The Stateless Rohingya Blog

By Danny Gold - Photos: Andrew Stanbridge  VICE  September 13, 2013 Internally displaced persons in the gymnasium that has become their home in the "district playground" IDP camp. Last month, United Nations human rights worker Tomas Quintana  was set upon by a mob  as he tried to visit a camp for Muslim refugees in the central Burmese city of Meiktila. “My car was descended upon by a crowd of around 200 people, who proceeded to punch and kick the windows and doors of the car while shouting abuse,”  Quintana said  in a statement. Yet Burma's government seemed relatively untroubled by the incident. Ye Hut, a presidential spokesman,  told members of the media  that Quintana had simply misinterpreted the situation. Apparently, the mob wasn't a mob at all, but a welcoming party of peaceful protesters who were trying to give him a letter and a T-shirt. A few days earlier, through no small amount of bureaucratic wrangling, the photographer...

NBCNews    September 07, 2013 Andrew Stanbridge Mamuda, right, sits with her two children next to the body of her husband, Nasir, who had been fatally shot by police after clashes in an internally displaced person camp in Myanmar. "I cannot stay here in the camp, I must go," said Mamuda, who hopes to flee to Malaysia. By Danny Gold, NBC News contributor SITTWE, Myanmar -- Driven from their homes by mob violence, many members of one of the world's most persecuted minorities face a harrowing dilemma: to tolerate horrendous conditions in sites likened to "prison camps" or to risk their lives  fleeing aboard rickety boats . "I cannot stay here in the camp, I must go," said Mamuda, a Rohingya Muslim, as she sat in a threadbare bamboo shelter, cradling her young children and watching her husband Nasir’s body be prepared for burial. "He came home with a bullet wound," said the 27-year-old, who plans to make the perilous more th...