The Stateless Rohingya Blog

Minura Begum. Credit Nicholas Kristof/The New York Times By Nicholas Kristof The New York Times May 29, 2014 SITTWE, Myanmar — Minura Begum has been in labor for almost 24 hours, and the baby is stuck. Worse, it’s turned around, one tiny foot already emerging into the world in a difficult breech delivery that threatens the lives of mother and child alike. Twenty-three years old and delivering her first child, Minura desperately needs a doctor. But the Myanmar government has confined her, along with 150,000 others , to a quasi-concentration camp outside town here, and it blocks aid workers from entering to provide medical help. She’s on her own. Welcome to Myanmar, where tremendous democratic progress is being swamped by crimes against humanity toward the Rohingya, a much-resented Muslim minority in this Buddhist country. Budding democracy seems to aggravate the persecution, for ethnic cleansing of an unpopular minority appears to be a popular vote-getting strat...

By  Kenan Malik The New York Times May 19, 2014 LONDON  — There is perhaps no religion that Western liberals find more appealing than Buddhism. Politicians fawn over the Dalai Lama, celebrities seek out Buddhist meditation, and scientists and philosophers insist that Buddhism has much to teach us about human nature and psychology. Even some of the so-called New Atheists have fallen for Buddhism’s allure. For most of its Western sympathizers, Buddhism is a deeply humanist outlook, less a religion than a philosophy, a way of life to create peace and harmony. The Rohingya people of Myanmar take a very different view of Buddhism. The Rohingya are Muslims who live mostly in Rakhine, in western Myanmar, bordering Bangladesh. Early Muslim settlements there date from the seventh century. Today, in a nation that is 90 percent Buddhist, there are some eight million Muslims, of whom about one in six is Rohingya. For the Myanmar government, however, the Rohingya sim...

The daughter of Daw Aye Kyi, a partly paralyzed 94-year-old woman who was stabbed to death in the village of Thabyu Chaing. (Photo: David Hogsholt for The New York Times) By Thomas Fuller The New York Times November 09, 2013 THABYU CHAING, Myanmar — Paralyzed from the waist down, Daw Aye Kyi was too heavy for her daughter and granddaughter to carry into the surrounding jungle when a Buddhist mob stormed through this rice-farming village hunting for Muslims. Three men brandishing machetes and knives ignored pleas for mercy and lunged at Ms. Aye Kyi. Her daughter and her granddaughter fled. Several hours later, Ms. Aye Kyi’s body was discovered, slumped next to the smoking cinders of her wooden house. The police say she was stabbed six times. She was 94 years old.  Ms. Aye Kyi was one of five Muslims killed in the attack on Thabyu Chaing last month, a rampage that also destroyed more than a dozen homes. So far, in a year and a half of sporadic Buddhist-Muslim v...