The Stateless Rohingya Blog

By Nurul Islam, Chairman, ARNO May 01, 2014 The Rohingya people are one of the world’s most persecuted, voiceless and underrepresented peoples. Their longstanding problem is an ethnic, religious and political persecution. It is a manmade tragedy deeply entrenched in Burmese regime’s anti-Rohingya policies of de-Muslimization, exclusion, intolerance and extermination. Their aim is to rid Arakan of the Muslim population and turn it into a Rakhinized Buddhist region. Particularly from 1962 military rule, the Rohingya have been subjected to institutionalized persecution. The human rights violations and abuses against them include severe restrictions on their basic freedoms – freedom of worship, movement, marriage, education – deprivation of citizenship, summery execution and mass murder, rape, razing houses and destruction of villages, forced eviction, torture, disappearance, arbitrary detention, looting, extortion, forced labour, forced relocation, and food insecurity. On top...

By Nurul Islam KPN News Immediately after the two genocidal onslaughts against Rohingya and Kaman Muslims in Rakhine State (Arakan) in June and October 2012, random operations were launched by the immigration authorities, guarded by police and armed forces, to verify the citizenship of the Muslims – to verify who has the right to be a citizen of Myanmar, and who does not. The operations began quietly with no public announcement and the villagers were taken by surprise. They had not been told what the operations were for. Rumours spread that, during the process of verification, the interviewing officers would ask the Rohingyas some intricate questions and classify them as Bengalis with a view to deporting them to third countries as stated by President Thein Sein and Dr. Aye Maung, Chairman of the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party (RNDP), which dominated the Rakhine state government. So, the Rohingyas, who were discriminated against and victims of genocide, were ...

By Nurul Islam KPN News Du Chee Yar Tan popularly known as Kilaidong is a village 6 miles south of the border town of Maungdaw in Burma’s Arakan/Rakhine State. It is a farming society with about 4000 Rohingya people. During recent years a Buddhist Rakhine settler village with a police outpost was established alongside the Rohingya settlement. U Aung  Zan Phyu, a settler Buddhist Rakhine is the chairman of the Du Chee Yar Tan despite more than its 90% population is Rohingya. Buddhist extremists under him, time and again, carried out extortion, looting and criminal atrocities against the villagers in connivance with the police. Helpless people who complained to the authorities for redress and remedies were met with reprisals. These have been a regular phenomenon all over Rohingya homeland of North Arakan. According to the villagers, on 7 January, without any provocation, an organized Rakhine Buddhist gang had seized and looted a small group of Rohingyas who were coming ...

Mr. Nurul Islam President of ARNO PressTV October 24, 2013 Aung San Suu Kyi is lauded as an international champion of human rights, welcomed at the home of the British Prime minister but for Rohinghya campaigners, her attention to abuses being suffered closer to home has been absent. They say it’s not too late for the country’s most prominent opposition leader to speak up on their behalf. Myanmar’s military junta is desperately trying to be reintegrated in the international community. Activists say the visit of prominent opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi to London could be critical in helping to raise the issue of the human rights abuses being suffered by the Rohingya people. Whether she chooses to do so is another matter entirely.  The UN refers it to ‘as one of the most persecuted groups in the world and the hope is global attention will bring a halt to the rights abuses being suffered where scores have been killed and injured with thousands displaced. ...

BBC News: 8 March 2013   Burmese opposition party, the National League for Democracy, is holding its first party congress since it was formed more than 20 years ago. Delegates from across the country are gathering in Rangoon to set out new policies and to select new members for its ageing leadership. Meanwhile, the Burmese president Thein Sein is finishing his trip across Europe and will return home to a country whose recent reforms have been rewarded by the lifting of sanctions, but where ethnic populations are suffering violent assaults. Troops continued a raid on rebels in Kachin state in the east over recent months, despite the president's orders to cease. And in the western Rakhine state, tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have been displaced amid clashes with Rakhine Buddhists, violence in which some say the state is complicit. Lucy Hocking's was joined on BBC World News by Baroness Cox, the founder of the Humanitarian Aid Relief Trust charity and by Nuru...