We came here to find refuge They called us refugees So we hid ourselves in their language Until we sounded just like them…… J J BOLA … “Refuge” India has grappled with refugees many times in history. According to UNHCR there are about 31, 000 refugees registered with the organisation by the end of December 2014. In the 16/17 centuries[Read More...]
Although the genocide of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar has gathered greater media attention in recent months, there is no indication that the international community is prepared to act in any meaningful way, thus leaving hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees stranded in border camps between Myanmar and Bangladesh. While top United Nations officials are now using the term[Read More...]
The Rohingya crisis reflects intention of the Myanmar government to forcibly oust the Muslims from Rakhine State. The brutal attack on unarmed civilians and placing of landmines along its border by Military in coordination with Border Guard Police and armed Rakhine Buddhists is the proof. Coastal area in Rakhine state is clearly of strategic importance to both China (0ne[Read More...]
Pope Francis lost a historical opportunity to truly set his legacy apart from previous Popes. Alas, for him, too, political expediency trumped all else. In his visit to Burma (Myanmar) on November 27, he refrained from using the word ‘Rohingya.’ But what’s in a name? In our frenzied attempts at understanding and articulating the plight of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Burma,[Read More...]
21-22 September 2017; Tambru, Myanmar-Bangladesh border and Rohingya refugee camp in Ukhia, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh: ‘Refugee camps’ of sorts or just make shift shelters of “Rohingya” minorities of Myanmar, who have fled the genocide and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Myanmar army and majority population, have sprung up along the Bangladesh-Myanmar border. These camps are stretching from just outside of[Read More...]
Press TV – October 15, 2017 A new influx of Rohingya refugees that hit Bangladesh contains around 14,000 orphans, authorities say, as new details emerge of a brutal crackdown in neighboring Myanmar which forced over half a million Rohingya Muslims to flee their homes. Bangladesh’s social services department said Sunday that some 13,751 children without […]
If the Rohingyas were not Muslims, they would not have faced what they have been facing for years—getting uprooted, exiled, expelled, burnt, beaten up, destroyed, devastated, raped, ruined, enslaved, shot to death, and starved to skeletal and spectral existence. Buddhist Myanmar’s military and militant monks are brutally Balkanizing (like what happened in the Balkans—Bosnia and Herzegovina—in 1990s) their historically[Read More...]
A couple of weeks ago I was in Dhaka, Bangladesh, it was at the time when several news agencies were reporting the Rohingya crisis unfolding in Myanmar. There was social media frenzy around the atrocities by the Myanmar security forces and the radio silence from Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. This international uproar was a result of 100,000s[Read More...]
The UN Security Council held its first meeting on Rohingya in nine years last Thursday (September 28, 2017). The language was harshly critical of Myanmar. Secretary General Antonio Guterres described the situation as a “human rights nightmare” and “urged Myanmar to end its military operations”. The number of Rohingya refugees has meanwhile mushroomed to more than 500,000. All the[Read More...]
On April 13, 1919, the 9th Gurkhas, 54th Sikhs & 59th Sind Rifles, on the orders of Col. Dyer, fired on an unarmed, peaceful crowd gathered to celebrate Besakhi at the Jalianwala Bagh in Amritsar. As a result, 1000 people died and perhaps three times that number were injured. Even though, the crowd was overwhelmingly Sikh, one of the platoons[Read More...]
