The Stateless Rohingya Blog

(Photo: REUTERS/Soe Zeya Tun) By Emanuel Stoakes The Diplomat October 14, 2014 A new government strategy looks like a blueprint for additional ethnic cleansing. Late last month, Myanmar Foreign Minister Wunna Maung Lwin announced to delegates at the UN General Assembly that a long-expected “action plan” for Rakhine state, the site of the country’s most urgent human rights crisis, was “being finalized and will soon be launched.” The minister claimed the strategy was designed to ensure “peace, stability, harmony and development” for “all people” in the region; he urged the international community to “contribute pragmatically and objectively” to their plan so that a “durable solution” to the problems in the area could be realized. While this appeal did not fall on deaf ears, around the time of his speech revelations in the international mediathrew light on what parts of the plan might actually involve: a set of measures that risked worsening the conditions of li...

By Emanuel Stoakes VICE News April 18, 2014 It’s been an abysmal year so far for  Myanmar ’s heavily-persecuted Rohingya ethnic minority. In mid-January, an alleged massacre of up to 40 people near the town of Maungdaw in the country’s western Rakhine state shook the community. Then the government of Myanmar — formerly Burma — officially denied the report, despite evidence to the contrary. In February, one of the largest providers of essential medical support in the country, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), was expelled from Rakhine after stating that it had treated 22 victims of the massacre-that-wasn’t. Consequently, there were 150 preventable deaths — 20 of those from women in labor — and almost 750,000 people “deprived of most medical services,” according to estimates  cited by the New York Times  in mid-March. The government, which operates from Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital city, attempted to justify the expulsion by charging that MSF had shown “bi...

By Emanuel Stoakes The Independent UK April 11, 2014 This year looks set to be the most fraught in a long time for the already highly imperilled ethnic group       At the time of writing, Burma’s first census in over 30 years is drawing to a close. It was meant to have been the latest in a series of milestones affirming the nation’s steady progress toward democracy and away from its bitterly troubled past. Instead, it has become a high-profile fiasco; one that has underlined the burning issues that still trouble the country and threaten to drag it backwards. Chief among those issues is the plight of a persecuted Muslim ethnic minority in the country's western Rakhine state. Just prior to the start of the nation-wide population survey, a spokesman for the Burmese government announced that the ethnic group, who are stateless and regarded as illegal immigrants by both Myanmar and neighbouring Bangladesh, could not identify themselves by the name the...

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...

The Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar continues to suffer from violent attacks [Reuters]    By Emanuel Stoakes Al Jazeera Junuary 27, 2014 A UN supervised investigation is needed before more atrocities are committed against the Rohingya Muslims. Yet another deadly attack on  Myanmar 's persecuted Rohingya minority  made the news  recently, this time taking place in the village of Du Chee Ya Tan, Rakhine state, not far from the border with Bangladesh. It is the latest in a series of incidents over the past 18 months in which the nation's Muslim community in general, and the predominantly Muslim Rohingya in particular, have experienced violence at the hands of Buddhist mobs. I consulted reliable NGO sources and interviewed witnesses shortly after the event hit the news in order to assemble a picture of what may have happened. Brutal acts of slaughter were perpetrated, so I was told, in retaliation for the killing of a policeman by t...