Rohingya Ethnic Cleansing - Updates & Discussions

[Banglar Bir]

12:00 AM, November 12, 2017 / LAST MODIFIED: 03:35 AM, November 12, 2017
Food, Shelter to Rohingyas: $882m needed for 10 months
Estimates CPD, warns the govt int'l support may not continue for long
Staff Correspondent
Centre for Policy Dialogue yesterday said an estimated $882 million or Tk 7,126 crore would be needed to provide food, shelter and other support to the Rohingyas until June next year.
It also said the expenditure for each Rohingya over the period would be Tk 59,388.

The independent think tank came up with the figures based on the estimate of the UN, which said $434 million would be needed for the Rohingyas in Bangladesh between September and February next year.

The humanitarian support currently provided by the international organisations would not continue for a long period. Hence, the burden would be on the government of Bangladesh, CPD Executive Director Fahmida Khatun said while presenting a paper on the implications of the Rohingya crisis for Bangladesh.

“Given the present budgetary framework for fiscal 2017-18, there is not much room for additional public spending,” she said.

Fahmida presented the paper at a dialogue titled "Addressing Rohingya Crisis: Options for Bangladesh" at Khazana Gardenia Banquet Hall in the capital yesterday. The programme was chaired by CPD Chairman Prof Rehman Sobhan and attended by diplomats, former ambassadors, international relations analysts and officials from UN agencies and other international organisations.

The CPD termed the Rohingya crisis a multi-dimensional problem for Bangladesh and suggested that the government continue "energetic diplomacy" particularly with the regional partners to solve it.

Discussants at the dialogue recommended taking both soft and hard approaches bilaterally and multilaterally so that the Myanmar authorities take back its nationals soon.

Some of them said the issue is likely to linger and affect Bangladesh in various ways.

They also warned about the risk of security, terrorism, spread of diseases, trafficking of women and children as well as illegal drug trade in the south-eastern region if the Rohingyas stayed there for a long period.

Foreign Secretary Md Shahidul Haque said the government wants to see a peaceful solution to the crisis.

He said Myanmar is a close neighbour and Bangladesh has to have good relations with it. The government is currently focusing on signing a bilateral arrangement with the country for the return of the Rohingyas, he added.

Haque said the government was not seeking humanitarian support from the international communities. "Rather, the government asks for political support to solve the Rohingya issue.

“This is a conflict between Myanmar and its own nationals. Bangladesh in no way created this environment. Bangladesh tries to become a responsible and responsive state. A state which responds to humanitarian crisis,” he said.

Fleeing persecution in Myanmar, over 613,000 Rohingyas have entered Bangladesh since August 25.

The CPD said over a million Rohingyas now are staying in the south-eastern region of the country, creating economic, social and environmental challenges for Bangladesh.

Debapriya Bhattacharya, distinguished fellow at the think tank, said the total number of refugees across the world is 6.5 crore and Bangladesh would be the fourth largest host country for refugees.

“We have shown generosity and it does not depend on resources, it depends on the heart,” he said.

William Moeller, political officer at the US Embassy in Dhaka, said solution lies with Myanmar and Bangladesh is just an innocent bystander to this crisis.

Ragnar Gudmundsson, country representative at International Monetary Fund, said a contingency plan would be very important for Bangladesh.

Anup Kumar Chakma, former Bangladesh ambassador to Myanmar, said Myanmar's relation with countries like China and the US has an impact on the Rohingya issue. He said China, US, India, and Thailand have interests and investments in Myanmar.

Imtiaz Ahmed, professor of international relations at University of Dhaka, recommended "becoming proactive" and sending high-level delegation to countries, particularly to China and India.

Referring to the ongoing atrocities against Rohingyas, Border Guard Bangladesh Director General Maj Gen Abul Hossain said the matter should be taken to the International Court of Justice.

Former ambassador Farooq Sobhan claimed that there was an attempt within Myanmar to permanently solve the Rohingya issue. He said One Belt One Road initiative of China would be seriously jeopardised if the issue was not resolved.

"There is also a potential threat of terrorism due to the crisis," he said.

Prof Sukamol Barua from Buddhist Federation said the Rohingya crisis is not a religious issue. He said local Buddhists were very cautious over the matter.
http://www.thedailystar.net/educati...elter-rohingyas-882m-needed-10-months-1489834

 

[Banglar Bir]

'Bangladesh close to Rohingya repatriation deal with Myanmar'
Prothom Alo English Desk | Update: 22:55, Nov 11, 2017

Remained focused on having a 'bilateral' solution to the Rohingya crisis, Bangladesh is very close to reaching a repatriation agreement with Myanmar, said foreign secretary Shahidul Haque on Saturday.
"Currently, we're focusing on signing a bilateral agreement for the return of Rohingyas...we're very close in terms of reaching a return agreement with Myanmar authorities," he said.

The foreign secretary was addressing a dialogue titled 'Addressing Rohingya Crisis: Options for Bangladesh' arranged by Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) at a city hotel.

He, however, said if the bilateral arrangement does not work finally, Bangladesh has other options on the table which he would not share right now.

Professor Imtiaz Ahmed of Dhaka University's Department of International Relations, former Bangladesh ambassador to Myanmar retired major general Anup Kumar Chakma and executive director of BRAC Muhammad Musa spoke at the dialogue.

CPD executive deirector Fahmida Khatun presented the keynote paper at the dialogue chaired by CPD chairman professor Rehman Sobhan.
CPD distinguished fellow Debapriya Bhattacharya moderated the session.

The foreign secretary said foreign minister AH Mahmood Ali is going to Myanmar later this month. "Hopefully, we'll be able to close the differences we have in a couple of places of the latest draft. We think we'll be able to resolve it peacefully."

Noting that the Rohingya crisis will have to be solved maintaining the good relations with Myanmar, Shahidul Haque said Bangladesh has so far adopted a policy which is a mix of 'soft and hard approaches' to resolve the Rohingya crisis.

He agreed with Imtiaz Ahmed who earlier at the dialogue said the radicalisation cannot emerge from the camps at the moment.

Explaining why the terminology 'refugee' is not being used for Rohingyas, he said the government of Bangladesh calls them 'forcibly displaced Myanmar nationals', not citizens, following its experiences of 1978 and 1991-92.

One of the reasons is this time Myanmar wanted to call the people refugees.

In reply to Bangladesh's prime minister's statement in the United Nations General Assembly, Myanmar called 'refugees' in fact, he said.

Professor Imtiaz said Bangladesh should call the Rohingyas 'refugees' as the terminology 'forcibly displaced Myanmar citizens,' does not make any sense and it is not a legal term as well.

The terminology 'forcibly displaced Myanmar citizens,' is absolutely unworkable and wrong as they are not Myanmar citizens, he said adding that citizen is a legal term. "So, I think, first we should call them what they are. They are refugees. Once you call them refugees, they have to go back," he said.

Imtiaz said, "For the first time, there is an international consensus and there is enough footage to say genocide took place. Since it is genocide or ethnic cleansing, it cannot be bilateral. No genocide in the world can be bilateral. It's an international issue."

He said Rohingyas are not only in Bangladesh, also in several countries including India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Professor Imtiaz also said it is high time to arrange international conferences with the countries that hosted Rohingyas. "The international community should not see it as an issue between Bangladesh and Myanmar. They rather should see it as a global issue as Rohingya Diaspora is everywhere."

Imtiaz said radicalisation will not come from the camps and it did not come in the 1970s and 1990s.

Former ambassador Farooq Sobhan said if the Rohingya problem is not solved, the whole 'One Belt One Road Initiative' and Bimstec will be seriously jeopardised.

Professor Rounaq Jahan said the media should focus on the plight of Rohingya rather than the challenges of Bangladesh in this regard.

Professor Sukumar Barua said it is not religious issue between Muslim and Buddhist rather it is an issue of state. "It can be solved bilaterally but international community will have to keep pressure for resolving the crisis."

The Buddhist people of Bangladesh extended their helping hands to the displaced Rohingyas, he added.

Indigenous community leader Sanjeeb Drong said if it takes a longer time to send back Rohingyas, the life and security of the indigenous community will be seriously affected in the Chittagong Hill Tracks (CHT).

Fahmida, in her keynote presentation, said some Tk 7,126 crore (US$ 882 million) will be required for 10 months from September 2017 to June 2018 to maintain the displaced Rohingyas in Cox's Bazar.

The CPD estimated the fund requirement for the 10 months of the current fiscal year based on an UNHCR estimate, she said.

The initial loss of forest area due to the Rohingya influx is 3,500 acres, which is 0.05 percent loss in total national forest area, the CPD executive director said.

BGB director general Maj Gen Abul Hossain, security expert retired brigadier M Sakhawat Hossain, ActionAid country director Farah Kabir and diplomats from different foreign missions stationed in Dhaka also spoke at the dialogue.
http://en.prothom-alo.com/bangladesh/news/166115/Bangladesh-close-to-Rohingya-repatriation-deal

 

[Banglar Bir]

A brief note from Bangladesh: Bearing witness to my country's genocide and meeting the Survivors.
My family and I excluding my old girl in college in US spent a week in Bangladesh visiting Rohingya survivors of Myanmar genocide.
We just got home in UK last night. This is my little reflection on what we witnessed.
I came home with a long list of "To-Do's".

Natalie, my wife, and I work as a two-person team of researchers and writers. We use each other as a sounding board and we teach each other on the Rohingya. She is the one who initially helped me overcome my own anti-Muslim racism and my own ignorance about Rohingyas.

So naturally, I wanted Natalie and Nilah to bear witness to my country's Buddhist genocide - note no quotations marks - of the most vulnerable segment of our society, the Rohingyas.

Here is my 8-year-old Nilah and Nat meeting with Rohingya children and moms.

I interviewed 2-dozen survivors, the majority of whom were mothers between the ages of 18 and 35. The youngest survivor I interviewed was a 10-year old Rohingya boy who was shot in the leg.

The most sadistic tale I heard a survivor recount was this:
her father was shot in the head in front of their house as he ran to the house where her daughter , 16, was tied up and gang-raped by a group of Burmese government troops, wearing red scarfs (light infantry unit commandos, as far as I know).
the father's head got blew open, and one soldier picked up bits of his brain and fed them to the chickens.
this IS an act of genocidal and sadistic killing, seen against the backdrop of what else has been done to the Rohingyas as a group by Myanmar over the last 40 years.

The Burmese society is brainwashed to hate the Rohingyas for no real reason: the Tatmadaw's racist, pathetic generals have adopted the institutionalized threat perception - that they are a a threat to national security and that their presence is a part of Bangladesh's cold war of population transfer from Chittagong to N. Rakhine.

The Burmese military (Tatmadaw) have accordingly manufactured and propagated lies after lies over 40-years.

I know every other influential figure personally who has been involved in this genocide.
I view them as evil as the Nazis. They consider me a "national traitor" and "enemy of the state".
I identify with the survivors of my country's genocide despite our differences in ethnicity and faith background.

So, I said, "Sorry", to this Rohingya brother who broke into tears at the site of a "good Burmese" at Kutupalong camp.

We held each other for about 5 minutes. No conversation as he did not speak Burmese. But no conversation was needed either.
Compassion and pain are universal.
A young Rohingya mother and widow (18) recounted to me how she was gang-raped by Myanmar soldiers. They handcuffed her with a small rope, and she tried to untie the rope with her teeth, and they put her hands on the table and chopped off a finger, with the hand still tied, for resisting the rape!

This Rohingya gentleman (pix below) has something dignified about him. He is 67 years old, from Maungdaw, and was a Class Cell leader at a township level in the Ruling Burma Socialist Party during General Ne Win's early days when Rohingyas continued to be recognized as an ethnic community of Burma with full citizenship rights.

This grandfather Rohingya man (76) was a former teacher and agricultural technician, who heard Prime Minister U Nu speak in his hometown of Maungdaw in the 1950's when Rohingyas were full citizens, and carried an original National Registration Card first issued in mid-1950's (the first of its kind in the history of ID in Burma's recorded history).

He spoke about his life-long desire to return to Burma, his birthplace, although he has been in the Registered Refugee camp at Kutupalong in the last 20 years.

He showed me his family IDs and pictures of the mosque he said his well-to-do family built in Maungdaw in 1895.

The typically repeated media and official narrative that Rohingyas were not citizens or an ethnic group of Burma is a verifiable lie on which rests the genocidal policies.

The mosque this Rohingya gentleman's foreparents built in 1895.

Finally, this is my Bangladeshi host (HFM Mr Ali) (pix below), who made it possible for our family to bear witness to the inter-generational impact of my own country's genocide and hear first hand the harrowing tales from Rohingya survivors.

They ARE survivors, not simply IDPs or refugees. They have survived the genocide across the borders in N. Rakhine State.

We are extremely grateful to the Honourable Foreign Minister and his MOFA staff who enabled us to get the most out of our week-long visit to Dhaka and Cox's Bazaar.

Based on what we have learned on this trip I will soon be hitting the speaking trail in UK, USA, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Bangladesh the rest of this year and early Jan.
Nat will continue to write critical pieces that challenge conventional but flawed ideas about the survivors 'return/repatriation' 'statelessness' and all those policy non-senses.
Meanwhile 1 million Rohingya survivors await anxiously - and in inhuman conditions - what the mythical international community will do to help secure a normal human future.
This little Rohingya survivor girl waited for her family's turn for food ration at Kutupalong registered camp under the scorching sun, taking advantage of the little shade from the two standing men's longis.

As a father, I ask myself, naturally, what I would do or how I would feel if my 8-year old were in this Rohingya girl's shoes, and so should every decent human.
http://www.maungzarni.net/2017/11/a-brief-note-from-bangladesh-bearing.html?m=1

 

[Banglar Bir]

Malaysia Foreign Minister: Asean summit to discuss Rohingya refugee crisis

Malaysian Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Anifah Aman said he believed that not only Malaysia, but other countries like Asean’s dialogue partners would raise the issue regarding the Rohingya Muslims. — Reuters
By Bernama
November 11, 2017
MANILA — The Rohingya refugee crisis in Myanmar is expected to be raised at the 31st Asean Summit and Related Summits, which kicks off here tomorrow, with the possibility of it being discussed behind closed door.
Malaysian Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Anifah Aman said even Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, who will be leading the Malaysian delegation to the three-day Summits, was very concerned about what was happening in Rakhine State.

“And in all probability it will be one of the agendas, but it also depends on the circumstances. Maybe there is a closed door meeting, that could be more effective,” he told the Malaysian media covering the Summits.

Anifah also said he believed that not only Malaysia, but other countries like Asean’s dialogue partners would raise the issue which had seen more than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims displaced from their homes, having fled to neighbouring Bangladesh since Aug 25, when the crackdown on the Rohingya intensified in Rakhine state.

Leaders from the 10 Asean member countries and its dialogue partners, namely Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Russia, United States, Canada, the European Union and the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will gather here for the important summits hosted by the Philippines.

Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi is leading the country’s delegation to the Summits.
Anifah also said the leaders would discuss regional and international issues of common concern such as the South China Sea, Korean Peninsula, counter terrorism and violent extremism and cyber digital economy.

The Manila gathering will see a total of 11 Summits and expected to adopt 56 outcome documents, said Anifah, adding that it includes the non-legally binding Asean Consensus on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Migrant Workers.

“The instrument was drafted as a follow-up to the Asean Declaration on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Migrant Workers or Cebu Declaration 2007 inked by Asean leaders in 2007,” he said.
He said Asean Economic Ministers are also expected to sign the Asean-Hong Kong, China Free Trade Agreement (AHKFTA) and the Agreement on Investment among Asean member states and Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China (AHKIA).

Other outcome includes East Asia Summit Leaders’ statement on anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism, cooperation in poverty alleviation and chemical weapons.

On the sidelines of the Summit, Najib is scheduled to hold bilateral meetings with his counterparts — Shinzo Abe of Japan, Lee Hsien Loong from Singapore and China’s Le Keying.
http://www.rohingyablogger.com/2017/11/malaysia-foreign-minister-asean-summit.html

CPD: Tk7,126 crore needed to host the Rohingyas till June 2018
Nawaz Farhin
Published at 11:17 PM November 11, 2017
Last updated at 12:29 AM November 12, 2017

A view of the the Rohingya refugee camp in Tang Khali near Cox's Bazar on October 18, 2017
Reuters
The think tank has estimated the 10-month fund requirement based on an estimation of the UNHCR for six months
A total of $882 million or about Tk7,126 crore will be required as funding until June 2018 for the Rohingyas who have taken refuge in Bangladesh after facing brutal military persecution in Myanmar, says the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD).

The independent think tank on Saturday disclosed at a dialogue the estimated 10-month fund requirement based on an estimation of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for six months.

With a latest additional requirement of $83.7 million, UNHCR’s total need for the Rohingyas until February next year now stands at $517.78 million, said CPD quoting UN website.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) earlier had estimated $434 million to be the total funding requirement for 1.2 million Rohingyas until February.

Based on these numbers, CPD added, expenditure required per Rohingya for September, 2017-June, 2018 period would be $795 or Tk5,939.

The latest requirement estimated by CPD is equivalent to 1.8% of Bangladesh’s national budget for FY2017-18, 0.3% of the GDP and 2.5% of the total revenue of the country.

The estimations were made in a keynote presented by CPD Executive Director Fahmida Khatun at the dialogue, titled “Addressing Rohingya Crisis: Options for Bangladesh,” organised at a Dhaka hotel on Saturday.

Fahmida said the Rohingya crisis has hit the locals in Cox’s Bazar as a social disaster, affecting population growth, and causing health and sanitation problems.

“The total forest area in Cox’s Bazar is nearly three million acres and around 3,500 acres of it has already been lost due to the Rohingya influx,” she said.

Since August 25, following a military crackdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, about 625,000 Rohingyas have entered Bangladesh, according to the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commission.
Draft proposal
At Saturday’s dialogue, Foreign Secretary M Shahidul Haque said the government has drafted a proposal for an agreement with Myanmar to repatriate the Rohingyas.

“We are taking all kind of preparations to solve the crisis and peaceful efforts are still underway. The foreign minister will meet Myanmar officials on November 23 in this regard.”

He also emphasised political support received from the international community, rather than the economic ones, to solve the crisis. “Myanmar is our neighbour and we need to resolve this peacefully, maintaining our friendship.

CPD Chairman Prof Rehman Sobhan stressed on organising an international conference to find out ways on how to solve the Rohingya crisis. “The Rohingyas need to be sent back to Myanmar voluntarily, not forcefully.”
He said the crisis had hit Bangladesh’s economy, society and environment most.
http://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2017/11/11/cpd-rohingyas-funding-unhcr/

Rohingya refugees suffer unspeakable acts of cruelty at the hands of Myanmar's military

UNCHR psychologist Mahmuda counsels refugees who has suffered traumatic ordeals. (UNCHR: Roger Arnold)
By James Bennett
ABC News
November 11, 2017
In the refugee camps of Bangladesh, a small handful of psychologists are attempting the near impossible — trying to counsel hundreds of thousands of traumatised Rohingya refugees.
Many of their patients have seen or suffered unspeakable acts of cruelty at the hands of Myanmar's military.
Bangladeshi psychologist Mahmuda, who goes by the one name, begins to list horrifying — but sadly familiar examples — when asked what trauma her patients have suffered.
"The slaughtering of husbands, missing children," she begins.

But then, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) worker starts to tell a tale of loss so painful, it is hard to listen.
"She saw her husband slaughtered by the army," Mahmuda begins.

Some Rohingya children have seen both their parents slaughtered. (UNHCR: Roger Arnold)
This woman, who Mahmuda estimates is in her early twenties, heavily pregnant and carrying a one-year-old baby, fled alone.

Then her contractions began.
"It was a really, really horrible situation," Mahmuda continued.
As the woman endures labour, entirely, utterly alone, she loses track of her one-year-old.
"She lost her baby," Mahmuda said, her voice wavering.
"She had no relatives, there was no one who could take care.
"And also, she gave birth."
Having lost one child and given birth to another, this distraught new mother walks, for days, alone with her newborn to the safety of Bangladesh.
There, fresh tragedy.
"After long walking, almost eight or 10 days, finally the baby didn't survive," Mahmuda concludes.
Asked what she says to someone enduring such grief, she sighs.
"What I have said to her is now you are safe, secure and you are alive," she said.
Children draw harrowing pictures of memories
Alongside mothers who have lost children, her patients also include children with no parents.
"A few of the children, they don't have any parents, any relatives," she said.
"They have been experiencing — they have seen in front of them — father and mother both slaughtered or burned.
"We have provided some basic support, not in depth counselling."

A child in Rohingya holds up a haunting picture she drew of her memories. (UNHCR: Roger Arnold)
One of the things Mahmuda has asked these traumatised children to do is draw their memories.
The images are confronting — helicopters, shooting down from above, burning villages, and people fleeing in boats.

She says schooling, and more safe spaces for children in the teeming camps are desperately needed.
To provide some basic play therapy, and to become then normalised, in their daily life.
None of this has happened because, faced with now over 600,000 fresh refugees since August, aid agencies are still struggling to feed and house them.

A quarter of young children are malnourished and the disease threat hangs like an ominous cloud.
The Red Cross, UNHCR, Care, Oxfam and Save the Children are launching fresh appeals for funding, amid fears the world is moving on from this still unfolding human suffering.
http://www.rohingyablogger.com/2017/11/rohingya-refugees-suffer-unspeakable.html

 

[Banglar Bir]

U2 condemn Suu Kyi’s silence on violence against Rohingya people
www.thestateless.com/2017/11/u2-condemn-suu-kyis-silence-on-violence-against-rohingya-people.html

Musicians, Adam Clayton, from left, Bono, Larry Mullan Jnr and The Edge, of the band U2, perform on stage at Twickenham Stadium in London, Sunday, July 9, 2017. (Photo by Joel Ryan/Invision/AP)
By Sorcha Pollak, The Irish Times
Rock group’s blog post does not acknowledge Bono’s involvement in offshore investments
U2 has condemned Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi for her silence in the face of “violence and terror being visited on the Rohingya people”.

Ms Suu Kyi has been widely criticised by former supporters, including fellow Nobel laureates, for failing to speak out against the violence being inflicted on thousands in her home country of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma).

Commenting in a post on the band’s website, U2 writes that it spent years campaigning for the release of Ms Suu Kyi after she was detained and placed under house arrest for her efforts to bring democracy to Myanmar.

The post signed “Adam, Bono, Edge, Larry” writes: “When she came to Dublin to thank Ireland and Amnesty International, we Irish could not have been more proud.

“When her party the NLD won a landslide in the elections and she stood her ground to become de-facto head of the country, an impossible journey seemed to be reaching its destination.”

The post continues that they could have “never imagined” Ms Suu Kyi would remain silent while more than 600,000 Rohingya people were forced to flee police brutality in Myanmar.

The band members write they never could have predicted “the woman who many of us believed would have the clearest and loudest voice on the crisis would go quiet. For these atrocities against the Rohingya people to be happening on her watch blows our minds and breaks our hearts.”

The Irish musicians say they have attempted to contact Ms Suu Kyi in recent months “to speak directly about the crisis in her country” and that they expected to speak to her this week but that the call had been cancelled.

“Aung San Suu Kyi’s silence is starting to look a lot like assent. As Martin Luther King said: ‘The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.’ The time has long passed for her to stand up and speak out.”
‘A mistake’
The group also called for greater international awareness of the role Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of Myanmar’s military, has played in the crackdown on the Rohingya people, warning that condemning Ms Suu Kyi while ignoring Mr Aung Hlaing “is a mistake”.

“While this in no way excuses her silence, Aung San Suu Kyi has no control, constitutional or otherwise, over his actions, and it is he who has authorised and overseen the terrorisation of the Rohingya people under the guise of protecting Myanmar from terrorism,” writes U2.

“If this horror of human rights abuses is to stop, and if the long-term conditions for resettlement of the Rohingya people are to ever occur, General Min Aung Hlaing and his military must be just as much the focus of international action and pressure as Aung San Suu Kyi and her civilian government.”

Saturday’s post from U2 follows revelations that band frontman Bono made a number of property investments via offshore entitites including a shopping centre in Lithuania and an office building in Germany.

Details of these investments emerged through the Paradise Papers, files obtained by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared with ICIJ, The Irish Times and more than 90 other media organisations in 67 countries.

Bono, who has campaigned for years against secretive offshore tax schemes, has not yet commented on his involvement with the offshore entities.
http://www.thestateless.com/2017/11...ence-on-violence-against-rohingya-people.html

 

[Banglar Bir]

U.N. official says will raise sexual violence against Rohingya with ICC

Rohingya refugees walk after crossing the Naf River in Teknaf, Bangladesh, November 12, 2017. REUTERS/Mohammad Ponir Hossain
By Serajul Quadir
Reuters
November 12, 2017
DHAKA -- A senior United Nations official said on Sunday she would raise the issue of persecution of Myanmar’s Rohingya minority, especially sexual violence and torture, with the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Pramila Patten, Special Representative of the Secretary- General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, also said around $10 million is needed immediately to deliver specialist services for survivors of gender-based violence.

Patten was speaking in the Bangladeshi capital after a three-day visit to the Cox’s Bazar region, near the border with Myanmar. There she met women and girls who are among hundreds of thousands of Rohingya that have sought refuge in Bangladesh following a crackdown by Myanmar’s military on the predominantly Muslim minority.

“When I return to New York I will brief and raise the issue with the prosecutor and president of the ICC whether they (Myanmar’s military) can be held responsible for these atrocities,” Patten said after visiting several camps.

“Sexual violence is being commanded, orchestrated and perpetrated by the Armed Forces of Myanmar, otherwise known as the Tatmadaw.”
“Rape is an act and a weapon of genocide.”
She said she would brief the U.N. secretary-general on the situation in Cox’s Bazar and that her office’s annual report, to be presented to the Security Council in March, would include a dedicated section on Myanmar.

Patten said brutal acts of sexual violence had occurred in the context of collective persecution that included the killing of adults and children, torture, mutilation and the burning and looting of villages.
“The widespread threat and use of sexual violence was a driver and ‘push factor’ for forced displacement on a massive scale, and a calculated tool of terror aimed at the extermination and removal of the Rohingya as a group,” she said.

“The forms of sexual violence we consistently heard about from survivors include gang-rape by multiple soldiers, forced public nudity and humiliation, and sexual slavery in military captivity. One survivor was in captivity for 45 days by the Myanmar army.”

Patten said that since the first mass influx of refugees into Bangladesh in August, gender-based violence specialists had delivered services to 1,644 survivors of sexual and gender-based violence, “although this is only the tip of the iceberg”.

“We need full funding for this humanitarian crisis from the international donor community. The burden is too heavy to be borne by the government of Bangladesh alone,” she added, calling for about $10 million of international funding.
Patten said she had been denied access to Myanmar itself.

Myanmar warned on Wednesday that a scolding delivered by the U.N. Security Council could “seriously harm” its talks with Bangladesh over repatriating more than 600,000 Rohingya who have fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state since Aug. 25.

The United Nations has denounced the violence during the past 10 weeks as a classic example of ethnic cleansing to drive the Rohingya Muslims out of Buddhist majority Myanmar, an accusation Myanmar rejects.
Reporting By Serajul Quadir; Editing by Catherine Evans
http://www.rohingyablogger.com/2017/11/un-official-says-will-raise-sexual.html

British MP George Foulkes: ‘What’s happening with the Rohingya is genocide’

British Member of Parliament George Foulkes (Photo: Dhaka Tribune)
By Shovel Mamun, Ashif Islam Shaon
Dhaka Tribune
November 12, 2017
Shovel Mamun and Ashif Islam Shaon of Dhaka Tribune speaks with British Member of Parliament George Foulkes
He discussed the upcoming Bangladesh general election in 2019 and the Rohingya crisis. Foulkes, Baron Foulkes of Cumnock PC is a British Labour Co-operative life peer. He has been a member of the House of Commons, the Scottish Parliament and as a life peer is now a member of the House of Lords.
What could Commonwealth countries do to solve the Rohingya problem?
Bangladesh has done a lot better than a lot of countries with the Rohingya crisis. Both the people and the government of Bangladesh should be congratulated for their sincere efforts. We want to help Bangladesh and are making every effort to ensure CAP countries are beside Bangladesh to help solve this problem.
Every country should put pressure on Myanmar to address their responsibilities.

My hope is that the Rohingya problem is resolved quickly. But things as they are, Bangladesh is a developing country and is faced with far more complications than other developed countries. Britain along with other countries has started to provide funds and assistance to the Bangladeshi government to aid in the effort.

We will raise the Rohingya issue in our parliament to find an effective solution.

Do you think there is a bilateral solution to this problem?
There is a need to have a bilateral agreement between the countries on this issue and Bangladesh needs support from other countries such as the UK. If there is commitment from the global community, it is possible to find a bilateral solution.
In your opinion, do you think Myanmar government has been delaying their efforts to find a solution?
Yes they are. This is genocide. British media has broadcasted reports of Myanmar army torturing the Rohingya people. Every country has a responsibility to pressurise the Myanmar government to find an effective solution quickly.

What are your thoughts on the polls for the upcoming Bangladeshi elections?
Great Britain has been practicing democracy for a very long time. I visited Bangladesh in 1991 during national elections and at the time, all parties, including BNP and Awami league, participated in what I felt was a free and fair electoral process.

However, in the previous election many questions were raised and phrases like “one party election” were being thrown around. My hope is that all parties will come together and participate in the upcoming national elections because in the end, democracy doesn’t work without participation.

What are some challenges in a democracy?
There are a lot of challenges. Take Russia for instance who are said to have influenced the recent US Polls by using social media. Fabricating news to influence the outcome of an election is a global issue and Bangladesh is no exception.

There is however, a difference between developed countries and developing countries such as Bangladesh. In the US, people are able to go and vote freely in a safe and secure polling station that are monitored and where vote rigging is not possible. While the economy of Bangladesh is rising, it is still developing and that brings its own set of challenges.
http://www.rohingyablogger.com/2017/11/british-mp-george-foulkes-whats.html

Bob Geldof to return Freedom of Dublin in Aung San Suu Kyi protest
www.thestateless.com/2017/11/bob-geldof-to-return-freedom-of-dublin-in-aung-san-suu-kyi-protest.html

Bob Geldof and Jeanne Marine attend the 'Electric Burma' concert for Aung San Suu Kyi at the Bord Gais Energy Theatre on June 18, 2012 in Dublin, Ireland (Image: PA)
By Press Association
Bob Geldof is to hand back his Freedom of the City of Dublin, saying he does not want to be associated with the award while it is also held by Aung San Suu Kyi.
The Live Aid founder and musician blasted the Burmese Nobel peace laureate, who has faced widespread criticism over her country’s treatment of its Rohingya Muslim minority.

In a statement he said: “Her association with our city shames us all and we should have no truck with it, even by default. We honoured her, now she appals and shames us.

Mr Geldof said he would hand back the freedom at City Hall in the Irish capital on Monday morning.

Irish-born Mr Geldof, who received an honorary knighthood from the Queen for his charity work, said he was a “proud Dubliner” but could not continue to hold the freedom while Ms Suu Kyi also held it.

He added: “In short, I do not wish to be associated in any way with an individual currently engaged in the mass ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people of north-west Burma.

“I am a founding patron of The Aegis Trust, who are concerned with genocide prevention and studies. Its founders built and maintain the National Holocaust Museum of the UK.

“I spoke at the inaugural National Holocaust Memorial Day at Westminster and in my time, I have walked amongst peoples who were sectionally targeted with ethnic cleansing.

“I would be a hypocrite now were I to share honours with one who has become at best an accomplice to murder, complicit in ethnic cleansing and a handmaiden to genocide.”

More than 600,000 of the minority group have fled the northern Rakhine state into neighbouring Bangladesh since August, leading to a major humanitarian crisis.

It is not the first time Mr Geldof has spoken out against Ms Suu Kyi. Last month at a summit in Colombia he described her as “one of the great ethnic cleansers of our planet”.

In his Sunday statement Mr Geldof added: “The moment she is stripped of her Dublin Freedom perhaps the council would see fit to restore to me that which I take such pride in. If not, so be it.”
http://www.thestateless.com/2017/11...om-of-dublin-in-aung-san-suu-kyi-protest.html

12:00 AM, November 13, 2017 / LAST MODIFIED: 03:32 AM, November 13, 2017
Atrocities of the millennium
Says Brazilian ambassador about the cruelties inflicted on the Rohingyas
Unb, Dhaka
Brazilian Ambassador to Bangladesh Joao Tabajara de Oliveira Junior has described the persecution of the Rohingya by Myanmar security forces as "atrocities of the millennium".
"This is something difficult to understand. This is unthinkable. Rohingya persecution is atrocities of the millennium," he said at a views-exchange meeting at the Daily Sun office yesterday.

The diplomat said although the displaced Rohingyas were leading a safe and better life at camps in Cox's Bazar, situation might worsen for want of relief and other supplies.

"More than 6,000 Rohingya children in Cox's Bazar are reportedly orphans. They are innocent. Yet they are exposed to many atrocities because of identity," he said.

Replying to a query, he said Brazil is shocked and concerned over Rohingya crisis, and it would like to work with Bangladesh and other countries to resolve the crisis.

The meeting was held during Tabajara's visit to the English daily office at East West Media Group Ltd complex in Bashundhara Residential Area. Daily Sun acting editor Enamul Hoque Chowdhury presided over it, said a press release.

The Brazilian ambassador said he would like to visit Rohingya camps in Cox's Bazar after completion of necessary formalities in this regard.

Tabajara said his country would like to boost trade and commerce with Bangladesh.

Since trade is the key to all relations in the modern world, an initiative will be taken to put business leaders of the two countries to discuss trade and exploit each other's potentials, he said.

Tabajara also held a meeting with Bashundhara Group Vice-Chairman Shafiat Sobhan Sanvir at its industrial headquarters-2 in Bashundhara Residential Area.
http://www.thedailystar.net/backpage/atrocities-the-millennium-1490515

Tillerson to deliver warning in Myanmar over Rohingya crisis
AFP
Published at 09:13 AM November 13, 2017

Rohingya refugees sit on a makeshift boat as they wait for permission from Border Guard Bangladesh to continue after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, at Shah Porir Dwip in Teknaf, Cox's Bazar on November 9, 2017 Reuters
The United Nations has denounced the campaign, including allegations of killings and mass rape, as 'ethnic cleansing'
In the face of widespread “atrocities” against ethnic Rohingya people in Myanmar, the United States has been cautiously stepping up pressure on that country’s army, while taking care to avoid endangering the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi.

As the US takes a more active role in the region — several American delegations have passed through in recent weeks — Secretary of State Rex Tillerson plans to travel to Myanmar on Wednesday to meet Suu Kyi, the nation’s leader, as well as army chief General Min Aung Hlaing.

Myanmar is the country formerly known as Burma.

Tillerson is expected to adopt a firm tone with military leaders there, whom he has deemed “responsible” for the crisis facing the Rohingya, an embattled Muslim minority that has seen more than 600,000 of its members flee to neighbouring Bangladesh in two and a half months.

In the name of putting down a supposed Rohingya rebellion, the army has since late August waged a sweeping military campaign in the western state of Rakhine, burning villages and sending thousands into what has become the largest exodus in today’s world.

The United Nations has denounced the campaign, including allegations of killings and mass rape, as “ethnic cleansing.”
‘Shocking’ scenes
Recently returned from Myanmar and the overflowing refugee camps in Bangladesh, Simon Henshaw, the State Department official responsible for refugee and migration issues, said the scene in the camps was “shocking.”

“The scale of the refugee crisis is immense,” he said, adding: “The conditions are tough. People are suffering.”
“Many refugees told us, through tears, accounts of seeing their villages burned, their relatives killed in front of them,” Henshaw said.

“The world can’t just stand by and be witness to the atrocities that are being reported in that area,” Tillerson said last month.

But it is unclear what steps the United States might take. Up to now, the State Department has merely strengthened a few punitive measures aimed at Myanmar’s army.
‘Little concrete action’
The initial condemnations were “important,” Sarah Margon of the organization Human Rights Watch told AFP, “but they stopped and there has been very little concrete action since then.”

She called for targeted economic sanctions meant to bring an end to “some of the most brutal and horrific atrocities that have been seen in years.”

In the absence of more determined action from the White House or State Department, several members of the US Congress are calling for sanctions to limit military cooperation with Myanmar and ban its army members from US soil. A draft bill would also ban the importation of rubies or jade from the country.

“The bill is an important, although belated, first step in pushing the Myanmar military to end the violence in Rakhine state,” said Joshua Kurlantzick of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. Now, he said, other parts of the government “should take action as well.”
The State Department has not ruled out supporting further sanctions.

But the United States has been careful not to place blame on Aung San Suu Kyi, drawing a line between the military and the civilian government led by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

While Suu Kyi has faced considerable criticism abroad for her apparent lack of empathy for the Rohingya, Washington has reaffirmed its support for her, saluting her commitment to allow the peaceful return of refugees.
A swipe at Suu Kyi
The US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, did however take a side swipe at Suu Kyi, saying the situation in her country “should shame senior Myanmar leaders who have sacrificed so much for an open, democratic Myanmar.”

The United States wants to support “the transition to a civilian government (but) make sure there’s no backsliding,” said a senior State Department official, speaking on background while emphasizing that Suu Kyi, once a dissident, has to deal with an army that ruled unchallenged for nearly a half-century.

And new sanctions could be taken badly in Myanmar, said historian Thant Myint-U. In the past, he told AFP, sanctions “made any transition to democracy less likely to succeed, and entrenched the isolation that is at the heart of all of Myanmar’s problems.”

Margon of Human Rights Watch acknowledged that Myanmar is in “really a difficult, delicate balance,” and added that the civilian government had been “very disappointing” in its handling of the refugee crisis.

Still, she added, “they are not the ones committing the atrocities, they are not the ones responsible for the ethnic cleansing.”

But Margon and, separately, Kurlantzick said the United States could privately deliver a stern message to Suu Kyi on the urgent need to do more.

Kurlantzick said Tillerson should warn the country’s generals that tougher multinational sanctions could ensue unless the violence stops, even while he cautions civilian leaders that they “are not necessarily exempt” from new sanctions.
http://www.dhakatribune.com/world/2017/11/13/227823/

 

[Banglar Bir]

12:00 AM, November 13, 2017 / LAST MODIFIED: 03:24 AM, November 13, 2017
200,000 more to arrive in coming weeks
Int'l Rescue Committee fears; 'shocking level' of malnutrition found among Rohingya kids

Rohingya refugees who entered Bangladesh on makeshift boats walk towards refugee camps after landing in Sabrang of Teknaf yesterday. Photo: AFP
Staff Correspondent
The International Rescue Committee fears around two lakh more Rohingyas will flee to Bangladesh in coming weeks, exacerbating an already "unimaginable humanitarian crisis" in Cox's Bazar that already hosts over eight lakh refugees.
"The IRC expects a further 200,000 new arrivals in coming weeks -- bringing the total refugee population to over 1 million," the New York-based humanitarian organisation, which operates in Myanmar's Rakhine State, said in a statement on Saturday.

The figure is based on knowledge of the remaining population of Rohingyas in Rakhine State as the pre-crisis number is estimated to be approximately 1.1 million, said IRC spokesperson Chiara Trincia.

“It's currently estimated that 2-4k people a day are crossing and it is likely that this will continue steadily over the next two months, with occasional peaks (as many as 20k in one day),” Trincia told The Daily Star in a WhatsApp message last night.

“Assuming this continues with peaks and surges, by end of year we will have at least 200k extra arrivals, adding further demand on already strained resources.”

The Rohingyas continue to flee Rakhine despite the world leaders' call to stop violence, allow access to aid agencies and ensure their security.

The UN Security Council has issued a statement condemning the atrocities, but taken no concrete action against Myanmar because of opposition from veto power China though the UN termed the military campaign "textbook example of ethnic cleansing".

Amid worldwide criticism, Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi had earlier said there was no conflict in Rakhine since September 5.

Yet, the persecuted minority group continues to flee from the Myanmarese state.

The new arrivals say they had no sense of security there as they saw their homes or those of neighbours burning, men killed and women raped. They also spoke of severe food and cash crisis.

Hundreds of Rohingyas were feared killed in Myanmar army's clearance operations that began in response to insurgent attacks on August 25, forcing over 613,000 Rohingyas to stream into Bangladesh.

There were shortages of life-saving supplies in Rakhine as Myanmar had blocked all UN aid agencies from delivering vital supplies of food, water and medicine to thousands of civilians after the military campaign began.

Late October, Myanmar agreed to allow the World Food Programme to distribute food there, but it is not known how far it could reach to the people in distress.

The Red Cross, which has been operating in Rakhine, says it is often difficult to reach the people who stayed back in Myanmar.

“The nature of the terrain is very difficult, you have mountains, rivers, wetlands, and people are scattered,” said Fabrizzio Carboni, head of delegation of the Red Cross in Myanmar.

When they go to these remote villages, the first thing they do is listen to people's problems, Carboni told Beijing-based CGTN television channel on Saturday.

“I mean, there is this isolation of community, this psychological impact of the violence.”

The Red Cross says its humanitarian aid is essential now, but adds that its help is not a long-term solution.

“It's not just a humanitarian responsibility, this is a political responsibility for the people to go back to their normal life,” Carboni said.

“There is obviously a need to reconcile communities to create a political environment which allows people to go back to their normal life,” he added.
SHOCKING LEVEL OF MALNUTRITION
A recent survey conducted by humanitarian agencies in Cox's Bazar has revealed shocking levels of malnutrition amongst Rohingya children.

It is further deepening fears of an impending and very serious public health crisis awaiting the world's most vulnerable group of refugees, according to International Rescue Committee (IRC).

The severe acute malnutrition rate of children is 7.5 percent, nearly four times the international emergency level.

"This means that a quarter of Rohingya children between six months and five years of age -- almost 40,000 -- are already malnourished and in urgent need of life-saving help," the IRC said in a statement, fearing the malnutrition rates to be higher with the aid agencies struggling to provide adequate food and other services.

Nearly three-quarters of the Rohingya people in Cox's Bazar lack enough food as well as sanitary living conditions, while 95 percent of them drink water contaminated with faecal matters.

“The conditions we are seeing in Cox's Bazar create a perfect storm for a public health crisis on an unimaginable scale,” said Cat Mahony, IRC's emergency response director in Cox's Bazar.

“The situation will only deteriorate with more arrivals and a greater strain on already overstretched resources.”
http://www.thedailystar.net/frontpage/2-lakh-more-arrive-coming-weeks-1490299

 

[Banglar Bir]

Burma’s Refugees: Repatriation for whom?
www.thestateless.com/2017/11/burmas-refugees-repatriation-for-whom.html

Rohingya refugees disembark from a boat on September 13, on the Bangladeshi side of the Naf River.
By Roland Watson, Dictator Watch
Introduction
We are well over 600,000 new Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, all of whom have arrived since late August. They fled a campaign of genocide organized by the country’s military dictatorship, and with ideological support from racist Buddhist monks and Aung San Suu Kyi.

They joined Rohingya who were already in the country, having fled earlier purges, most recently last autumn and in 2012. The International Organization for Migration estimates that there are now over 1,000,000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

The genocide since late August has shocked the world.
The stories of the refugees are so terrible that there is no question that it is genocide, although major parties such as the U.S. and the E.U. still refuse to describe it as such, since this would convey upon them a responsibility to act. Nonetheless, the International Community does recognize that one million refugees is untenable and that they have to be allowed to go home. There is great pressure being imposed on Burma’s leaders to permit this, and which will continue when the U.S. Secretary of State visits the country on November 15th.

All elements of the anti-Rohingya racist alliance – the Tatmadaw, Suu Kyi and the monks – want to prevent repatriation, but they will probably fail. With this many refugees just across the border, the pressure will never go away.

Right now, they are negotiating for partial and only grudging admission. First, they are using absolute denial of repatriation as a threat. When the Security Council released its latest “statement” (not a “resolution,” which China prevented), they reacted to even this watered-down condemnation by saying that it would “seriously harm” repatriation. At the same time, they are systematically seizing and rezoning Rohingya land, as they have already stolen their crops and livestock. The Rohingya may someday be able to return, but if the dictatorship has its way this will only be to new concentration camps.

Indeed, recognizing the inevitability of repatriation, they are organizing a plan with many different hurdles, to reduce as far as possible the number who actually return. They have said that the refugees must present what for many if not most will be non-existent documentation.

(Children are the largest group – they do not have any papers.) Next, anyone they do let in will be issued the despised NVC identification, which explicitly states that they are not citizens of Burma. (Repatriation therefore must be accompanied by the granting of citizenship.) And finally, the dictatorship will of course resist the demand to provide a safe environment for the returnees, meaning protection from additional attacks by regime soldiers, police, and Rakhine racists. (To have a guarantee of safety, there must be international peacekeepers.)

In summary, repatriation will happen, but we are a long way from the dictatorship yielding such that everyone is accepted back, with citizenship, and to an environment free of repression.
Repatriation for whom?
However, even with all of these bad signs, the process of refugee repatriation does raise one distinct opportunity. This concerns the question: Repatriation for whom? It is not enough to allow only the most recent Rohingya refugees the right to return.
This should be extended to the entire Rohingya exodus population. Moreover, the issue should be expanded to include other ethnic nationality refugee populations, such as the Karen, Shan and Kachin.
If the world is going to address the problem of refugees from Burma – how can a country that is a “democracy” even have them – it should broaden the discussion, and action, to everyone.

A process needs to be established to enable the free and peaceful return of any Rohingya refugee who wants to go home to Burma, no matter how long ago he or she was forced to flee, and the free and peaceful return of refugees from all the other ethnic nationalities as well. International activists and media should keep pressure on the generals and Suu Kyi until this is achieved.

In fact, this is why their efforts to deny repatriation are so strong.
They understand that once they start letting non-Burmans come back, they will have to open the door to everyone.
Conditions inside Burma
The best way to understand a refugee crisis is to get a feel for it from the victims’ perspective – what they have experienced. Vulnerable groups understand that they are at risk and recognize when things are turning against them. They see and hear the hate propaganda. This of course causes them to be afraid, and also to make plans for if things get worse, if they are actually attacked. This in turn varies from changing how and where one works and travels, to avoid danger; having key belongings packed in a Go Bag, so they can flee at a moment’s notice; sending copies of documents to safe locations, if possible to friends and relatives abroad, so

essential ID and papers aren’t lost forever; harvesting crops as earlier as possible and also moving livestock; preparing shelters in nearby hills, with food, clothing and other essential supplies; and creating village warning systems with guards and dogs.

Then, if and when the attacks come, they are ready to flee. Typically, entire villages flee. If their homes are not destroyed and the village is not mined with explosives, they may return when the soldiers, police and rampaging mob leaves. During this period away from their homes, they are “internally displaced persons.” If they are not able to return home, if it has been burned or mined or is in some other way still too dangerous, they may continue living in the hills as IDPs, move to established IDP camps in safe areas (these are typically guarded by ethnic nationality armies), or – if all else fails – flee over the nearest border at which point they formally become “refugees.”

In these types of situations, and as we have seen with the Rohingya, the refugee camps can grow extremely quickly and to a monumental scale. At this point the international humanitarian aid community typically intervenes (unless it is blocked) to provide the refugees with basic shelter, food, sanitation, health care, and education for children.

Some refugee crises are short-lived, but others are very long-term. For the latter, the refugees can get trapped in their camps, if the host country refuses them travel and work privileges. Ultimately, they can get desperate, as new generations are born and begin to spend their entire lives in the camp. In some cases, this becomes so bad that the number of refugee suicides skyrockets. Criminal problems may develop in the camps as well.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees together with the International Organization for Migration and other agencies and groups have a process whereby refugees may be resettled to other countries. This involves first being registered as a refugee and getting a refugee document; waiting, often for years; applying for resettlement; and then waiting again for a long time before finding out if any country is willing to accept you.
Given the huge number of refugees around the world today, from Burma and other countries with widespread and severe civil conflict, the ability of other nations to take them in is being overwhelmed.

In these cases, refugees often take matters into their own hands. They try to organize transportation to other countries where they can have more freedom. This may be with people they know and trust from their community, who for a fee will arrange the transportation, to using groups with which they have no connection, who also will arrange transportation for money but who cannot be trusted. These are the human trafficking gangs.

With the Rohingya, many refugees have found their circumstances so desperate that they have used human traffickers to try to get to Malaysia, which for some led to their drowning at sea or to imprisonment and death in jungle camps in Southern Thailand. We can see a similar level of desperation in all of the Rohingya who have drowned while trying to cross the Naf River to Bangladesh. When a refugee is escaping genocide, he or she will take any risk, no matter how great it might be, to escape.
Refugee locations and numbers
Because the Rohingya have suffered many major attacks over the last forty years, there have been numerous mass departures from their homes in Burma. At this point the population of the group has been dispersed roughly as follows (Source: Al Jazeera and agencies):
Bangladesh – 1,000,000 plus
Pakistan – 350,000
Saudi Arabia – 200,000
Malaysia – 150,000
India – 40,000
UAE – 10,000
Thailand – 5,000
Indonesia – 1,000
Remaining in Burma – probably less than 500,000, of which some 100,000 are in internment – concentration – camps, and with almost no rights.
At this point, there has been limited resettlement of Rohingya refugees to Western countries, including Europe, the U.S., Canada, and also Australia and New Zealand.

This makes a total population estimate for the group of roughly 2.2 million, with less than a quarter remaining in their native Burma homeland.

The conditions for the refugees vary widely. In Bangladesh, Indonesia and also Thailand, they are effectively illegal and are greatly restricted. Rohingya who have made it to Malaysia, Pakistan, India and the Middle East have a better situation and more freedom, including to form communities and to have jobs, although there is also a propaganda campaign against them in India. The few refugees who have been able to make it to the West in some ways have the best situation of all, since they are legal and receive state assistance to get established in the societies.

But, as mentioned above, the Rohingya are not the only ethnic group under duress in Burma. There has been massive state repression against the ethnic nationalities of Eastern and Northern Burma as well, for the last fifty-five years.

The Internally Displaced Monitoring Center estimates that excluding the Rohingya there are over 500,000 IDPs inside Burma, with the largest groups being the Karen, Kachin and Shan. There are a further 100,000 verified refugees in a series of camps on the Thai side of the border, comprising mainly Karen and also Karenni. The actual number though is higher, since registration has ended and new arrivals are not included in the count. On the plus side, many refugees from these groups have been resettled to the West over the last ten years. For the United States alone, it is well over 100,000.
Rohingya in Indonesia
The situation for the Rohingya, and for all the refugees from Burma, can also be understood more clearly by looking at the population in Indonesia. There are 800 to 1,000 Rohingya refugees in Indonesia, most of whom initially fled Burma following the attacks in 2012. This purge resulted in almost 170,000 people fleeing to Bangladesh, and where most of them remain.

Many of the Rohingya in Indonesia experienced the following. They were registered by UNHCR, after which in 2013 they were taken by IOM to Jakarta. There, they spent a year in another refugee camp, really an immigration detention center – an open jail. Following this they were moved in smaller groups to other areas around the country, where they have been ever since. But, while they now have a little more freedom, they are not allowed to work or to go to school.

The Rohingya refugees in Indonesia are desperate. They can see no end to their plight. They are also frustrated because other groups of refugees in the country, such as from Afghanistan and Somalia, are being resettled to the West, and where they are given rights. It is a very curious question, why Afghani and Somali refugees would be accepted but not Rohingya. To me, the core factor underlying this must be that the Western countries, and which have already taken so many other Burma refugees, don’t want to anger Aung San Suu Kyi. She has told the world to not even say the name “Rohingya.” I have no doubt that she doesn’t want anyone in the West accepting them, either, and which signal diplomats clearly understand and are following.

The Rohingya refugees in Indonesia are like all refugees everywhere. They have the same goals. What they would like most is to be able to go home, to Burma. Until this is possible, they want the government of Indonesia to grant them rights. If the U.S., Canada and Europe can embrace refugees, why not Indonesia (and Thailand!)? Finally, if they can’t get this, they would like to be resettled to the West.

I encourage all journalists, starting with journalists in Indonesia and with pan-Southeast Asia media outlets, to investigate this situation. Please get in touch. I can connect you to Rohingya in Indonesia who can tell you their stories.
Conclusion
Burma, once again, is a mess. It is absolutely a failed state.
When you have a genocide of a vulnerable group that is perpetrated by one arm of the government and openly backed by the other, this is the highest level of failure. Even though things may be peaceful in Rangoon and Mandalay (no public protests or free press, though), elsewhere the country is no different from Yemen or Somalia. There is perpetual conflict, never-ending oppression and exploitation, and for the Rohingya the most severe of the crimes against humanity.

The Rohingya must be allowed to return home, meaning any and all Rohingya who have fled over the last forty years. Indeed, all the IDPs and refugees in and from Burma must be allowed to go home. The greatest task of the government, after providing potable water, food and medical care, is enabling – helping – these people to come home. Everything else, including commercial and resource development, is by comparison meaningless.

This is another aspect of Burma as a failed state – that no one, certainly not the Suu Kyi government, has prioritized the problem of helping people return, and not only the IDPs and refugees but also the millions of economic migrants who fled the country. The core objective is simple: Bring everyone home who wants to come back, and then have them get to work rebuilding Burma and in a well-designed and sustainable way.

The barrier of course is obvious. All of the above would require ending the power and privilege of the military dictatorship and its cronies. Until this is accomplished, Burma is simply a mafia gang, a massive criminal enterprise, and which Suu Kyi has joined.
It is a country in name only.
http://www.thestateless.com/2017/11/burmas-refugees-repatriation-for-whom.html

 

[Banglar Bir]

Rohingya crisis - EU Foreign Ministers Must Back Global Arms Embargo
Refugee group.JPG

Children witnessing their mother being raped by Burmese Army soldiers.
Children seeing their school friends shot.
Thousands of homes burned.
More than 600,000 Rohingya fleeing to neighbouring Bangladesh.
A ‘textbook example of ethnic cleansing’ says the UN.
And still no action from the European Union.

European Union Foreign Ministers are meeting on Monday 13th November.
Email them now to demand action.
https://action.burmacampaign.org.uk...reign-ministers-must-back-global-arms-embargo

 

[Banglar Bir]

Source: CNN
Exclusive video tells of Rohingya massacre
Accounts of rape, burning children and murder
How a Rohingya massacre unfolded at Tula Toli
By Rebecca Wright, CNN
Updated 0507 GMT (1307 HKT) November 13, 2017
(CNN)Discarded and left for dead, Mumtaz says she found herself on top of a mound of charred, entangled bodies.

"They killed and killed and piled the bodies up high. It was like cut bamboo," says Mumtaz, a Rohingya woman from the village of Tula Toli in western Myanmar.

"In the pile there was someone's neck, someone's head, someone's leg. I was able to come out, I don't know how."
The horrors Mumtaz says she endured didn't stop there. After escaping the mass grave, Mumtaz says she was dragged to a village house and raped by soldiers. The wooden house was then locked and set on fire.

It was her seven-year-old daughter Razia, who was in the hut, that ultimately saved her.
"I called to my mum. And my mum said, 'who are you?,'" Razia says. "My mother's head was split. She was thrown aside. They struck me and threw me aside."

"I said 'your finger is on fire.' Then my mum and I got out and left."
The pair squeezed through a damaged part of a fence and hid in a vegetable patch, before other villagers found them and helped them get to Bangladesh, where a staggering 615,000 Rohingya refugees have fled since August 25, according to aid agencies.

Rohingya refugee Mumtaz and her seven-year-old daughter Razia photographed last week.
The refugees have escaped violent clashes in the north of Rakhine State, where Myanmar's military has intensified what it calls "clearance operations" targeting "terrorists" after Rohingya militants attacked police posts, killing 12 security officials.

The UN calls what's happening in Rakhine a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing" and the killings that took place in Mumtaz's village on August 30 have been described as one of the worst atrocities of the past two and a half months.
Documenting a massacre
Shafiur Rahman, a Bangladeshi-British documentary maker, first heard about what occurred at Tula Toli after he filmed a group of Rohingya crossing the border between Myanmar and Bangladesh on September 2, three days after the killings.

The dramatic footage shows dozens of men and women clambering across barbed wire fences into no man's land, some of them covered in blood and carrying dead or injured relatives. Their distress is palpable.
"It quickly became clear to me that those telling me the most horrific accounts of their last few days were those coming from Tula Toli," Rahman tells CNN. "And what also struck me was the consistency in their stories."

Mumtaz, photographed here on September 27, 2017, fled from Myanmar with her daughter.
He met Mumtaz and Razia in Bangladesh in late September. Almost mummified in bandages, Mumtaz had spent 15 days bed- bound in a clinic, unable to speak or even sip a glass of water. By mid-October, the horrific burns all over her face and body started to slowly heal, and Mumtaz began to share her story with Rahman in a series of interviews.

Accounts of mass rape, murder and arson have been given by many of the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees who have escaped Myanmar.

But the testimonies Rahman has collected from a total of 30 Tula Toli residents over the past two months, and detailed in this report depict what Amnesty International describes in an October report as "what appears to be one of the worst atrocities of the Army's ethnic cleansing campaign."
"Amnesty International believes, based on consistent, corroborating witness accounts, that soldiers massacred at least scores of Rohingya women, men, and children from Min Gyi on 30 August," the Amnesty report concludes. Min Gyi is another name for Tula Toli.
Amnesty also released satellite images showing the village before and after the houses were burnt.

'They won't kill anyone'
One of Myanmar's poorest regions, Rakhine State is home to the mostly Muslim Rohingya and the Rakhines, a predominantly Buddhist ethnic group.
The two have lived side by side in Tula Toli for generations although long-simmering tensions have often erupted into violence in the region. The estimated 1.1 million Rohingya have been denied citizenship in Myanmar, which regards them as Bengali. Bangladesh insists they are from Myanmar, rendering them effectively stateless.

In detailed video interviews and conversations, most of the 30 survivors told Rahman that they were given assurances by local officials that they would be safe if they remained in their village.

Rehana, photographed here on September 4, 2017, was able to flee from Tula Toli with her children
Mohammed Nasir said he was told: "They might torch the houses, but they won't kill anyone."
Residents describe helicopters landing near the village at 8 a.m. on the morning of August 30. The soldiers were joined by around 50 Rakhine Buddhists and other non-Rohingya minorities from outside the village, survivors said.

"They asked us to gather on the beach," Nasir says, describing the sandy bank of the meandering river that runs through Tula Toli. He saw the killings unfold from a hill.
"When they saw people gathering, they went straight for them. They were shooting continuously, at the same time the houses were burning.
Cellphone footage shows Tula Toli residents heading to the river in their village on August 30, where witnesses say many were shot later that day.
Another resident, Rehana Begum, said she was also told to leave her home and stay near the river.
"They kept us there by saying that they would do us no harm," Begum says. "At 8 a.m., a helicopter landed and the village was besieged. Whoever was able to flee, they fled."

"(The military) surrounded us suddenly and we could not escape because of the river. The tide was high. There were no boats. Since my brothers could carry my children, I was able to swim and flee," she says.
"Many were shot, scores got hit and they fell on their face," Rehana said. "Those lying on the ground were picked up, chopped and later they were thrown into the river."

Hasina, left, and her husband Shahidul on October 8. They say soldiers burned their one-year-old daughter alive.

Hasina, a Rohingya woman from Tula Toli, says the soldiers and their accomplices threw her one-year-old daughter Sohaifa on a fire while she was still alive.
"They tore her from my arms," Hasina says, breaking down into tears. "They threw her into a burning pile of clothes. They had started a fire using people's belongings. And they threw her into the big burning pile."

Her husband had been working outside the village when the killings took place and later reunited with his wife in Bangladesh, where he found out about the death of their only child.
CNN cannot verify the accounts of the refugees, as access to Rakhine State is heavily restricted.
Peace deal signed
More than a week before the attack on the village, Rohingya village officials say there was a meeting on August 18, in which both Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims from Tula Toli signed a peace agreement.

While the village, which is home to 4,360 Rohingya and 435 Rakhines, hadn't seen any clashes in recent years, Rakhine officials said they wanted to allay Rohingya fears given tensions between the two groups elsewhere in the state and a recent military build up, the survivors told Rahman.
"A resolution was passed to not attack each other and live peacefully. It was signed by both sides, Rakhine and us," said Nur Kabir, the current secretary of Tula Toli's village administration, who is now in Bangladesh.

A group of Rohingya refugees from Tula Toli being brought from the border to the refugee camps in Bangladesh on September 2, 2017

"But they attacked on Wednesday starting at 8 a.m. and killed us."
The survivors say their trust in that peace agreement signed days before, and in the village authorities, was obliterated when the military arrived early on the morning of August 30. Those who escaped estimate that between 1,500 to 1,700 people died that day.

Rahman believes, given the instructions of local officials, the peace deal and the military build-up in the area before August 25, that the attack on Tula Toli was pre-planned. He calls it a "terrifying and inescapable notion" that undermines the repeated insistence from Myanmar authorities that the military were responding to attacks from Rohinya insurgents.

Zaw Htay, the spokesperson for Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, said that local Rakhines and the military had been targeted by insurgents in Tula Toli.

"We could verify that on 30 August 2017 in Min Gyi (Tular Tuli) village, there were a total of eight attacks against Rakhine population and security forces by hundreds of terrorists," Zaw Htay said.
Previously, Myanmar's government has denied charges of ethnic cleansing, saying that the military took "full measures to avoid collateral damage and the harming of innocent civilians" in Rakhine State.
In a televised speech on September 19, Suu Kyi, a Nobel peace prize laureate who took power in 2015 in a power-sharing agreement with the military, said she "condemned all human rights violations," but failed to address alleged atrocities by the military.

She now faces increased scrutiny ahead of the visit of the US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, on Wednesday, who has said he is "extraordinarily concerned about the situation."
Pope Francis, who has spoken out repeatedly in defense of the Rohingya, will also meet with Suu Kyi during a visit to Myanmar and Bangladesh later in November.

Seven-year-old Razia, who helped her mother Mumtaz to escape from Tula Toli. The rest of the family were killed in front of them. She suffered head injuries when her village was attacked.
Bleak future
Mumtaz is slowly recovering from her burns and other injuries in Bangladesh, but faces a desperate future.
Conditions in the border camps are bleak, with aid agencies struggling to provide enough food, shelter and healthcare in what the UN has described as the world's fastest growing refugee crisis and a major humanitarian emergency.

She and Razia now have only each other. In the carnage, Mumtaz says her husband was shot by the riverside. One of her three sons was thrown into a fire. The other two were killed in the wooden hut that Razia and Mumtaz escaped from.
"My brother and the others were burnt," Razia says. "They were killed by being smashed. They shot dead my dad."
Razia's head is scarred with the blows she received. But worse is the mental trauma of the memories, which are still raw.
"She saw. The little girl saw everything," Mumtaz says. "She tried to pick up her brother as he was burning. She couldn't."
Edited by Katie Hunt
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/12/asia/myanmar-rohingya-tula-toli-massacre-testimony/index.html

 

[Banglar Bir]

South Asian Actors and Artists Call on World Leaders to End Violence Against Rohingya
BY NEHMAT KAUR ON 10/11/2017
A letter signed by prominent South Asians calls on world leaders to pressure the Myanmar government into granting citizenship to the Rohingya.

Over 30 South Asians in the media and arts have signed an open letter condemning the world’s response to the Rohingya crisis and calling on world leaders to take action at the upcoming ASEAN Summit.

In 1994, the world wrung its hands and chose to observe – not stop – the brutal violence unfolding in Rwanda. And then, after hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost, the international community swore there would never be a repeat.

Now, an open letter from some of the most prominent South Asians in arts and media is reminding the international community of its promises, “Remember what happened in Rwanda? Now pay attention to Myanmar.”

Over 30 South Asians artistes, including Riz Ahmed, Shruti Ganguly, Heems, Aziz Ansari, Kumail Nanjiani, Freida Pinto, Manish Dayal, Nandita Das and Kamila Shamsie, have signed an open letter condemning the world’s response to the Rohingya crisis and calling on world leaders to take action at the upcoming ASEAN Summit.

Titled ‘The Genocide Under Our Noses’, the letter draws attention to the fact that over 600,000 Rohingya Muslims – nearly half their total population – have fled state-sponsored persecution in Myanmar’s Rakhine state just in the past ten weeks. Reports say hundreds more continue to arrive on Bangladeshi shores, while thousands still remain stranded in Myanmar.

The unprecedented influx of refugees – bearing accounts of the Burmese military torching their villages, raping and murdering with impunity – has plunged Bangladesh into a humanitarian crisis. In late October, the United Nations declared the situation a textbook case of ethnic cleansing, and appealed for $434 million to tackle the worsening conditions in Bangladesh’s camps. With an estimated 12,000 children arriving every week, UNICEF has estimated that it will need $76 million to treat just the children, who form as much as 60% of the refugee population in Bangladesh.

And yet, international response has proven inadequate so far. The UN’s appeal remains underfunded and it was only this week that the UN Security Council released a presidential statement expressing “grave concern” over the situation in Myanmar, and asked the state “to ensure no further excessive use of military force”. Britain, France and others originally circulated a resolution for the same purpose, but dropped it since diplomats expected China and Russia to exercise their veto powers. Regardless, Myanmar retorted, saying that the statement could “seriously harm” bilateral negotiations with Bangladesh, negatively impacting efforts to repatriate the refugees.
Also read: Timeline: Being Rohingya in Myanmar, from 1784 to Now
But state actors are not the only players involved. “Myanmar is no longer a pariah state; it has a democratically elected government and has been flooded with foreign direct investment over the past few years,” states the letter, drawing attention to non-state actors. “The corporations who have invested in this region must speak up and divest, unless human rights are respected, or they too will be complicit in these horrendous acts,” the letter goes on to say.

Rohingya refugee men carry a man after travelling over the Bangladesh-Myanmar border in Teknaf, Bangladesh, September 1, 2017. Credit: Reuters/Mohammad Ponir Hossain

Many are hoping that world leaders will use an upcoming trio of events – the APEC Summit in Da Nang, Vietnam on November 10, an ASEAN meeting in Manila, Philippines on November 12 and then the East Asia Summit in Manila on November 13 and 14 – to coax Myanmar into complying with international norms.

Referring to the ASEAN summit, the open letter calls on leaders to “pressure the Myanmar government to stop these atrocities, grant the Rohingya citizenship, and allow them to return to a place they call home.”

It adds, “Countries must fully fund the UN appeal and close the funding gap that is leaving traumatised children without basic food, water and shelter. Finally, member states of the United Nations must assess what diplomatic efforts can enable them to fulfill their responsibility to protect the Rohingya.”

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has also released a statement ahead of the summits, demanding “concerted global action” from the countries that will be attending the summits, including the US, China, Japan, Russia, Canada, Australia, Mexico, the EU, Japan and South Korea. Brad Adams, the organisation’s director in Asia, said, “World leaders shouldn’t return home from these summits without agreeing to targeted sanctions to pressure Burma to end its abuses and allow in independent observers and aid groups.”
Also read: For the Rohingya in Bangladesh’s Refugee Camps, Living is Surviving
The organisation has also said the Security Council should take “more meaningful action” and recommended imposing an arms embargo, economic sanctions and travel bans on members of the military. However, with China publicly praising Myanmar’s efforts to “maintain stability” and the US withdrawing its assistance to Myanmar’s military at the same time, unanimous action by the UNSC seems unlikely. Although, as HRW and the open letter points out, that shouldn’t stop countries from taking bilateral and multilateral action.

With the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson scheduled to visit Myanmar on November 15, and ministers from China, Japan, Germany and Sweden also visiting Myanmar and Bangladesh this month, the Bangladeshi government is hoping the international community “will continue building pressure on Myanmar”.

Currently home to about a million refugees and counting, the already over-subscribed state is struggling to keep its borders open and its refugee camps habitable. The thousands stuck at the mouth of the Naf river do not know or do not care about the conditions that await them. The letter’s premise is a simple one, “After Rwanda we said ‘never again’. We must mean it”.
https://thewire.in/195832/south-asian-artistes-call-world-leaders-end-violence-rohingya/

 

[Banglar Bir]

Last exit from Myanmar, Rohingya wait for weeks on beach
Reuters
Published at 10:41 AM November 13, 2017

A Rohingya Muslim woman holds a baby as they wait to cross the border to go to Bangladesh, in a temporary camp outside Maungdaw, northern Rakhine state, Myanmar November 12, 2017 Reuters
Well over 600,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh to find shelter in the refugee camps
Some 1,000 Rohingya desperate to leave Myanmar are camped on this exposed, sun-baked beach on the Bay of Bengal waiting for a boat to carry them to sanctuary in Bangladesh.

Having kept northern parts of Rakhine State virtually off limits since it launched a counter-insurgency operation there in late August, Myanmar’s military made a rare show of openness on Sunday by taking foreign journalists to see one of the beaches from which Rohingya are trying to escape.

Well over 600,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh to find shelter in the refugee camps, the living victims of what a top UN official has called “ethnic cleansing”.

Myanmar, a mostly Buddhist country, has denied such accusations, insisting the military’s clearance operation was necessitated by national security concerns after Rohingya militants attacked 30 security posts in northern Rakhine on August 25.

For the Rohingya at Ah Lei Than Kyaw, some 5 km south of the mouth of the Naf river, the beach is a kind of purgatory.

Mohammad Eidnou, a 19-year-old laborer, sold his house and belongings but he and his family have spent everything surviving for the past two months and have no money to pay the $50 a head that boatmen are demanding to take them to Bangladesh.

“I don’t want to go back to my village because there is nothing for us,” Eidnou told Reuters. “We cannot survive.”

Some have been stuck there for over a month, sweltering under the plastic sheeting used to make tents and existing on handouts proved by the Myanmar Red Cross Society.

Others came just a few days ago, a sign that the flight of the Rohingya to Bangladesh is far from over. The International Rescue Committee reckons that two-thirds of some 300,000 left in Myanmar could leave in the next couple of months.

On the beach at Ah Lei Than Kyaw, 30-year-old Sauli Mullahhe was thinking only of getting away.

Like several other men, he described how things had got so bad that he could no longer go to work or his children to school. He could not get to a pharmacy when they fell sick, or go to a market to buy food and said the authorities had even stopped Rohingya leaving the village to fish.

“I could not have survived anymore,” Mullahhe said. “I will not go back to my village, I really hope to cross the Naf river to get to Bangladesh.”
Tillerson coming
Myint Kyaw, a police lieutenant-colonel, said his officers were leaving the Rohingya on the beach alone, and were not intervening when boats came to pick them up.

“We don’t really take any action against them, because we don’t want them in trouble,” the policeman said. “They cannot go on living in the camp for very long because they can have so many health problems. That’s why we don’t interfere with them.”

Rohingya among the hundreds who reached Bangladesh on rickety boats and rafts late last week told Reuters they had left thousands of others behind in miserable conditions on the Pa Nyaung Pin Gyi beach, at the mouth of the Naf.

The military-arranged media trip did not extend that far up the coast.

Many of the Rohingya living in the camps in Cox’s Bazar, on the Bangladesh side of the Naf river, have recounted how their relatives were raped and murdered as they ran from villages set ablaze by Myanmar soldiers.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of Myanmar’s less than two-year-old civilian government, has said any allegations of atrocities need substantiating and should be investigated.

Under Myanmar’s transition to democracy, civilians still have to share power with the generals who ruled the country for nearly half a century, and Suu Kyi has no say over what the military does.

She is currently on a mission explaining how Myanmar is working to stem the crisis to leaders of other Southeast Asian countries at a regional summit in Manila.

On Wednesday, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will visit Myanmar for talks with the country’s leadership, while senators back in Washington press for economic and travel sanctions against the military and its business interests.

Suu Kyi has said preparations are being made for Rohingya to return, so long as they can prove they were resident.
http://www.dhakatribune.com/world/south-asia/2017/11/13/227838/

 

[Banglar Bir]

The ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is visible from space

Light from a torch falls on the face of a Rohingya Muslim girl sitting with a group on a raft made with plastic containers on which they crossed over from Myanmar into Bangladesh. (AP Photo/A.M. Ahad)
WRITTEN BY
Tim Fernholz David Yanofsky
November 12, 2017
In just months, more than 600,000 members of Myanmar’s ethnic Muslim minority, the Rohingya, have fled persecution into neighboring Bangladesh. When that many people move on earth, you can see it from space.
The imagery below comes from Planet, a satellite imaging company that photographs the entire landmass of earth daily. It shows Kutupalong refugee camp, spreading over an area a little larger than ten square miles. The left side of the photo is Bangladesh; the right side, Myanmar.

In the space of a few weeks between Sept. 21 and Nov. 10, you can see the “massive expansion of the camp over a short amount of time,” Micah Farfour, who analyzes imagery like this for Amnesty International, said in an email. “You can see there were once trees/vegetation where there are now structures (lighter colors).”

Farfour says that the rapid growth of the camp confirms a large exodus from Myanmar, and suggests, “the situation in Myanmar for the people fleeing is likely desperate and widespread to cause so many people to leave so quickly.” It also suggests that migrants are getting through despite reports that the Bangladesh government tried to halt the mass movement.

Amnesty International has sent teams of researchers to Bangladesh to interview the refugees, documenting a government-led crack down on the Rohingya that began during the summer. Soldiers, accompanied by citizen militias, have burned Rohnigya towns, shot refugees as they fled and raped Rohingya women.
The United Nations top human rights’ official has called it ““a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

The area of the conflict; refugees are concentrated near Cox’s Bazaar. (Amnesty International)
One challenge for the UN and human rights organizations has been getting access to Rakhine state, the Myanmar province where the Rohingya made their home. That has made satellite imagery an increasingly important tool for human rights monitors.
Amnesty has used satellite imagery to track burnt villages in Myanmar.

“Many times, I am able to work with researchers that receive reports from the ground from locals and then I can attempt to confirm or deny things with satellite imagery,” Farfour writes, noting that Planet’s frequent imaging of the same areas is critical because “I am looking at areas of the world that the higher resolution satellites rarely document until it may be too late.”

On Nov. 10, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres called on Myanmar to allow the Rohingya to return to their homes and allow UN inspectors access to Rakhine state. “What has happened is an immense tragedy and the levels of violence and the atrocities committed are something that we cannot be silent about,” he said.
https://qz.com/1127120/the-ethnic-cleansing-of-the-rohingya-is-visible-from-space/

 

[Banglar Bir]

One of the world’s poorest countries confronts ethnic cleansing on its doorstep
By Omar Waraich November 6
torture, rape, killings, arson and other human rights violations.
The Bangladeshi government, which had long been ambivalent towards the Rohingya, embraced them.
On a visit to the camps last month, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina declared that if Bangladesh could feed 160 million people, it could feed hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees. Across the Cox’s Bazar district, she is shown consoling refugee children on placards that hail her as the “Mother of Humanity.”

Now, the mood is slowly giving way to anxiety. Bangladeshis are keenly aware that the humanitarian crisis has enhanced their prestige abroad, but there are worries about how their poor, densely populated country will cope.

With an eye on next year’s elections, which are clouded by fears about how the religious right might exploit the crisis, ministers routinely grumble about the insupportable burden they are forced to carry. There is no sign that the refugees will be able to return to their homes anytime soon, and there is no plan to provide for their long-term needs.

As far as Burma’s generals see it, they have successfully executed a plan to finally rid themselves of the Rohingya. Stripped of their citizenship, denied recognition as an ethnic group, the Rohingya have long been subject to an entrenched system of discrimination. The heart-rending testimonies of the past two months bear a chilling consistency with reports from the late 1970s, when 200,000 Rohingya were also driven out of their villages amid a frenzy of violence.

Back then, many Bangladeshis found it easy to sympathize with the plight of the Rohingya. The memories of 1971, when the Pakistan army carried out large-scale human rights violations and drove millions of refugees into India, were still fresh. But that didn’t stop the government from trying to force them back. “We are not going to make the refugees so comfortable that they won’t go back to Burma,” a minister said at the time. Within the space of six months, 10,000 refugees had died in the camps of hunger.

The desire to see the refugees return to Burma appears to dominate the current Bangladeshi government’s thinking. It has refused to grant the Rohingya refugee status, leaving them without any legal status on either side of the border. That decision may seem trivial, but it’s of fateful significance, since it prevents international humanitarian aid agencies from mobilizing the kind of support needed. Also against the wishes of the humanitarian community, the government is constructing what may become the world’s largest refugee camp.

The Kutupalong refugee camp, assigned to Rohingya refugees who fled here during the early 1990s, has now been extended in every direction. Scattered across 3,000 acres of previously forested land, it will become home to more than a million people. Plans are underway to coax earlier arrivals of Rohingya refugees out of the makeshift dwellings and onto the rambling hills where they have been assigned shelter. There is no direct access by road; supplies have to be delivered by foot.

The weather is oppressive. The searing heat is only interrupted by monsoon rain or severe gusts of wind. The thought of the camp’s fate during the coming cyclone season fills the humanitarian community with dread, as do other looming hazards. A fire in a tent, or the outbreak of disease, will sweep across the camp with a fury that will be difficult to tame. Doctors Without Borders has described health conditions in the camp as a “time bomb.”

The government is still toying with the reckless idea of moving the Rohingya refugees offshore, to a pair of uninhabited and uninhabitable silt islands that have barely emerged into view.
Meanwhile, criminal gangs, human traffickers, armed groups and others who sense opportunity in misery are a constant menace.

Every refugee I spoke to said they wanted to go home — but not before “shanti,” or peace, returns. It will not be enough for the violence to stop. The cruel, entrenched system of discrimination and segregation that made them so vulnerable in the first place has to be dismantled. The Rohingya cannot be left living in fear of a fresh wave of violence that will drive them across the border yet again, condemned to their tragic status as a perpetually unwanted people.

For that to happen, Burma’s military must be held accountable and Bangladesh’s government must be helped with its burden. This is not a crisis that will disappear any time soon, and unless there is a determined global response over the long-term, it could become worse still. The plight of the Rohingya is a test — a moment that demands the international community demonstrate that the words “never again” still carry some meaning.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ts-doorstep/?tid=ss_fb&utm_term=.db24973c8286

 

[Banglar Bir]

https://www.facebook.com/

Myanmar's soldiers targeted Rohingya Muslim women for gang rape: UN official
Sun Nov 12, 2017 05:23PM

Rohingya Muslim refugees who entered Bangladesh by makeshift boats walk toward refugee camps after landing in the Teknaf district of Bangladesh, November 11, 2017. (Photo by AFP)
Myanmar's soldiers have "systematically targeted" Rohingya Muslim women for gang rape in Rakhine state, says a UN official.
Pramila Patten, the special representative of the UN Secretary-General on sexual violence in conflict, said many of the atrocities committed by the troops "could be crimes against humanity."

The UN official made the remarks during a press briefing in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, on Sunday, after visiting the southeastern district of Cox's Bazar, which is located near the border with Myanmar.

"I heard horrific stories of rape and gang rape, with many of the women and girls who died as a result of the rape," Patten said, adding, "My observations point to a pattern of widespread atrocities, including sexual violence against Rohingya women and girls who have been systematically targeted on account of their ethnicity and religion."

The sexual violence in Rakhine was "commanded, orchestrated and perpetrated by the armed forces of Myanmar," the special representative said.

"The forms of sexual violence we consistently heard about from survivors include gang rape by multiple soldiers, forced public nudity and humiliation and sexual slavery in military captivity."

"One survivor described being held in captivity by the Myanmar armed forces for 45 days, during which time she was repeatedly raped. Others still bore visible scars, bruises and bite marks attesting to their ordeal," Patten stated.

The UN official added that the sexual violence was a key reason behind the exodus of the Rohingya and occurred in the context of "collective persecution" of the minority.

"The widespread threat and use of sexual violence was clearly a driver and push factor for forced displacement on a massive scale and a calculated tool of terror aimed at the extermination and the removal of the Rohingya as a group."

Patten earlier met women and girls who were among thousands of Rohingya Muslims that have sought refuge in Bangladesh.

More than 600,000 Rohingya have fled the predominantly-Buddhist country of Myanmar to Bangladesh since August 25, when a crackdown on the Rohingya intensified in Rakhine. The government has been engaged in a campaign against the minority, which the UN and human rights groups have called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

Elsewhere in her remarks, Patten said she would raise the issue of the persecution of the Rohingya, especially sexual violence and torture, with the International Criminal Court (ICC).

"When I return to New York I will brief and raise the issue with the prosecutor and president of the ICC whether they (Myanmar's military) can be held responsible for these atrocities."

International rights groups have already called on world leaders to address the plight of the Rohingya.

PressTV-HRW urges strong action against Myanmar over Rohingya
Human Rights Watch urges world leaders gathering for upcoming annual summits in Asia to address the plight of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2017/11/12/541960/UN-Myanmar-Rohingya-women