The Stateless Rohingya Blog

A woman, whose new born baby just died, sits on a chair at a refugee camp on May 11, 2014 in Sittwe, Burma. 150,000 Rohingya IDP (internally displaced people) are currently imprisoned in refugee camps outside of Sittwe in Rakhine State in Western Myanmar.Getty Images By Gianluca Mezzofiore IBTimes Myanmar has laid out a controversial plan to offer citizenship to Rohingya Muslims, described by the UN as the world's most persecuted minority, in exchange for registering their identities as Bengali. Foreign minister Wunna Maung Lwin said in an address to the UN general assembly that an action plan will be launched soon and requested the international community to provide development assistance in the Rakhine state, where most of the country's 1.1 million Rohingya live, stateless and in apartheid-like conditions. "We are working for peace, stability, harmony and development of all people in Rakhine state," he said. But critics of the plan claim the...

 Photo: Ministry of Information/Myanmar Fire in Du Char Yar Tan, Maungdaw By Gianluca Mezzofiore IBTimes News January 29, 2014 Burmese police set fire to at least 70 Rohingya homes in the village of Du Char Yar Tan, where at least 48  Muslims were said to have been killed  by a Buddhist mob amid renewed sectarian violence, it has been claimed. Two eyewitnesses said that police burnt down the houses overnight. The village has been semi-deserted after the mob violence a week ago. Two hundred villagers were allowed to return in the area in the remote Maungdaw township in Rakhine state.  "We are calling for an international investigation. Without protection, more Rohingya will die," Tun Khin, human rights activist and president of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation in the UK, told  IBTimes UK . The Ministry of Information  confirmed the incident on Facebook  but blamed Muslim villagers who "burned their own homes". ...