprived of medical care and therapy, an estimated three million mentally disabled individuals are ostracized by society, concealed and locked away inside their own communities, often by their own families. 
By DAVID WOOD
I am a Rohingya. An oppressed stateless people from Burma. 
 
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.

After I passed matriculation, I sneaked out Arakan (his home state) to Rangon to continue my study. If I did not leave in secret my family would have had to have paid a large bribe, which they could not afford.
In Rangon, I was involved in research into natural resources, as a part of my research, I was harassed, beaten and detained by government authorities. My colleagues managed to released me through a bribe.
By David Scott Mathieson (Asia Times)

MAE SOT - What if you held an election and you weren't sure how many people showed up at the polls? To establish voting patterns and trends, one needs to have an accurate estimate of the population, clearly demarcated electorates and the eligible voters contained therein, and a system of tallying votes. It is not clear how closely these prerequisites were observed ahead of the November 7, 2010, vote in Myanmar when population estimates in the country vary widely.

Myanmar has not had an effective nationwide census for decades. Previous ones took place during British colonial rule in 1931, under the post war social democratic government in 1953, and by

the socialist government in 1983. The last official census in 1983 calculated the population to be 35.4 million, despite that count not being able to access considerable parts of the country due to civil war. But what is Myanmar's population now, and how did authorities count the votes on November 7, 2010?

by William McEvoy ( The Stage UK)
 
Richard Shannon’s solo show, based on the life and activism of Burmese democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi, is a simple and inspiring record of one woman’s struggle. Using minimal lighting and props, it puts performer Liana Gould centre stage with little else.

Gould shows a compelling emotional range as she leads us through Suu Kyi’s life, as a student in Oxford, dealing with grief at her parents’ illness and death, getting involved in political campaigns, coping with house arrest. She commands our attention because of her sincerity as a performer, and of course, the story itself is both moving and uplifting.
By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, May 20 -- With the UN's envoy to Myanmar Vijay Nambiar openly refusing to speak with the press, despite a formal request from the UN correspondents' association, the only way to learn the specifics of his recent visit is to ask the Security Council diplomats he spoke to, then ask the UN to confirm.





Aung Zaw is founder and editor of the Irrawaddy magazine. He can be reached at aungzaw@irrawaddy.org
Aung San Suu Kyi recently said to a group of Berlin students during a phone-in with German broadcaster DW-TV that no “meaningful change” has taken place in Burma since the general election in November.
A few days later, the UN secretary-general's acting special envoy to Burma, Vijay Nambiar, flew into Burma to meet with government officials and opposition leaders, including Suu Kyi.
Nambiar said, "The government has made some very interesting statements ... which are very encouraging."

He said he hoped that there would be a breakthrough, though he did not elaborate. He went on to urge Naypyidaw to release the more than 2,200 political prisoners in Burma.Then there was a classic play of the military-backed government showing its true colors. It announced a limited amnesty by reducing all current prisoners' sentences by one year. But only 47 political prisoners were released among several thousands of criminals who enjoyed the president’s “clemency.”
By Mong Palatino, The Diplomat Blog

Burma’s bid to chair the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 2014 was politely dismissed when the bloc concluded its latest summit in Indonesia without a clear commitment on the matter. Instead of receiving support for its bid, Burma was advised by fellow ASEAN members to build better infrastructure first if it really wants to lead the group in the future. But the unstated reason for the quiet rejection of the country’s aspiration is the apparent failure of the ruling junta to improve its poor human rights record. In the eyes of ASEAN, and the rest of the world, Burma’s new government has been unable to hasten the democratization process because of its lack of sincerity and the fact that there is no definite and lasting initiative to promote political reconciliation with dissident parties.
AFP: YANGON — A senior US diplomat met Myanmar's pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi Thursday for talks about the country's new political landscape following the recent dissolution of the junta.

Joseph Yun, the deputy US assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific affairs, described the meeting as "very good" but did not reveal details of his discussion with the Nobel Peace Prize winner.
AFP :WASHINGTON — The United States renewed its economic sanctions against Myanmar and urged the military-backed regime to go much further after it reduced prisoners' terms by just one year.

In a formal notice to Congress, President Barack Obama on Monday said that he was renewing sanctions that would otherwise have expired this month because Myanmar, also known as Burma, was taking actions "hostile to US interests."
Hundreds of men belonging to Burma's minority Rohingya ethnic group continue to languish in stateless limbo in an Indian jail, after being rescued at sea more than two years ago.

The waiting came to a welcome end for 18 Rohingya boat people Thursday, as they crossed from India's West Bengal state into Bangladesh. More than 200 other Rohingyas, though, remain in a prison on India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in a waiting process that has stretched from months to years.
ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ အစိုးရ၏ အေရးၾကီးေသာ ၀န္ၾကီးဌာနမ်ားထဲတြင္ တစ္ခု အပါအ၀င္ ျဖစ္ေသာ လူ၀င္မူ ၾကီးၾကပ္ေရး (လ၀က) ၀န္ၾကီးဌာနကို စစ္တပ္ ၀န္ၾကီး လက္ထဲသို႕ လြဲေျပာင္း ေပးလိုက္ျပီ ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သတင္း ရရွိသည္။
" သူ႕ကို ရာထူးက ဖယ္ရွားလိုက္တာေတာ့ မဟုတ္ပါဘူး။ သူကိုင္ေနတဲ့ ၀န္ၾကီးဌာန (၂) ခုထဲက အေရးၾကီးတဲ့ လ၀က ၀န္ၾကီးဌာနကို စစ္တပ္က လာတဲ့ ဗိုလ္မွဴးၾကီး ထိန္လင္း လက္ထဲကို လြဲေျပာင္း လိုက္တာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ သူရဲ႕ သာသနာေရး ၀န္ၾကီးဌာနကေတာ့ သူလက္ထဲမွာ က်န္ရွိေနမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္" ဟု အမည္မေဖၚလိုသူ အစိုးရ အဖြဲ႕၀င္ ၀န္ၾကီး တစ္ဦးက ေျပာသည္။
Thu, May 19th, 2011 12:49 am BdST
Moinul Hoque Chowdhury
bdnews24.com correspondent

Dhaka, May 18 (bdnews24.com) — The Election Commission (EC) has requested the government for information to ensure that foreign nationals, including Rohingyas, are excluded from the voters roll.

The commission's deputy-secretary Mihir Sarwar Morshed told bdnews24.com that it has sent a letter to the home ministry requesting information on areas where foreigners and Rohingyas might trespass into Bangladesh.

In 2009, when the voters' roll was being updated, some 50,000 Rohingyas in Cox's Bazar and Chittagong Hill Tracts, and 10 people, supposedly ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam) members were identified as listed voters in Moulvibazar.
AP News
The British government has cautioned Southeast Asian countries not to allow Myanmar to take the leadership of their regional bloc.
It says Myanmar will need to show "enormous political progress" to deserve the prestigious role that it now seeks. 

Myanmar, among the members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, has sought the annual chairmanship of the 10-member bloc in 2014. Fellow members have not raised any objection but urged it to continue taking steps to realize a long-unfulfilled promise to fully democratize.

U.S. Ambassador to ASEAN David Carden says it's up to ASEAN to decide on Myanmar's leadership role. He says Washington hopes Myanmar will take seriously the new ASEAN charter, which includes promotion of human rights.
VOA News

The United States is sending a senior diplomat for “introductory” talks with leaders of Burma’s new, nominally-civilian, government. The new government was seated in late March to replace a military junta but U.S. officials say the military retains effective control.

Officials here say the dispatch of the diplomat to Burma does not reflect any easing of the critical U.S. view of the political changes there, but that the Obama administration remains committed to trying dialogue with Burma.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Joseph Yun is due to leave Washington Wednesday for a visit to Burma spanning three days.

The senior diplomat last visited Burma in December and so his visit his week will be the first since the new government was sworn in on March 30th.
 DVB News

One of the handful of political prisoners released yesterday in the much-criticised amnesty has said that little has improved in Burma during his three years behind bars.

Zayar Thaw, a prominent hip hop artist and member of the outlawed Generation Wave youth activist group, yesterday arrived back at his home in Rangoon, one of around 30 political prisoners of a total of 17,000 released in the amnesty.

Critics of the government variously called it a “sick joke” and a “pathetic” attempt by President Thein Sein at carrying through his pledged reforms. The 31-year-old says that despite three years in jail, the outside world is much the same as before.
“Our country is still in a state of regression,” he told DVB. “Every sector – education, health – is going backwards. The economic system only favours one’s close aides and our human living standards are dropping.”
by David Scott Mathieson
David_Scott_Mathieson.jpgWhat if you held an election and you weren't sure how many people showed up at the polls? To establish voting patterns and trends, one needs to have an accurate estimate of the population, clearly demarcated electorates and the eligible voters contained therein, and a system of tallying votes. It is not clear how closely these prerequisites were observed ahead of the November 7, 2010, vote in Burma* when population estimates in the country vary widely.
Burma has not had an effective nationwide census for decades. Previous ones took place during British colonial rule in 1931, under the post war social democratic government in 1953, and by the socialist government in 1983. The last official census in 1983 calculated the population to be 35.4 million, despite that count not being able to access considerable parts of the country due to civil war. But what is Burma's population now, and how did authorities count the votes on November 7, 2010? 


Population estimates between 2008 and 2010 vary from 44.2 million in 2009 according to the United Nations, based on Ministry of Home Affairs figures, to 59.1 million in 2010 according to the government's Ministry of Immigration and Population estimates. The figures stem from a survey of some kind conducted from 2007 in cooperation with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) that estimated the population growth rate at 2.02% annually. From the lowest to highest figures over a two to three year period, there is a 15 million people differential in Burma government, UN and other international organizations' estimates. 
RFA Burmese
အာစီယံဥကၠ႒ျဖစ္ေရး၊ ပိတ္ဆို႔အေရးယူမႈ ဖယ္ရွားေရး အတြက္ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံက ႏုိင္ငံေရးအေျခအေန တိုးတက္ဖို႔လုိေၾကာင္းထိုင္းႏုိင္ငံကို ေရာက္ရွိေနတဲ့ၾသစေၾတလ် ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီးက ေျပာၾကားလိုက္ပါတယ္။
AFP
၂ဝ၁၁ခုႏွစ္ ေမလ၇ရက္ေန႔႔ကအင္ဒိုနီးရွားႏုိင္ငံဂ်ကာတာၿမိဳ႕တြင္ က်င္းပသည့္ ၁၈ ႀကိမ္ေျမာက္ အာစီယံ ထိပ္သီးညီလာခံ ေဘးပန္းေဆြးေႏြးပြဲအျဖစ္ အာစီယံေခါင္းေဆာင္မ်ားႏွင့္ လူထု အေျချပဳ အဖြဲ႔အစည္း ကိုယ္စားလွယ္မ်ား အလြတ္သေဘာ ေတြ႔ဆံုေဆြးေႏြးစဥ္ ေတြ႔ရသည့္ ျမန္မာသမၼတ ဦးသိန္းစိန္။ (Photo: AFP)
 ၾသစေၾတလ် ႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီး Kevin Rudd နဲ႔ ထိုင္းႏုိင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီး Kasit Piromya တို႔ဟာ ထိုင္းႏုိင္ငံ ဘန္ေကာက္ၿမိဳ႕ ၾသစေၾတလ်သံရံုးမွာ မေန႔က ေတြ႔ဆံုရာမွာ အာစီယံ ဥကၠ႒ရာထူးကုိ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံက အဆိုျပဳထားတဲ့ ကိစၥနဲ႔ ထိုင္း-ျမန္မာ နယ္စပ္က အိုးအိမ္စြန္႔ပစ္ ထြက္ေျပးေနရတဲ့ စစ္ေျပးဒုကၡသည္ အေရးေတြကို ေဆြးေႏြးခဲ့ၾကတယ္လို႔ ဒီကေန႔ထုတ္ The Nation သတင္းစာမွာ ေဖာ္ျပထားပါတယ္။
Rohingya Exodus