The Stateless Rohingya Blog

BBC News: 8 March 2013   Burmese opposition party, the National League for Democracy, is holding its first party congress since it was formed more than 20 years ago. Delegates from across the country are gathering in Rangoon to set out new policies and to select new members for its ageing leadership. Meanwhile, the Burmese president Thein Sein is finishing his trip across Europe and will return home to a country whose recent reforms have been rewarded by the lifting of sanctions, but where ethnic populations are suffering violent assaults. Troops continued a raid on rebels in Kachin state in the east over recent months, despite the president's orders to cease. And in the western Rakhine state, tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have been displaced amid clashes with Rakhine Buddhists, violence in which some say the state is complicit. Lucy Hocking's was joined on BBC World News by Baroness Cox, the founder of the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust charity and by Nuru

UN human rights envoy for Burma Tomas Ojea Quintana speaks to reporters following a meeting with Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2012. (Photo: The Irrawaddy) Irrawaddy News: March 8, 2013  GENEVA — The crisis in Burma’s Arakan State, where sectarian violence erupted last year, risks spreading and endangering democratic reforms undertaken since military rule ended in 2011, a UN investigator said on Thursday. Burma should also release its remaining 250 political prisoners, end torture by police and address root causes of ethnic conflicts, the independent investigator Tomas Ojea Quintana said. “There remains a large gap between reform at the top and implementation on the ground,” he said in an annual report to the United Nations Human Rights Council. “Rakhine [Arakan] State is going through a profound crisis that threatens to spread to other parts of the country and has the potential to undermine the entire reform process in Myanmar.”