Monday 17 December 2012

Police Extorted A Rohingya Shopkeeper, Maung Daw


On 13 Dec 2012, at 3:00PM, Win Htay Oo, a police vice corporal went to a Rohingya shopkeeper Mohamed Solam s/o Kasim (27Yr) hailed from Nyaung Chaung village tract while he was selling his own shop (Shop no: 3C-13) in Maung Daw Municipal Market where the police threatened the shopkeeper saying that he is included in the FIR list recently released by Maung Daw court. He was also told to pay money 200,000Ks otherwise he would be arrested and sentenced for long imprisonment. The police extorted 100,000Ks from Solam.
  The FIR lists was released for those who were involved in fuelling on creating the 8 June 2012 riot by Maung Daw court but most of the innocents Rohingyas who do not know anything about riot are included in this list. Due to this list many innocent Rohingyas were tortured, some were even killed and were hidden and some were sentenced for 10 or more year’s imprisonments. Polices have been threatening and extorting money from Rohingyas showing their imitated FIR list in Maung Daw and Buthidaung townships since it had been released. They have extorted even those Rohingyas who had been away from the towns for days with legal movement permission before 8 June 2012 riot begun.

BANGLADESH: NGO ban hurting undocumented Rohingya

A hut of plastic and twigs erected by an increasing number of undocumented Rohingya refugees at the Kutupalong makeshift site outside of Cox's Bazar (Photo - © David Swanson/IRIN) 
Some 40,000 undocumented Rohingya refugees are being adversely affected by a government ban four months ago on NGOs working at two makeshift sites in southeastern Bangladesh. 
“If we get some rice, we eat. Otherwise, we don’t eat,” Anowara Begum, an undocumented Rohingya refugee and 40-year-old mother-of-four at the Leda makeshift camp outside Nayapara, one of two makeshift sites outside two official government camps for Rohingya refugees told IRIN. 
"Since the NGOs stopped coming our kids don't get medicine. They don't get treated for what they need. They don't get the food they need," Sokeya Begum, 39, another undocumented Rohingya, said.
In August, Bangladeshi authorities ordered three NGOs - M̩decins Sans Fronti̬res (MSF), Action Against Hunger and Muslim Aid UK Рto stop the formal delivery of humanitarian services, including health care and food to undocumented Rohingya refugees, saying such services would encourage more to flee to Bangladesh.
According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), there are more than 200,000 Rohingyas in Bangladesh, of whom only 30,000 are documented and living in two government camps assisted by the agency. 
Some 12,000 documented refugees live at the Kutupalong camp in Cox’s Bazar District, with another nearly 18,000 further south at Nayapara - both within 2km of Myanmar. 
Documented refugees are provided food rations by the World Food Programme (WFP), along with shelter assistance, non-food items, water/sanitation services, vocational training and supplementary feeding for malnourished refugees by UNHCR. 
However, most Rohingya - a mainly Muslim ethnic group who fled persecution en masse to Bangladesh from Myanmar’s neighbouring Rakhine State years earlier - are undocumented. 
UNHCR has not been permitted to register newly arriving Rohingya since mid-1992. 
Only those who are documented receive regular assistance, while those who are undocumented are largely dependent on a handful of international NGOs who until recently were allowed to work in the area. 
Poor living conditions
Prior to the government ban, conditions in the makeshift camps were described by Physicians for Human Rights as “among the worst they had ever seen”.
Most people outside the Kutupalong camp are housed in ramshackle huts made of twigs and plastic sheeting, denied food aid, and live beside open sewers, the Boston-based group says.
In its most recent survey, MSF found that global acute malnutrition, one of the basic indicators for assessing the severity of a humanitarian crisis, was as high as 27 percent at the Kutupalong makeshift camp, where an estimated 20,000 unregistered refugees live - almost double the emergency threshold of 15 percent set by the World Health Organization.
No further surveys have been made since the ban took effect. 
In June, the Bangladeshi authorities effectively closed the door to Rohingya fleeing communal violence in Rakhine State in June and October which left dozens dead and thousands of homes destroyed. 
"We are not interested in more people coming to Bangladesh," Foreign Minister Dipu Moni told reporters at the time, noting that Bangladesh was already a densely populated country and could not afford a fresh influx.
Government figures suggest 200,000-500,000 undocumented Rohingya live in villages and towns outside the camps, many of them in Cox’s Bazar, Bandarban and Chittagong.
UNHCR has repeatedly called on Dhaka to lift the ban, but more than four months on it remains in place, leaving aid workers reluctant to comment on the record. 
“The situation here is very bad, it’s horrific,” Shahina Akter, a local nutrition volunteer who asked that her organization not be identified, citing issues of severe malnutrition.
“Because of the ban, it’s harder for us to help the Rohingya,” another aid worker who asked not to be identified, confirmed.

Phil Rees: Ask Me Anything on Myanmar


Al Jazeera
December 16, 2012


Filmmaker Phil Rees will be on Reddit answering your questions about 'The Hidden Genocide'.



Do you have questions about the Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar?
Then log onto reddit.com from 2100GMT on Sunday to join the chat with film maker Phil Rees.
Phil Rees' film 'The Hidden Genocide' is a story of a people fleeing the land where they were born, of a people deprived of citizenship in their homeland. It is the story of the Rohingya of western Myanmar, whose very existence as a people is denied.
"When you see measures preventing births, trying to deny the identity of the people, hoping to see that they really are eventually, that they no longer exist; denying their history, denying the legitimacy of their right to live where they live, these are all warning signs that mean it's not frivolous to envisage the use of the term genocide," said Professor William Schabas, the former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
Phil Rees is a Welsh writer, reporter and documentary maker who has specialised in international relations. 
He has covered Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas during a 30-year career in journalism. He reported from Myanmar in 1991 and lived in southeast Asia for seven years.
He has won a dozen international awards, including two from Britain's Royal Television Society. For nine years he was a BBC foreign correspondent and senior producer on the BBC's flagship global affairs programme.

About Me

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Maung daw, Arakan state, Myanmar (Burma)
I am an independent man who voted to humanitarian aid.