The Stateless Rohingya Blog

By Reuter September 22, 2014 YANGON – Myanmar gave citizenship on Monday to 209 Muslims displaced by sectarian violence, after the first phase of a project aimed at determining the status of about a million Rohingya whose claims to nationality have been rejected in the past.  A Rohingya man looks at his Myanmar Naturalized Citizenship identification card during the ceremony for oath of citizenship and giving the Citizenship identification cards and Naturalized Citizenship Identification cards in Myae Pone Township, Rakhine State, western Myanmar, Sept 22. Forty Rohingya people from Taung Paw refugee camp received Myanmar Citizenship Identification card and Naturalized Citizenship Identification card as per 1982 Burma Citizenship Law, local sources said. (EPA photo) The Rohingya Muslim minority live under apartheid-like conditions in Rakhine State in the west, needing permission to move from their villages or from camps where almost 140,000 remain after being displaced

Rohingyas wait for aid outside a mosque after the Friday prayers in Sittwe on 18 May 2012. (Reuters) By PressTV September 22, 2014 This episode exposes how the Myanmar government is practicing discrimination by not allowing aid into Rohingya camps. In Rakhine State in Western Myanmar, tens of thousands of Rohingyas are barely surviving in what have been described as concentration camps. The government is stopping aid getting to the camps, effectively leading to the starvation of many to death. The situation is aggravating. Rohingya Muslims account for about five percent of Myanmar’s population of nearly 60 million. They have been persecuted and have faced torture, neglect, and repression since the country's independence in 1948. Myanmar government and armed forces have been repeatedly criticized for failing to protect the Rohingya Muslims.

By Carlos Sardiña Galache September 22, 2014 The most controversial aspect of the census recently held in Burma has been the denial of the large Muslim population in Arakan to identify themselves as Rohingya, the term of their choice. The government ban means as many as one million people remain uncounted in Arakan. That is scarcely surprising, as the Burmese government, Rakhine ultra-nationalists and seemingly a majority of the Burmese population have denied for years the existence of the Rohingya identity. According to them, the Rohingya ethnicity is an invention devised by immigrants from Bangladesh to take over the land in Arakan. Few people have made more effort to deny the claims of ethnicity by the Rohingya than Derek Tonkin, former British ambassador to Thailand and editor of the website Network Myanmar. Mr. Tonkin has reached  his conclusions  after digging deeply in colonial British archives, where he has not found a single use of the term  Rohingya . His command o