Rohingya

“Israeli weapons are used in the ethnic and religious cleansing carried out by the Myanmar army against the Rohingya minority, resulting in the persecution of 700,000 Muslims who were slaughtered and expelled from their country,” said Israeli writer and journalist Tsur Shezaf in an article published by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth.
Shezaf asserted that “Israel contributed to the grievances of Rohingya Muslims through its refusal to abide by the UN international boycott resolutions to prevent supplying Myanmar with arms.”

Following a United Nations Human Rights Council fact-finding mission in Myanmar, a damning U.N.

“The gross human rights violations and abuses committed in Kachin, Rakhine, and Shan states,” the report charges, “undoubtedly amount to the gravest crimes under international law.” (CD) — Following a United Nations Human Rights Council fact-finding mission in Myanmar, a damning U.N. report published Monday concludes that the nation’s military leaders, including its top commander, should be further investigated […]

The sprawling camps in Bangladesh housing one million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are makeshift at best. Bamboo poles, for example, help stabilize flimsy plastic sheeting and tents vulnerable to the heavy rain and strong winds of the monsoon season underway. TRENTON FRANKLIN

“In my four years as High Commissioner, I have heard many preposterous claims. That claim is almost in its own category of absurdity. Have you no shame, sir, have you no shame? We are not fools.”

Displaced Rohingya women, 2017, in Bangladesh. The UN is struggling to help resolve the crisis of millions of Rohingya who escaped a pogrom in Myanmar but face enormous risks in returning home. TASNIM NEWS AGENCY
Among refugee advocates there  has been a growing concern that recent agreements among regional governments and the United Nations on a framework for mitigating the Rohingya crisis could prompt at least some of the million-plus people who have fled the deadly military pogrom in Myanmar to consider risking a return to try to rebuild their lives.

Why Jailing of Gnanasara Did Not Become News in This Part of Asia “Ordered disorder, planned caprice, And dehumanised humanity…” – Bertolt Brecht in The Exception and the Rule (quoted in The Sunday Leader) “I have done my duty towards the country,” Gnanasara told reporters as he boarded the bus taking him to prison. Why should I regret?”   Rarely … Continue reading The Monks Who Spew Hate

The English-language Bangkok Post reported on May 5 that the Rohingya refugees who return to Myanmar will be safe, according to the military there, as long as they stay confined to the camps being set up for them. Myanmar’s current commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, told a visiting delegation from the UN Security Council “there is no need to be worried about their security if they stay in the areas designated for them.”

Dennis J. Bernstein spoke with filmmaker and human rights activist, Jeanne Hallacy, just back with horror stories from Myanmar and the massive Rohingya camps of over 700,000 in neighboring Bangladesh. By Dennis J Bernstein The English-language Bangkok Post reported on…Read more →

When reality goes off the chart of what is thinkable, fiction is no match.  That Oxford University’s most iconic living graduate Aung San Suu Kyi may find herself at the International Criminal Court for her “complicity of silence in crimes against humanity” and even a genocide will go down in history as one such extraordinary tale.  Yet as the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee made unequivocally clear in her 6-