The Stateless Rohingya Blog

By Jane O'Brien, BBC News, Washington Last year, Indonesia picked up 130 starving, dehydrated Rohingyas from a boat in its waters A prominent member of Burma's persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority has urged the US to limit any plan to lift sanctions against the country until the group's human rights can be guaranteed.

On April 14, Myanmar observes the New Year (Thingyan) through water festival (symbolising purification) and also the victory in election of the pro-democracy leader and chief of National League for Democracy (NLD) Aung San Suu Kyi (66), which started a new era in Myanmar's politics.

တိုင္း​နဲ့​ျပည္နယ္​ေတြမွာ တိုင္း​ရင္း​သား​ေရး​ရာ ဝန္ၾကီး​ေတြကို က်န္တိုင္း​နဲ့​ ျပည္နယ္ဝန္ၾကီး​ေတြနဲ့​ တ​ေျပး​ညီ လစာနဲ့​အ​ေဆာင္အ​ေယာင္ ခံစား​ဖို့​ ဆံုး​ျဖတ္ျပီး​ ျဖစ္​ေပမယ့္​ လက္ဝယ္ရဖို့​အတြက္ ဥပ​ေဒတခ်ို့​ကို ျပင္ဆင္ဖို့​ လိုအပ္​ေနပါတယ္။

သမ္မတ ဦး​သိန်း​စိန်နဲ့​ အမျိုး​သား​ဒီမိုက​ေရစီအဖွဲ့​ချုပ် ဥက္ကဋ္ဌ ​ေဒါ်​ေအာင်ဆန်း​စုြကည်တို့​ ​ေနြပည်​ေတာ်မှာ ဒီ​ေန့​မနက် ​ေတွ့​ဆံုပါတယ်။ ေဒါ် ေအာင်ဆန်း စုြကည်နှင့် ဦး သိန်း စိန် ပထမအြကိမ် ေတွ့ ဆံုခဲ့ စဉ်က တနာရီ​ေကျာ်ြကာြမင့်​တဲ့​ ဒီ​ေတွ့​ဆံုပွဲမှာ ဘာ​ေတွ​ေဆွး​ေနွး​တယ်ဆိုတာ မသိ​ေသး​ဘဲ သမ္မတနဲ့​ ​ေဒါ်​ေအာင်ဆန်း​စုြကည်တို့​ ​ေန့​လယ်စာအတူ သံုး​ေဆာင်ြကတယ်လို့​ အမျိုး​သား​ဒီမိုက​ေရစီအဖွဲ့​ချုပ် သတင်း​ရပ်ကွက်က ​ေြပာပါတယ်။

(Commentary) – For years, I used to say that I had hope for freedom in Burma, but such hope flew in the face of the facts. My hope was based on a belief that the courage of the Burmese people would be rewarded in the end, and that history shows that dictators do not last forever.

Christian Solidarity Worldwide has urged David Cameron to make the issue of Burma's ethnic minorities a priority during his visit to the country this week. The Prime Minister is to meet Burma's President Thein Sein and pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party won a historic by-election last week.

Chittagong, Bangladesh:  Burma has asked for necessary cooperation in the agriculture sector to increase rice output and we have accepted the proposal in principle to help the neighboring country," a senior official from the Ministry of Agriculture said on April 8. "It is just a beginning and both sides will have to sit for several rounds of talks for finding probable modalities before going ahead with the cooperation," the official said.