The Stateless Rohingya Blog

  By  Dr. Habib Siddiqui It is good to read Bertil Lintner’s latest article “The Muslims of Myanmar” in the Irrawaddy. For years, his misconstrued article in the Far Eastern Economy has been the only staple for pseudo-experts on terrorism watch in south and south-east Asia. It was a flawed article on several points. The most striking assertion being the so-called link of al-Qaeda with some Rohingya groups that have been vocal about human rights of their people. Based on my own research on this sensitive subject I found out that there was absolutely no truth to the myth propagated by him, which was based on secondary and tertiary sources. We can probably guess who were feeding him such mis- or dis-information at the expense of the Rohingya people and their legitimate rights. The fascist,  hatemongers within the Rakhine and Buddhist community inside Burma exploited his half-baked flawed thesis towards fear-mongering against the Rohingya people as if the mythical Mu...

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...

By Dr. Habib Siddiqui July 24, 2015 In Buddhist Burma, rape is increasingly used for genocidal campaigns against Muslims and other minorities. The state of Arakan had her share of troubles in recent years, all started with rumors that a Buddhist woman was violated by a Rohingya Muslim. Based on medical reports, Dr. Maung Zarni and I, including many other human rights activists, have shown that there was no truth to such allegations. But the extermination campaign that followed resulted in the death of thousands and the uprooting of nearly a quarter of the Rohingya and other Muslims of Burma. The targeted violence did not confine itself to Arakan but spread everywhere. Before the start of a new hate campaign, there was always some false allegations lodged against one or two Muslims to stir up the Buddhist mob to start the genocidal campaign against Muslims.  Last month, the crimes of the Arakan state were repeated in Mandalay - all with a false claim.  The news...

By Dr. Habib Siddiqui April 6, 2014 My attention has been drawn to Dr. Paul Fuller's article which has appeared in the DVB. Here below I share my observations. Throughout history there have always been people, even those who appear to be intellectuals, who justified the crimes of despots and ruthless murderers under certain pretexts. There were no shortages of German, Austrian and Italian fascist intellectuals who were not only supporters of the Nazi Fascism of the Hitler era but greatly promoted the evil cause. One would have thought that Nuremberg Trials and the wholesale condemnation of the evil ideology in the subsequent years and decades had put that dark chapter behind us, and no one and surely not the so-called educated intellectuals who teach at the college and university levels would be a devil's advocate. But our expectations have always been unrealistic. There are still evil geniuses around our world who are willing to act as intellectual whores and p...

By Dr. Habib Siddiqui March 23, 2014 In recent days, Myanmar government is carrying out a census in which the Rohingyas are excluded. This stance should not surprise us at all knowing the apartheid scheme of the rogue regime and its war criminals.  As I have mentioned numerous times, the racist Buddhists of the Rakhine state (the Maghs) don't want Rohingyas to be included and have been behind the series of pogroms dating back to the time of World War II when Rohingya Muslims were ethnically cleansed from vast southern parts of the Arakan State, forcing them to live in the northern townships that are near Bangladesh. It was no surprise that on March 16 of this year, there were widespread protests in Arakan (Rakhine) State against the possibility of the Rohingyas being counted as a distinct ethnic group. The Buddhist mob sentiment, as a result of years of hateful brainwashing, regards the Rohingya Muslims as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. They issued a demand for th...

Dear HABIB, I’ve been keeping a low profile for the last two weeks as I’ve returned to Burma to view firsthand what many are calling ethnic cleansing. But I can’t stay silent anymore — I am watching a tragedy unfold that is threatening the lives of tens of thousands of the most persecuted people on earth — the Rohingya ethnic minority in Rakhine State. Late last week, the government of Burma forced the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate organization, Doctors Without Borders (MSF), to close the doors to their clinics across the country. We responded by blasting the government publicly here in Rangoon, calling on governments with influence on the regime to apply immediate and forceful pressure. They did and soon arrangements were being made for MSF to reopen their clinics in all areas of the country — EXCEPT in the areas where the Rohingya live — precisely where the need is the greatest. Why? MFS was found guilty of telling the truth about attacks against the Rohingya that ki...

By Dr. Habib Siddiqui March 1, 2014 Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the Nobel Prize-winning charity group also known as Doctors Without Borders, have been operating in Burma (Myanmar) since 1992 under an MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with the Ministry of Health. The group has been giving health care to both ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims, a stateless minority who live in apartheid-like conditions and who otherwise have little access to healthcare. The internationally acclaimed group has also been providing healthcare in Kachin and Shan states, as well as programs across the country offering antiretroviral treatment to around 30,000 HIV patients. Since 2004, MSF has treated over 1,240,000 malaria patients in Rakhine state alone.  The stateless Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar are portrayed deliberately as Bangladeshis to deny them basic human rights and justify a genocidal campaign within this Buddhist country. As a result of a series of ethnic cleansing dr...

Dr. Habib Siddiqui January 25, 2014 The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations 65 years ago in December of 1948. The U.S. didn’t ratify the Genocide Convention for another 40 years. The late Sen. William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, took up the task in the 1960s of getting the convention ratified. He assumed it would be easy. But it was not. He ended up giving 3,211 speeches on the floor of the Senate, a different speech every day for 19 years, until it was ratified. It took two more years before President Ronald Reagan finally signed the measure into law on Nov. 5, 1988 — in a hangar at O’Hare Airport in Chicago.  After the Jewish Holocaust in Europe, the world said “never again,” but the list of genocides since then is long and sorrowful: Cambodia in the 1970s, nearly 2 million dead; Rwanda in 1994, 800,000 dead; Bosnia in the 1990s, 250,000 dead; Chechnya between the years 1994 and 20...

Dr. Habib Siddiqui January 20, 2014 At the Milwaukee International Conference last year it was noted with great concern that what was going on in the Arakan State was nothing short of genocide. The current events in Myanmar again confirm our fear. In a recently published article, journalist Dr. Ismail Salami of Press TV demonstrated how the 8-stages of genocide, first coined by Dr. Greg Stanton, are in play when it comes to the Rohingya people. He writes [extra phrases or sentences within the parentheses are mine]: 1) Classification: People are classified into “us” and “other”, the first stage towards sociocide and colonization. In Myanmar, Muslims are seen as the ‘other’ and therefore inferior. 2) Symbolizations: People are given names or symbols in order that others may tell them apart. This stage is not, per se, dangerous unless it turns into dehumanization. [The Rohingya people are called ‘Kala’ people, or Chittagonians or Bengalis - to symbolize that they are ...

By Dr. Habib Siddiqui November 26, 2013 An OIC (Organization of Islamic Countries) delegation, which included foreign ministers and senior officials from its member states Indonesia, Malaysia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Djibouti, and Bangladesh recently visited Myanmar. It was led by the OIC Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu. The OIC delegation pressed for unhindered access of humanitarian aid to all affected people and communities, including Rakhine (Arakan) State, without any discrimination. They also stressed the need for clarifying misconceptions and misunderstandings on both sides and for building mutual trust and interfaith community harmony. As has become the norm in this mostly Buddhist country that has come to signify the den of intolerance and hatred of our time, the OIC delegation was, however, met byangry demonstrators, esp. in the Rakhine state, which has seen more than its share of ethnic cleansing of the Muslim minorities. Some 3,000 protesters, led b...