The Stateless Rohingya Blog

The Southeast Asian body vows to monitor the plight of the ethnic group unwanted in Burma and Bangladesh. AFP A Rohingya Muslim family seen in the Burmese-Bangladesh border after fleeing violence in Burma's Rakhine state, June 12, 2012. The head of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) raised the issue of the Rohingyas with the top diplomats of Burma and Bangladesh on Friday, vowing to monitor the Muslim ethnic group unwanted by both countries.

The hardliners called on Muslims to go to Myanmar and "carry out jihad for your Muslim brothers" (AFP, Romeo Gacad)  JAKARTA — Hundreds of Islamic hardliners protested outside the Myanmar embassy in the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Friday to "stop the genocide" of Rohingya Muslims in the wake of deadly communal unrest. Around 300 hardliners from organisations, including the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and Jemaah Anshorut Tauhid (JAT), threatened to storm the Myanmar embassy in Jakarta as some 50 police officers guarded the building.

12/07/2012 Joint press release HUMANITY GONE AMOK IN BURMA, SAVE ROHINGYA PEOPLE We the undersigned organizations have strongly condemned President Thein Sein for his disowning the Rohingyas. It is an irresponsible action that the President had proposed UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres that sending the Rohingyas to refugee camps run by the UNHCR was the “only solution” to the issue. He also nonsensically said, “We will send them away if any third country would accept them”. 

(Opinion) – Burma Campaign UK (BCUK) supports human rights for the Rohingya people. For Burma Campaign UK to make such a statement shouldn’t be surprising or controversial.  We are a human rights organization working on Burma. How could anyone disagree that the Rohingya people are entitled to full human rights and the normal rights and protections under international law? But some people see that statement as such an outrage that Burma Campaign UK staff deserve to be raped and killed. We need to be “punished,” “taught a lesson” and “hung.” All these views and many more – many vicious and obscene – have been emailed to us or posted on YouTube and Facebook. 

LAST spring, a flowering of democracy in  Myanmar  mesmerized the world. But now, three months after the democracy activist  Daw Aung San Suu Kyi  won a parliamentary seat, and a month after she  traveled to Oslo  to belatedly receive the  1991 Nobel Peace Prize , an alarm bell is ringing in Myanmar. In the villages of Arakan State, near the Bangladeshi border, a pogrom against a population of Muslims called the Rohingyas began in June. It is the ugly side of Myanmar’s democratic transition — a rotting of the flower, even as it seems to bloom.

A Rohingya Muslim woman and her family members, who had tried to cross into Bangladesh to escape communal violence in Myanmar, cry in a coast guard station in southern Bangladesh on June 19, 2012, before being sent back to Myanmar. Amid Myanmar’s plans to eject its Rohingya Muslim minority, which the United Nations calls one of the world’s most-prosecuted people, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says it will help the internally-displaced in the country to return to their homes.