The Stateless Rohingya Blog

Myanmar's government pressurises foreign officials and aid agencies not to speak 'Rohingya' name, activists say. Rohingya were excluded from a UN-supported national census in April [EPA] By  AL Jazeera August 20, 2014 Myanmar's government has been pressuring aid workers and foreign officials not to speak "Rohingya" name, activists and UN officials say. 'How will the rights of the Rohingya be protected by people who won't even use the word 'Rohingya'?'' Tun Khin, president of the activist group Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK, told the Associated Press news agency. Khin said by not using it, governments are cooperating with a policy of repression. Myanmar's oppressed Rohingya Muslims have been denied citizenship, targeted in deadly sectarian violence and corralled into dirty camps without aid. Myanmar authorities view the Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, not one of the 135 officia...

Facebook has gained immense traction in Myanmar in recent years [Photo: Hereward Holland/Al Jazeera]   By Hereward Holland Al Jazeera June 14, 2014 Since violence erupted in 2012, Facebook users in Myanmar have fanned anti-Muslim sentiment. Yangon, Myanmar - A nest of laptops in a shabby downtown apartment here acts as the modest, but passionate, command centre of Myanmar's battle against hate speech. White flowers stand in a glass bottle on a table surrounded by volunteers sitting cross-legged, lit up by their computer screens. The group of young people work for Panzagar, a new civil society organisation dedicated to countering the tide of online vitriol with flower power or, more accurately, flower speech. "Now, compared to the military regime, we have some freedom, there is no censorship, and we can use the internet and write whatever we want on the Facebook," said Panzagar's Nay Phone Latt. "But at that time there are so many people who misuse the fre...

By  Hereward Holland Al Jazeera April 14, 2014 Muslim Rohingya are excluded from political representation as a result of not being counted. Myanmar's million-plus Muslim Rohingya population doesn't officially exist on government records. Branded "Bengali" and considered illegal immigrants, they've been living under systematic discrimination since sectarian violence erupted in 2012 in the coastal Rakhine state. In the past six months,  resentment  of aid groups has been building among some Buddhists because of charities' perceived preferential treatment of the Rohingya, who make up the vast majority of those displaced by the recent unrest. Many aid groups that once provided life-giving support to the Rohingya's squalid camps have either been banned or forced to flee, their compounds ransacked by Buddhist mobs. The mobs gathered after a UN-backed national census, the country's first in 30 years. The headcount officially began on ...

Photo: Reuters/Soe Zeya Tun By  Emanuel Stoakes Al Jazeera March 24, 2014 The Myanmar government denies the latest report on violence against the Rohingya minority. When news broke in mid-January this year of an alleged  massacre of ethnic Rohingya  Muslims near the town of Maungdaw in Myanmar's troubled Rakhine state, it elicited widespread international concern. Shortly after the story made headlines in international media,  spokesmen  for the government of Myanmar, by contrast, issued a different account of the events denying that anyone had been killed. Questions remain as to why or how they arrived at such a conclusion so quickly. Following this, a number of NGOs and monitor groups released statements on the incident: The  United Nations ,  Human Rights Watch  and  Fortify Rights  augmented earlier press pieces on the reported slaughter, all of which strongly indicated that  dozens had...

People try to calm down Ahmed's mother at a mosque, where the body of her young son lies. By Zigor Aldama Al Jazeera February 04, 2014  Displaced Rohingya Muslims struggle with persecution and Buddhist resentment. Sittwe, Myanmar -  A checkpoint guarded by three bored-looking policemen in the middle of a narrow road separates two very different worlds. On one side in Sittwe, capital of Myanmar's western state of Rakhine, people lead a common life: They're free to go wherever they please, marry whomever they want, and to attend religious ceremonies in their Buddhist temple of choice. Behind barbed wire on the other side, nearly 150,000 people are crowded into a dozen or so camps for internally displaced people. They are the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic group not recognised among the 134 official ethnicities of the country, and considered by the  United Nations  as one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. They can't leave the ca...