The Stateless Rohingya Blog

An elderly Rohingya Muslim woman sits outside her tent at a camp in Rakhine state. (FILE photo) By Dr. Habib Siddiqui October 03, 2014 The Rohingya people of Myanmar (formerly Burma) who mostly live in the western part – the Rakhine (formerly Arakan) state, bordering Bangladesh, are undoubtedly the most persecuted people on earth. Denied citizenship in the Buddhist majority country, the Rohingyas have simply become the most unwanted people in our planet. The nearby Bangladesh does not want the persecuted Rohingyas to settle there either. In desperate attempts to save their lives, many Rohingyas have become now the ‘boat people’ of our time! Who would have thought that in our time, some 68 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted by the world community to guide its behaviors and actions we would see so much of intolerance and persecution of peoples based on their race or ethnicity? There are 30 Articles of the UDHR, starting with

People shop at a market in Maungdaw, northern Rakhine state June 6, 2014.CREDIT: REUTERS/SOE ZEYA TUN By Jared Ferrie  Reuters UK Human rights groups condemned on Friday a Myanmar government plan that could force thousands of minority Rohingya Muslims into detention camps indefinitely if they do not qualify for citizenship. The U.S. and some other embassies in Myanmar had raised their concern with the government about some aspects of the plan, a U.S. official told Reuters. Most of Myanmar's 1.1 million Rohingya Muslims live in apartheid-like conditions in Rakhine state on the west coast of the predominantly Buddhist country, and almost 140,000 are displaced after deadly clashes with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in 2012. The government has refused to grant most Rohingya citizenship and refers to them as Bengali, which implies they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh despite having lived in Myanmar for generations. The Rakhine State Action Plan will requir