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Myanmar General Discussion (non military)

Why don't hou accept gour own race?
Thailand has been changing border during these 100 years. Those who can prove to be descendant of Thai on foreign soil due to border change can ask for Thai citizenship. This includes Cambodian Thai.Some island is now Cambodia where it was Siam's. Those people mah apply Thai citizenship. Same is true for Burma soil Thai.

For new Bangali to come, they will.come after rainy season. Which is about this month. We have to do humanitarian again. Sending them back only sentence them to death. Receiving them is against our will as well. Luckily it seems they don't want to stay in Thailand but want to goto Malaysia. Those who want to stay is agsinst my will. My position is, we do humanitarian, but they need to find their own new houses soon.

Something that doesn't get noticed is that Myanmar allows back Buddhists from Bangladesh who face persecution there.

Buddhists from Bangladesh resettle in Myanmar, Rohingya Muslims cry foul - CSMonitor.com


Buddhists from Bangladesh resettle in Myanmar, Rohingya Muslims cry foul

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  • Minority Rohingya Muslims who have long alleged persecution by the Buddhists in Myanmar, say Buddhist families from Bangladesh are now being resettled on their land.


    By Shaikh Azizur Rahman, Correspondent May 24, 2013
    • 0524-Myanmar-Rohingya-muslims_full_600.jpg

      Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP
      View Caption
    Calcutta, India — Buddhist families from Bangladesh are quietly crossing the border into Myanmar, where local Rakhine Buddhist groups and government agencies are helping them resettle. The move has created pressure on the minority Rohingya Muslims, who have long alleged persecution by the Buddhists to leave.

    Muslim Rohingyas, who are not recognized by the state, allege that the Buddhists and the Myanmar government are attempting to throw them out of their villages and take away their land.

    “The Buddhists from Bangladesh are being resettled around Rakhine’s Rohingya villages to create more pressure on the local minority community,” says Bangladesh-based Rohingya rights activist Khin Maung Lay. “Their men joined local Buddhists in some of recent attacks in which Rohingya villages were set ablaze. More Buddhists there means an increased threat of communal tension and violence against the Rohingyas because the Buddhists are now openly saying that they don’t want to see any Muslim around them.”

    Recommended: Myanmar's about-face: 5 recent reforms
    Minority Buddhists from Bangladesh began migrating to Myanmar shortly after Muslim rioters – who were reportedly enraged when a young local Bengali Buddhist posted a photo to Facebook deemed offensive to Islam – torched and vandalized at least 19 Buddhist temples and scores of houses along southeastern Bangladesh last September.

  • Win Myaing, a government spokesman of Rakhine state in Myanmar, says that after September’s anti-Buddhist attack, several ethnic Burmese Buddhist tribes living in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tract and other areas far from where the clashes originated sent “distress signals” through friends and relatives, seeking help from government agencies and monasteries in Myanmar.

    “They all said that their lives were under threat in Bangladesh and they wanted to move to safety. We assured them in a return message that we would accommodate them as much as possible. In the past six months a few hundred Buddhist families have crossed over to Myanmar,” Mr. Myaing said to local media. “We are guessing that more Buddhists will leave Bangladesh in the coming months, and we will try our best to resettle them here and provide aid.”

    Though Buddhist leaders and other analysts in Bangladesh confirmed that Buddhist families in southern Bangladesh were crossing into Myanmar and planning to settle there, they question the reason for their exodus.

    The Bangladesh government halted the anti-Buddhist violence within days after it erupted last year, and provided sufficient aid and protection to the victim Buddhists, according to Buddist monks and other eyewitnesses.

    “The Muslim mobs were planning more attacks. But the government immediately deployed police and paramilitary forces around vulnerable Buddhist villages and halted further attacks,” says Karunashri Thera, a Buddist monk from the Cox’s Bazar district of Bangladesh, the port town where the clashes started. “Buddhists were happy with government action after the Muslim attack on Buddhist villages. The government also provided aid to rebuild the Buddhist houses and temples.”

    Nilutpal Barua, a Bangladeshi Buddhist community leader in Cox’s Bazar points out that when the Muslim mobs launched the attacks, they mostly targeted the local native Bangla (Bengali)-speaking Bangladeshi Buddhists, but those who are leaving Bangladesh for Myanmar now are mostly the Burmese ethnic tribes. Burmese ethnic groups generally live separately from the Bangladeshi Buddhist community and are much more poor.

    “Not a single Bangladeshi Buddhist family has left Bangladesh for Myanmar, so far, following the attack in September. We got very good support from our government after the Muslim mobs vandalized our villages. We don’t feel unsafe now,” says Mr. Barua, who is a government college teacher. “I don’t think that the departure of the Burmese tribes from Bangladesh was triggered by last year’s anti-Buddhist violence.”

    Exiled returnees
    After the military crackdown on the pro-democracy movement began in Myanmar in 1988, many leaders and activists from Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy and other pro-democracy political parties took refuge across the border in Bangladesh.

    “The general elections in 2010 in Myanmar signaled that the country was on a path to democratization, so the exiled Burmese leaders began returning home from Bangladesh,” says local journalist Mohammad Nurul Islam who is known as an expert on the Bangladesh-Myanmar issues. “They were soon followed by some of their Burmese ethnic tribal and ethnic Burman supporters who had been living in Bangladesh as refugees.”

    Now, says Mr. Islam, these refugees who lived in poor conditions for decades hope to build a better life in the Rohingya villages in Myanmar, with the help of local government authorities and monasteries.

    Mr. Islam says it’s significant that people from local Buddhist tribes had begun migrating to Myanmar after the deadly Muslim-Buddhist conflict broke out in Buddhist-majority country last May.

    Last May the Rohingya villages came under attack in the Rakhine state just across the border from Bangladesh causing many to flee their villages. The anti-Rohingya pogrom continued throughout last year, and into the beginning of this year. When the violence died down, however, local Buddhists announced that the Rohingyas would not be allowed to return to their villages or their land. In many cases, groups began distributing the land that formerly belonged to the Rohingyas to poorer Buddhists.

    After the September anti-Buddhist attack in Bangladesh, local government authorities in Myanmar made an announcement in newspapers (in Rakhine state) that Buddhists were facing attacks in Bangladesh and that local Buddhists should provide as much help to resettle fellow Buddhists if they crossed into the Rakhine state.

    “Buddhist monasteries and political leaders from Rakhine send messages to the poorer members of the Burmese ethnic Buddhist tribes in CHT [in Bangladesh] inviting them to come down and settle here,” says Kyaw Thein, a Rohingya community leader in the Rakhine capital of Sittwe. “The offers of houses and farm-land are quite attractive to those mostly landless poor Buddhists and so they are responding enthusiastically.”

    Rakhine State, one of seven states in Myanmar, is situated on Myanmar’s western coast. Like many parts of Myanmar it has a diverse ethnic population, but Rahkine make up the majority of the 3.1 million population. The stateless, Muslim-minority Rohingyas occupy the northernmost region of the state that borders Bangladesh.

    Although Rohingyas have lived in Myanmar’s Arakan state for many centuries, the Buddhist-dominated society there identifies the ethnic minority as “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh, and the Burmese military government stripped the Rohingyas of their citizenship in 1982. Stateless Rohingyas have migrated to Bangladesh, Malaysia, and other countries. In Bangladesh there are 400,000 Rohingyas, who are mostly living as illegal refugees.

    Model villages
    In 2010 the Myanmar government built 40 model villages of about 100 houses each as part of an effort to invite Buddhist settlers from other parts of the country and “adjust the balance” of the population where Muslims outweighed Buddhists, according to Burmese officials.

    Sources inside Myanmar say that those who are coming from Bangladesh – the Burmese and the Bangladeshi Buddhists – are being allocated houses in the model village, alongside Buddhist settlers from other parts of the country.

    Local pro-government newspapers are regularly reporting on the arrival of the Buddhists from Bangladesh and their resettlement in Rakhine. An unnamed government official helping with the resettlement process told local media that each Buddhist family arriving from Bangladesh was being given 2 acres of farmland, along with a home in Maungdaw or Sittwe.

    “They are from our fellow ethnic groups. We have to help them. The just-arrived families are being kept at Baho Buddhist monastery (in Maungdaw) for few days before they are allocated homes and farm-lands in the model villages,” the official said. “We have already resettled 3,000 to 4,000 Buddhists in Maungdaw in the past few months.”

    Fleeing to India
    As many as 20,000 Mulsim Rohingyas have fled Myanmar since communal tension broke out in May last year, and of those, as many as 1,500 have made their way to India, according to activists.

    Mohammad Zubair, a Muslim who fled his home in Maungdaw, a town in Rakhine State, earlier this year for India, recently arrived with 18 other Rohingyas. He says the Buddhists from Bangladesh were being resettled in his town as part of a government-sponsored plan to “balance the population between Buddhists and Muslims” making it increasingly difficult to survive as a Muslim there.

    Mr. Zubair says that since the unrest last year, local Buddhists kept him from accessing his land, let alone cultivating it. Many Rohingya families were nearly starving, he says. “We decided to flee Myanmar to save my family from starvation and death.”

    “Government officers openly say, ‘alongside 600,000 Muslims there are only 20,000 Buddhists ... we must resettle some tens of thousands of Buddhists in this area so that the Buddhists don’t face any threat from Muslims here.’ They are taking the Rohingya’s farmlands and giving them to those Buddhists who are coming from Bangladesh,” says Zubair who, along with his wife and three children, landed in Hyderabad last month.

    “We the Rohingya Muslims have lived in Myanmar for centuries. Yet they say that we are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. But they are welcoming those Bangladeshi illegal immigrants to Myanmar just because they are their fellow Buddhists,” says Mr. Kyaw Thein adding that he was afraid of what might come next. ”They are inviting more of those Bangladeshi Buddhists just to outnumber us in this region, use them as extra manpower during attack on us and crush us further."
 
Why don't hou accept gour own race?
Thailand has been changing border during these 100 years. Those who can prove to be descendant of Thai on foreign soil due to border change can ask for Thai citizenship. This includes Cambodian Thai.Some island is now Cambodia where it was Siam's. Those people mah apply Thai citizenship. Same is true for Burma soil Thai.

For new Bangali to come, they will.come after rainy season. Which is about this month. We have to do humanitarian again. Sending them back only sentence them to death. Receiving them is against our will as well. Luckily it seems they don't want to stay in Thailand but want to goto Malaysia. Those who want to stay is agsinst my will. My position is, we do humanitarian, but they need to find their own new houses soon.

Race does not play a role when it comes to decision of citizenship in Bangladesh.
Besides Bengali itself is not a race but a mixture of races who happens to speak Bengali in various dialects.
 
Race does not play a role when it comes to decision of citizenship in Bangladesh.
Besides Bengali itself is not a race but a mixture of races who happens to speak Bengali.

What about the UNHCR who said Bangladesh should take these people in?

Edit: Rohingya speak Bengali.
 
What about the UNHCR who said Bangladesh should take these people in?

Ofcourse I support UNHCR and I am always in favor of granting refuge to the people in distress. But it can not continue forever and let Myanmar go away with atrocities.

Edit: Rohingya speak Bengali.

To a lot of Pundits Assamese speaks Bengali dialect too but Assamese themselves dont accept it. They even sent a petition to Microsoft to not to consider their language as Bengali.
 
If BD treat them like this.Myanmar should be glad. That garantee their hate against BD for not accepting them. If im BD, I would lay red carpet forthese Bengali. Then do the pole to increase their seperatism sentiment.BD rejection of these people is an adventsge to Burma.
 
If BD treat them like this.Myanmar should be glad. That garantee their hate against BD for not accepting them. If im BD, I would lay red carpet forthese Bengali. Then do the pole to increase their seperatism sentiment.BD rejection of these people is an adventsge to Burma.
then you don't have history and political understanding
 
If BD treat them like this.Myanmar should be glad. That garantee their hate against BD for not accepting them. If im BD, I would lay red carpet forthese Bengali. Then do the pole to increase their seperatism sentiment.BD rejection of these people is an adventsge to Burma.

Bangladesh dont want a military conflict in its border which will in turn spread inside BD. BD could give military support to the Rohingya and could create a nightmare for Burmese but no government ever tried that. We understand Rohingyas are a minuscule minority and dont have ability to run their own affairs. We sincerely hope that MM accept them with honor and dignity in their part and show magnanimity of being a better human. Bengalis are very smart people (not saying as I am a Bengali) and could serve Myanmar in a good way if permitted.
 
Bangladesh dont want a military conflict in its border which will in turn spread inside BD. BD could give military support to the Rohingya and could create a nightmare for Burmese but no government ever tried that. We understand Rohingyas are a minuscule minority and dont have ability to run their own affairs. We sincerely hope that MM accept them with honor and dignity in their part and show magnanimity of being a better human. Bengalis are very smart people (not saying as I am a Bengali) and could serve Myanmar in a good way if permitted.

Myanmar General Discussion (non military) | Page 11

We are doing our bit. Now do your bit and gracefully accept your diaspora with honour and humility.

If you ever openly supported an armed Muslim rebellion in Arakan, that would be the end of the Rohingya and the end of a democratic Bangladesh.

If BD treat them like this.Myanmar should be glad. That garantee their hate against BD for not accepting them. If im BD, I would lay red carpet forthese Bengali. Then do the pole to increase their seperatism sentiment.BD rejection of these people is an adventsge to Burma.

I want nothing to do with Bangladesh. They should accept their people back and seal the borders - no more ethnic unrest in Arakan.
 
Myanmar Kyat falls to new low amid inflation fears, dollar shortage
October 29, 2014 3:30 pm
Yangon (dpa) - The Myanmar kyat fell to its lowest rate to the dollar in years Wednesday, amid growing demand for the US currency for imports, and fuelling concerns of inflation, news reports said.
The currency reached 1,012 to the dollar Wednesday, down 24 per cent since the official exchange rate was allowed some flexibility in April 2012 by the government of Thein Sein, which has opened up the countr after decades of military dictatorship.

"The Central Bank doesn’t sell enough dollars for us," said an official from the Ayarwaddy Bank, one of the leading private banks offering money exchange, asking not to be named.

The Central Bank is meant to sell 10 million dollars per day, but is only releasing a quarter of that, he said.

The demand for dollars was being driven by the country’s rapid consumption, especially of manufactured goods, as it recovers from decades of seclusion by the military regime and isolation by sanctions, the Irrawaddy magazine reported Tuesday.

The trade deficit was around 3 billion dollars for the first half of the current fiscal year to the end of September, on exports of 6 billion dollars and imports of 9 billion, it said, citing the Commerce Ministry.

The World Bank estimates inflation in Myanmar at 7 per cent, and has called for it not to be allowed to exceed 10 per cent, it reported.

The drop in value of the kyat was also due to the dollar’s rise against all currencies after the US Federal Reserve hinted at a rise in interest rates, the Eleven Myanmar news outlet reported Tuesday.


Myanmar Kyat falls to new low amid inflation fears, dollar shortage - The Nation
 
Myanmar Kyat falls to new low amid inflation fears, dollar shortage
October 29, 2014 3:30 pm
Yangon (dpa) - The Myanmar kyat fell to its lowest rate to the dollar in years Wednesday, amid growing demand for the US currency for imports, and fuelling concerns of inflation, news reports said.
The currency reached 1,012 to the dollar Wednesday, down 24 per cent since the official exchange rate was allowed some flexibility in April 2012 by the government of Thein Sein, which has opened up the countr after decades of military dictatorship.

"The Central Bank doesn’t sell enough dollars for us," said an official from the Ayarwaddy Bank, one of the leading private banks offering money exchange, asking not to be named.

The Central Bank is meant to sell 10 million dollars per day, but is only releasing a quarter of that, he said.

The demand for dollars was being driven by the country’s rapid consumption, especially of manufactured goods, as it recovers from decades of seclusion by the military regime and isolation by sanctions, the Irrawaddy magazine reported Tuesday.

The trade deficit was around 3 billion dollars for the first half of the current fiscal year to the end of September, on exports of 6 billion dollars and imports of 9 billion, it said, citing the Commerce Ministry.

The World Bank estimates inflation in Myanmar at 7 per cent, and has called for it not to be allowed to exceed 10 per cent, it reported.

The drop in value of the kyat was also due to the dollar’s rise against all currencies after the US Federal Reserve hinted at a rise in interest rates, the Eleven Myanmar news outlet reported Tuesday.


Myanmar Kyat falls to new low amid inflation fears, dollar shortage - The Nation

Finally! :victory:

Uncharacteristic of you to look for good news about Myanmar.
 
Myanmar’s Rohingya Apartheid
A new government strategy looks like a blueprint for additional ethnic cleansing.

thediplomat_2014-10-14_09-42-02-386x257.jpg

Late last month, Myanmar Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin announced to delegates at the UN General Assembly that a long-expected “action plan” for Rakhine state, the site of the country’s most urgent human rights crisis, was “being finalized and will soon be launched.”

The minister claimed the strategy was designed to ensure “peace, stability, harmony and development” for “all people” in the region; he urged the international community to “contribute pragmatically and objectively” to their plan so that a “durable solution” to the problems in the area could be realized.

While this appeal did not fall on deaf ears, around the time of his speech revelations in the international mediathrew light on what parts of the plan might actually involve: a set of measures that risked worsening the conditions of life for thousands, while effectively recycling a policy that received heavy international condemnation when it was first proposed two years ago.

Rakhine state has been the site of several outbreaks of violence between an eponymous, largely-Buddhist ethnic group and a Muslim minority who call themselves Rohingya. A conflict between the two communities erupted in June 2012 and developed into anti-Rohingya pogroms; a second, organized bout of targeted violence occurred in October of the same year.

An investigation by Human Rights Watch determined that during these incidents, the Rohingya were subjected to crimes against humanity as a part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing led by the ethnic Rakhine community in which state agencies were heavily implicated. As a consequence of these events, hundreds died and roughly 140,000 people were displaced, the vast majority of them Rohingya.

Following the first wave of violence, the Myanmar President Thein Sein declared that the only remedy to the tensions in Rakhine state would be for the Rohingya to be sent to a third country or detained permanently in camps overseen by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). He also reiterated the government’s view that the minority were illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and not a native race of the country.

A draft of the plan referenced in the foreign minister’s speech, which has not been made public but has been seen by The Diplomat, in effect offers only a minor alteration of that heavily criticized policy. In it, the Rohingya, who were retrospectively stripped of their citizenship in a law passed by the former military dictatorship in 1982, are offered the chance to regain these rights if they submit to a “citizenship verification exercise” in which the participants have to self-identify as “Bengalis,” in accordance with the government’s position.

Those who refuse to call themselves this, or who fail to produce paperwork proving their presence in the country for generations, will be subjected to confinement in “temporary camps” and, the plan envisions, forcibly resettled overseas with the aid of the UNHCR.

The number of those condemned to this fate could potentially be enormous, as many in the community look set to refuse to comply with the verification program, while many others have lost official documentation of their family’s presence in Myanmar. Moreover, given that the UNHCR has once again ruled out any involvement in a third country transfer operation, those Rohingya denied citizenship face the prospect of being forced to stay in “temporary” camps indefinitely.

Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, told this correspondent that if the plan was implemented as outlined in the draft, he thought “a new Burmese apartheid” could result, in which the minority would be permanently “locked down in camps, bereft of livelihoods, education, health and hope for anything better.”

“No one should support such a plan that delivers such rights abusing outcomes,” he added.

Besides the outcry caused by proposals in the draft, sources in rights groups fear that the Rohingya may already be facing attempts to coerce or trick them into being officially documented according to the government’s wishes.

“I am concerned the authorities may be trying to get some Rohingya to classify themselves as illegal Bengalis without their consent,” Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project, a non-governmental organization that monitors rights abuses in Rakhine state, told The Diplomat.

“Some communities in northern Rakhine state have been told to participate in a scheme in which they list their family members on official forms for the authorities to review; people have been told that they will have their land confiscated or that they will be prevented from doing any economic activity if they do not comply,” she said.

“Others have been subjected to beatings and arrests if they do not agree to participate,” she added, noting that the exercise appears to be linked to the citizenship verification process already underway across parts of the state.

A copy of one these forms used in these exercises and obtained by The Diplomat is headed “top secret,” which suggests that the operation may be part of an unannounced citizenship-checking process. The heading of a column in which ethnicity is listed only allows for the Rohingya to be documented as “Bengalis.”

These measures, Lewa added, have been accompanied by an intensification of security operations by the Border Guard Police (BGP) against communities suspected of having links with the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO), a small and largely inactive rebel militia group based in Bangladesh.

“According to our sources, 43 people have been arrested for suspicion of links with RSO, some were badly tortured in detention. We believe that one man was tortured to death,” she said.

Against this backdrop of violence and intimidation, the citizenship verification plan looks set to continue. Yet, for all its destructive potential, there are credible indications that several organizations and state actors in Myanmar have assented to the government’s call for “pragmatism” and have decided to get behind the exercise in the belief that this might benefit the Rohingya.

Sources in the NGO community that maintain regular contact with foreign governments told The Diplomat on condition of anonymity that U.S. officials view the plan as a “positive step” and had been working behind-the-scenes to try to get the political elite Naypyidaw to provide an opening through which some Rohingya might gain citizenship rights.

These allegations appear to be supported by the claims of sources within the Rohingya camps, who also did not wish to be identified, but described meetings with U.S. and British officials who implicitly urged them to “co-operate with government in doing verification [sic] according to 1982 citizenship law.”

These claims were bolstered by those of an authoritative source with extensive contacts in Naypyidaw, who told this correspondent that the U.S. had been working with Myanmar on several issues related to human rights for some time. This relationship went so far as to include American help with “strategic communications,” she said.

The source did not want to be identified for her own security, but indicated that the rationale behind this move was that Washington could gain purchase over Thein Sein’s administration through its support; one way of using this leverage was to pressure the government of Myanmar to improve its human rights record.

The U.S. embassy was contacted for comment on these claims. It replied saying that it wished to formulate a response, but at the time of writing had not done so.

Another source within the camps corroborated his counterpart’s claims and added that other foreign representatives – including the Turkish and Bangladeshi ambassadors – had attended meetings with Rohingya community leaders and encouraged them to take part in the government’s citizenship scheme.

While these allegations remain unverified, a representative from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs told a news crew that she thought “the government is engaged in trying to find solutions for the people in the camps, and that solution is through the verification and the citizenship process,” a statement that appeared to explicitly endorse the plan.

By contrast, Rohingya activists told this correspondent that they viewed the government’s strategy as “an ethnocidal plan” and a potential route to “ethnic cleansing.” They resent the fact that the Rakhine action plan, which was developed with input from rights groups, foreign embassies and others, was not produced with any consultation of their community, but rather has been introduced to them with threats of permanent confinement in camps hanging over their head.

Reflecting the views of every other Rohingya source this correspondent has spoken to about the draft proposals, one activist source – who was too frightened of retribution to identify himself – emphatically declared that the minority “can’t accept it at all” and indicated that his community would not co-operate with the authorities.

Given the likelihood of widespread resistance, it is possible Myanmar’s proposals will indeed license ethnic cleansing through the forced displacement of potentially hundreds of thousands of Rohingya into camps. In such a scenario, the likelihood of violence and destabilization increase dramatically, with unforeseeable consequences.

Given the realistic possibility that the government’s plans could lead to an unprecedented crisis, the international community and NGOs active in Myanmar face a moral imperative to act to prevent such an outcome.

Fail to do so, and these actors could continue to surrender what leverage they have over Naypyidaw in the name of pragmatism, while achieving very little for some of Asia’s most vulnerable people, even as they continue down the path to preventable disaster.

Myanmar’s Rohingya Apartheid | The Diplomat
 

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