The Stateless Rohingya Blog

US President Barack Obama meeting with President Thein Sein of Burma at the Burma Parliament Building in Rangoon, Burma, November 19, 2012. (Pete Souza/White House) By  Rachel Wagley Foreign Policy Journal December 6, 2013 When the Obama Administration spontaneously lifted sanctions against Burma without conditions in 2012, it concurrently slammed the door on the bipartisan congressional coalition that had played a pivotal role in shaping US policy toward Burma for two decades. Congressional requests for the administration to rationalize its new, hurried, and improvised policy to “extend the hand of friendship” to Burma’s former military dictators have since been repeatedly ignored. But on December 4, administration representatives finally acquiesced to testify before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific on how the administration’s engagement policy will advance reform in what Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Steve Chabot (R-OH) called Burma’...

Displacement and discrimination continue to affect Rohingya (Evangelos Petratos EU/ECHO January 2013) By Rachel Wagley  F oreign Policy Journal November 25, 2013 On November 12, the United Nations General Assembly released its  draft annual resolution  against Burma, calling on the Burmese government to address 2013 “communal violence.” The terms “communal violence,” “sectarian violence,”  and  “inter-communal violence”  have become go-to descriptors of attacks against Muslims in Burma. Insofar as they are used to describe  specific incidents  during the June and October 2012 attacks in Arakan State, the terms are to some degree accurate. But the blanket use of these terms to describe  ongoing  anti-Muslim attacks throughout Burma is inaccurate and even incendiary. It normalizes the misconception that in 2013, Muslims as a community have been both victims and perpetrators. In Burma’s anti-Muslim climate, this misconcept...