The Stateless Rohingya Blog

Tomas Munita for The New York Times By  Jane Perlez New York Times November 7, 2014 SITTWE, Myanmar  — The  Myanmar  government has given the estimated one million Rohingya people in this coastal region of the country a dispiriting choice: Prove your family has lived here for more than 60 years and qualify for second-class citizenship, or be placed in camps and face deportation. The policy, accompanied by a wave of decrees and legislation, has made life for the Rohingya, a long-persecuted Muslim minority, ever more desperate, spurring the biggest flow of Rohingya refugees since a major exodus two years ago. In the last three weeks alone, 14,500 Rohingya have sailed from the beaches of Rakhine State to Thailand, with the ultimate goal of reaching Malaysia, according to the  Arakan Project , a group that monitors Rohingya refugees. The crisis has become an embarrassment to the White House ahead of a scheduled visit by  President Oba...

By Nicholas Kristof New York Times June 1, 2014 MRAUK U, Myanmar — AS we hiked on a bamboo bridge over a river, past a police checkpoint, by water buffalo, over abandoned rice paddies, and past a hamlet where 28 Muslim children had been hacked to death, word raced ahead of us. Farmers poured out to welcome us from two besieged villages that for two years have been mostly cut off from the world. One man, a teacher who spoke a bit of English, thrust a handwritten letter in my hands. Puzzled, I asked him whom he had written the letter for. He explained that he had drafted it in hopes that a foreigner might visit some day and transmit news of the villagers’ suffering. “Many people are by violent wound died,” the letter recounted in painstaking English. “Now our Rohingyas many people are homeless. We do not have home, food and living very difficulty. Now we are to the cage prison sent.” The villagers are Rohingya, a dark-skinned Muslim minority that is deeply resented ...

The body of Nur Husain, 27 was prepared for burial. it was unclear precisely what killed him, according to a western doctor who reviewed the four medicines that were given to him. But almost certainly, proper monitoring and the oxygen ordinarily administered by Doctors Without Borders could have saved him, the doctor said.  Adam Dean for The New York Times By Jane Perlez New York Times May 02, 2014 SITTWE, Myanmar — By the time the baby girl was brought to the makeshift pharmacy, her chest was heaving, her temperature soaring. The supply of oxygen that might have helped was now off limits, in a Doctors Without Borders clinic shut down by the government in February. A hospital visit was out of the question; admission for Rohingya Muslims, a long-persecuted minority, always requires a lengthy approval process — time that the baby, named Parmin, did not have. In desperation, the pharmacy owner sent the family to the rarely staffed Dapaing clinic, the only governm...

By   Editorial of New York Times December 11, 2013 Anti-Muslim sentiment in Myanmar is threatening to derail the significant progress the country has made toward democracy since the military junta formally stepped down in 2011. In June and in October 2012, rampages in Rakhine State against Rohingyas, a minority Muslim group, left scores dead. Tens of thousands fled their homes. In October this year, mobs attacked Muslims in a rampage that killed a 94-year-old grandmother, among other victims. A far smaller number of Buddhists have also been victims of lethal violence. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims have fled Myanmar, a Buddhist-majority nation. Most sought asylum in Bangladesh and Malaysia. Recently, thousands have taken refuge in or been forcibly displaced to camps within Myanmar where they are virtual prisoners. Humanitarian aid groups have been denied access to these camps. A group of radical Buddhist monks known as 969 and their de facto leader Ashin Wirathu are ...

A young Rohingya man bearing the scars of a shooting by Local Buddhists during the violence in June 2012. Photo by  Dougal Thomas . Hanna Ingber New York Times July 12, 2013 Myanmar’s Muslim minority has faced a series of deadly attacks over the past year that have tarnished the country’s image even as it is trying to transform itself into a stable, peaceful democracy after decades of military rule. As my colleague Thomas Fuller has reported,  sectarian clashes in the western state of Rakhine  in 2012 left at least 167 dead and forced 100,000 people, most of them Muslims, to flee their homes. Buddhist mobs went on a  rampage in Meiktila  in central Myanmar in March, killing dozens. And critics say a  radical Buddhist movement  has fanned the flames of discrimination, discouraging Buddhists from doing business with Muslims or intermarrying. The violence has raised fears among  Muslims in Yangon  and elsewhere that they, too, c...