BGP personal arrested a man at Feram Puru, Maungdaw North on Sunday for giving information to Rohingya media based abroad, according to our local correspondent.

Imam Hossain, s/o Ola Miah was arrested from in front of his house at around 10pm. BGP said that he was using a Bangladesh SIM card for passing fake information to media personal based in that country.

Many Rohingyas use Bangladesh SIM card to contact with their friends and relatives in the neighbouring country. Almost half a million Rohingyas have fled to Bangladesh following brutal persecution at home.

Imam was assaulted in custody throughout the night. He was released the next day on payment of 400,000 kyats.

Three more houses have burned down on Wednesday in Boli Bazar, Maungdaw, according to our correspondent.

The identities of the victims have not been confirmed.

Arson attacks of this type have been occurring in regular intervals in February.

In each case, a mysterious fire occurs generally from the stove burning down the entire house and adjoining ones within minutes. The government then blames the victims for setting fire to their own houses to discredit the Buddhist nationalist movement.

In some cases, the owners of the households are on the run, while in others wntire families live out in the open. The affected households are forbidden to raise new shelters, and others are strictly forbidden to house them. As a result, many including children and women are spending their nights without any shelter.

Myanmar, Abdus Sufi son of Shona Mia 42 years old , has on 28 Feb 2015 attacked and serious injured by the member of terrorist group of RNDP when he was looking after his cattle in the field .

By Hanna Hindstrom

Both government and opposition see bashing the besieged Rohingya minority as a sure-fire path to electoral success.

The Burmese government recently came under fire for back-pedaling on a pledge to grant the country’s beleaguered Rohingya minority the right to vote. On Feb. 12, the government announced the imminent suspension of all temporary ID cards held by over half a million Rohingya Muslims in western Burma, dashing hopes that they might be allowed to vote in Burma’s first general election in over 50 years, scheduled for the end of this year.

The proposal to grant the Rohingya voting rights — aggressively promoted by Burma’s ruling Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) and passed by parliament on Feb. 2 — had been seen as a flicker of hope for the stateless Muslim minority squeezed into apartheid-like conditions near the Bangladeshi border. But President Thein Sein quickly bowed to a growing Buddhist protest movement and withdrew his support. A spokesperson for the U.S. government criticized his decision as “counter to reconciliation in Rakhine [state],” where outbursts of religious violence between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims have claimed dozens of lives since 2012. The sad reality is that the proposal was never more than a cynical political ploy to harness votes for the military-aligned USDP ahead of the highly anticipated elections. The government’s rapid U-turn only exposes its two-faced policy toward the Rohingya.

Indeed, the military and its proxy parties have simultaneously suppressed and courted the Rohingya vote since 2008, when the military welcomed their support to help rig a referendum approving a controversial new constitution. In the flawed 2010 election, many stateless Rohingya were offered the prospect of citizenship in exchange for casting their ballots for the USDP, which subsequently grasped power in three Muslim-majority constituencies in northern Rakhine State. Once in office, President Thein Sein’s government quickly reneged on these commitments.

There are currently six ethnic Rohingya legislators representing the USDP in northern Rakhine: three at the state and three at the national level. These politicians, who took up their posts promising to secure greater rights and freedoms for their people, have proven troublesome for the ruling party. Shwe Maung, a Rohingya member of the national parliament, has drawn considerable ire for his unapologetic activism on behalf of his constituency. Last year a presidential spokesman accused him of “defamation” for implicating local police officers in an alleged massacre of Rohingya in the western town of Maungdaw.

Nonetheless, in 2010 the Rohingya vote was essential to the USDP, with nearly half of its legislators in Rakhine elected by the minority (while several more seats were obtained through electoral fraud). The USDP’s overtures to the Rohingya also provoked hostility from the Buddhist-majority ethnic Rakhine — another minority group long persecuted by the military junta — who mostly view the Rohingya as “illegal immigrants” from neighboring Bangladesh, and see the government’s courting of their vote as a betrayal of their state for political profit. Buoyed by hostility toward the Burman-dominated military, a nationalist Rakhine party (now known as the Rakhine National Party or RNP), won a majority of seats in the national and regional parliaments. The RNP and other Rakhine nationalist parties have since spearheaded efforts to marginalize and disenfranchise the Rohingya, whose plight became more acute in 2012, when religious violence forced some 140,000 of them into cramped, disease-infested camps. With its new influence in parliament, the RNP has successfully pushed through a law banning undocumented Rohingya from forming political parties.

As in 2010, the RNP now poses a significant electoral threat to the USDP in Rakhine State, where the ruling party is likely to lose most of its remaining seats in the 2015 poll without the Rohingya vote. This is why the USDP once again turned — briefly — to the Rohingya in an effort to attract voters in the region this year. This is not without a small tinge of irony, considering the government’s oppression of the minority, who Thein Sein has repeatedly threatened to deport from Burma.

Unfortunately, a tide of Buddhist nationalism has now made it more politically profitable to vilify the Rohingya than to woo them for their votes. Since the 2012 violence, the unpopular minority has become a rallying tool for both ethnic Rakhine and Burman political parties — boosted by a nationwide crusade to “defend” Buddhism against Islam. The government has never recognized the term “Rohingya” and has been accused of complicity in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the minority. President Thein Sein has even publicly defended the country’s most venomous hate preacher,Ashin Wirathu, who has likened Muslims to “mad dogs.”

Wirathu’s powerful Buddhist nationalist group, known locally as the “Ma Ba Tha,” has collaborated with the government to draft a set of “race and religious protection” laws designed to restrict the rights of Muslims. In turn, Wirathu has backed Thein Sein and warned against amending the constitution to allow opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi a chance at the presidency. This cozy relationship exposes the political value of exploiting, rather than soothing, anti-Muslim sentiments in the run-up to the elections. In this context, it should come as no surprise that the USDP leadership quickly abandoned its flirtations with the Rohingya vote.

The military, which has a long history of pitting the country’s myriad ethnic and religious groups against each other, has even less incentive to support the reviled minority. Since 2012, ethnic Rakhine have welcomed thousands of Burmese troops into the restive state to maintain security. The military’s role has been amplified by persistent rumors — often repeated by the government — that Rohingya separatists are now active along the Bangladeshi border. The threat of instability and violence may thus serve as an alternate strategy to boost the army’s popularity in Rakhine and defend its grip over Burmese politics.

Shwe Maung, one of the Rohingya lawmakers from Rakhine, concedes that the USDP leadership “may have another plan” in place for winning support in Rakhine. He says he feels “betrayed” by the government, and will not stand in the 2015 election unless temporary ID or “white card” holders are allowed to vote. This looks increasingly unlikely, as white cards will be invalidated from March 31, rendering their owners unable to vote under Burmese election law. As some 95 percent of Shwe Maung’s constituency are Muslim Rohingya, the disenfranchisement of its population could be devastating — not least if Rakhine nationalists secured his seat.

The Burmese government continues to push ahead with its controversial nationality verification process, which will require Rohingya Muslims to label themselves as “Bengali” in order to obtain citizenship. The few Rohingya who have accepted this designation have seen no significant changes to their standard of living, remaining confined to peripheral slums or displacement camps with limited access to education and healthcare. All Rohingya “white card” holders will now be obligated to undergo this process after their documents expire next month. Those who refuse risk deportation.

The idea of using the Rohingya as pawns rather than allies seems to have permeated the opposition party as well. Democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), also fought against the bid to enfranchise the Rohingya, with one of the party’s lawmakers dismissing the proposal as “inconsistent” with other legislation. It is not the first time the Nobel laureate has drawn criticism for her silence on the oppression of the Rohingya or Burma’s escalating anti-Muslim sentiments. In December, the NLD fired one of its leaders for making a public speech criticizing the proliferation of Buddhist extremism. He is now facing a three-year jail sentence for “insulting” religion. Suu Kyi has never spoken in his support.

Her silence has been widely interpreted as a Machiavellian gambit designed to avoid controversy ahead of the 2015 election that, assuming it is free and fair, her party is expected to win by a landslide. The upsurge in religious hostility — which has claimed hundreds of mostly Muslim lives across the country since 2012 — is seen by some as a manufactured attempt to fracture her popular support base. Either way, Suu Kyi – like her uniformed opponents — seems to have prioritized political cunning over human rights.

As Burma’s historic elections draw nearer, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Rohingya have little to gain from the country’s political transition, which ended five decades of military rule in 2011. Neither the ruling party nor the opposition has ever been genuinely interested in promoting their rights. On Wednesday, a UN human rights chief warned Burmese politicians against fanning the “flames of prejudice” to win votes in the upcoming poll. Unfortunately, it would appear that the besieged minority carries far greater political currency as scapegoats than as full-fledged participants in Burma’s fragile democracy.

The four innocent (Rohingya) women arrested in Buthidaung Township on Monday early morning were released later at night on bails and upon seizure of their respective family registration lists by the Border Guard Police (BGP), the local sources reported.

The Myanmar BGP arrested 18 Rohingya women as some of their family members were absent for the re-conducting prejudicial census at ‘Nga Ran Chaung’ village in the township. Of them, 14 women were released and four were detained in the lock-up until the late night. (Read the Earlier Report HERE)

“The women were harassed in the detention until they were released on bails and upon seizing their family registration lists around 10:00PM of the day. On Wednesday, February 25, morning, the families of the four women arrested went to the Border Guard Police Station for taking part in the survey of the census as per the forced conditions in the bail.

The BGP took group pictures of the three families but the whole family of Daw Halidah was forced to sit tight under the hot sun until 4:00PM of the day” said a local Rohingya asking not to be named.

Moreover, on Wednesday morning, a BGP officer confiscated the registration lists of the families of U Mohammed Toyub and U Sultan Ahmed on pretext of putting back their family members in the list that had been delisted earlier. Although in the evening, U Sultan Ahmed went to the police to have his family list back, the BGP didn’t return it, it has been learnt.

And they police and other departments in the census enumeration didn’t charge money at the beginning stage. But now they have started arbitrarily squeezing Kyat 5,000 respectively for ‘Delisting the Deaths’ and “Listing down the Newly Born Babies.’

The United Nations and Amnesty International have warned that Burma is backsliding on its commitment to human rights.

In it annual report, Amnesty said the human rights situation in the country has “stalled” while in a UN statement, High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said on Wednesday that Burma “seems headed in the wrong direction and needs urgently to get back on track”.

Criticism comes at a time when thousands of people have recently been displaced during conflict in the Kokang region of northeastern Shan State and during a period of simmering tensions between Muslims and Buddhists in the country following pogroms targeting the Rohingya community in Arakan State.

Over the past year, human rights abuses saw political exclusion of the disenfranchised Rohingyas, the shooting of protestor Khin Win at the Latpadaung mine, and the manslaughter of freelance journalist Par Gyi while in Burmese army custody.

“The international community has seen the transition in Myanmar [Burma] as a story of promise and hope, but recent developments are calling into question the direction of that reform, and even threatening to set it back,” Zeid said.

He warned that the denial of Rohingyas’ right to self-identification “should sound a clear warning bell” to the international community, and called for “a new democratic Myanmar [to be] built on the strength of its diversity.”

Supporting the decentralisation of military governance, he said thew ongoing civil conflicts in the country must stop, otherwise an impasse will be “tragic for Myanmar’s peace process”. The UN human rights chief added that “ensuring accountability for the military will be a key test for the transition.”

A day earlier, Amnesty International Secretary-General Salil Shetty noted: “This has been a devastating year for those seeking to stand up for human rights and for those caught up in the suffering of war zones.”

Shetty said that it is “essential to confront violations against civilians, and to bring to justice those responsible”, adding that it is imperative to have “true accountability and justice” when rules to protect civilians are violated.

“One obvious and practical step is waiting to be taken: Amnesty International has welcomed the proposal, now backed by around 40 governments, for the UN Security Council to adopt a code of conduct agreeing to voluntarily refrain from using the veto in a way which would block Security Council action in situations of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.” she said.

The Burmese military has stood accused on several occasions of violations of human rights that may constitute war crimes.

More Rohingya Muslims are on the run from after three houses burned down from an arson attack. This is the third such incident in less than a fortnight.

On Friday, as the jumma prayers were taking place at Hati para, Maungdaw North, there was a loud burning noise. Witnesses say that as soon as the congregation finished, they rushed to the spot finding that a fire was burning the home of Ladu, s/o Abdur Shukkur.

Within moments, the fire spread to the adjoining homes of his brothers – – Habib Ullah and Solim Ullah.

Locals allege the Buddhist nationalist group 969 is behind the arson attack.

When the authorities heard of the incident, they said that the three brothers had masterminded the arson to give Buddhist nationalist groups a bad name.

Earlier on February 8, eight Rohingya houses burned down at Garaita Beel, Maundaw North. Witnesses say there was the presence of an inflammable chemical in the stove of the house where the fire originated and the presence of suspicious Rakhine nationalists in the neighbourhood during day time.

The government blamed Rohingya Muslims for setting their own houses on fire to discredit Buddhist nationalists.

Then on February 12, four houses burned down at Saheb para, Maungdaw South in a similar incident. Once again the authorities blamed the victims for trying to discredit Buddhist nationalists. They are currently in hiding to evade arrest.