The Stateless Rohingya Blog

By Emanuel Stoakes VICE News April 18, 2014 It’s been an abysmal year so far for  Myanmar ’s heavily-persecuted Rohingya ethnic minority. In mid-January, an alleged massacre of up to 40 people near the town of Maungdaw in the country’s western Rakhine state shook the community. Then the government of Myanmar — formerly Burma — officially denied the report, despite evidence to the contrary. In February, one of the largest providers of essential medical support in the country, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), was expelled from Rakhine after stating that it had treated 22 victims of the massacre-that-wasn’t. Consequently, there were 150 preventable deaths — 20 of those from women in labor — and almost 750,000 people “deprived of most medical services,” according to estimates  cited by the New York Times  in mid-March. The government, which operates from Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital city, attempted to justify the expulsion by charging that MSF had shown “bi...

By Danny Gold - Photos: Andrew Stanbridge  VICE  September 13, 2013 Internally displaced persons in the gymnasium that has become their home in the "district playground" IDP camp. Last month, United Nations human rights worker Tomas Quintana  was set upon by a mob  as he tried to visit a camp for Muslim refugees in the central Burmese city of Meiktila. “My car was descended upon by a crowd of around 200 people, who proceeded to punch and kick the windows and doors of the car while shouting abuse,”  Quintana said  in a statement. Yet Burma's government seemed relatively untroubled by the incident. Ye Hut, a presidential spokesman,  told members of the media  that Quintana had simply misinterpreted the situation. Apparently, the mob wasn't a mob at all, but a welcoming party of peaceful protesters who were trying to give him a letter and a T-shirt. A few days earlier, through no small amount of bureaucratic wrangling, the photographer...