BGB pushes back twenty two Rohingyas

Teknaf, Bangladesh: Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) arrested twenty two Rohingyas from different entry points of border and pushed back to Burma recently, said an aide of BGB of Teknaf.
“BGB arrested them in various raided while trying to enter Bangladesh without knowledge of Bangladesh authorities.”
According to sources, on October 8, in the morning, eight Rohingyas were arrested from the entry point of Taungbro-border by BGB while they were crossing Burma-Bangladesh border. But, in the evening, they were pushed back to Burma after investigating.
Besides, on October 6, BGB arrested another 14 Rohingyas from the border points of Shapuri Dip and Nilla under the Teknaf police station of Cox’s Bazar district after doing operation at border belts. .
“An arrestee said on condition of anonymity, “I cross Burma-Bangladesh because of persecution and harassment against the Rohingya minority by the present Burma’s ruling government.”
According to different sources, Burma’s border security force (Nasaka), police, and army including Rakhine mobs have been arresting Rohingyas rwith fabricated cases, killing and harassing many Rohingya Muslims since occurred communal violence in northern Arakan State, Burma.

Over 1,800 Holy Quran, Hadith books burned down in Akyab

Akyab, Arakan State:  Over 1,800 Holy Quran and Hadith books were burnt down by Rakhine extremists with the collaboration of security forces, at about 2:00 pm,  on October 7, in Akuab,( Sittwe), the capital of Arakan, said a local villager on condition of anonymity.
“The Rakhine also tried to torch the central Mosque of Akyab, but security force, especially military gave protection from setting on fire. However, the Rakhine extremists burned down five houses in the compound of big Mosque. They also burned down a big library of over 1800 religious books- Holy Quran and Hadith books.”

In the arson attack, five houses were burnt down inside the central Mosque compound.
The Rakhine extremists tried to set on fire of Dil Mohamed’s house, hailed from Ambala ward of Akyab (Sittwe) by throwing petrol gallons to his home, but luckily the family members were awake, so it was possible to put off the fire, said a local elder from Sittwe
The also set on fire a book shop which is established at the gate of central Mosque.
How the Rakhine people are allowed to torch the Muslim properties within the Act of 144, while the Muslims are kept in the houses like Daw Aung San Suu Kyi house arrest, said a local youth.
“We the Rohingya people protest this kind of atrocities by Rakhine extremists due to the emergency ACT 144, and we ask the government to inquiry the event of arson attack of central Mosque,” said a villager of Sittwe.
Some media stated that the fire broken out due to shock circuit in electrical transmission line, according to a teacher from Sittwe.
This action is concerned to the riots of Ramu, Bangladesh that damaged 12 Buddhist temples and houses.

The Rohingya: Unwanted at Home, Unwelcome Abroad

Amidst commendable progress in Burma’s democratization, one voice in the country has been consistently silenced. The Rohingya people are quickly becoming the ethnic minority whose fate will likely be remembered as a “casualty” of democracy – a type of collateral damage symptomatic of states that make the transition from military regimes to full-fledged democracies. In the shadow of Burma’s democratic parading, the fact remains: the Rohingya, a 500,000 Muslim-minority group based in the Arakan region, remain amongst the most persecuted people on the planet — having suffered extreme persecution and discrimination throughout history.

The persecution of the Rohingya is not a novel phenomenon. The Hmannan Yazawin – known in English as the Glass Palace Chronicle – is the standard account of Burma’s pre-colonial Konbaung Dynasty; it boasts the first reported execution of a Muslim man in Burma in 1050 AD. His name was Byat Wi, and legend has it that he was killed because the king feared his “elephant-like” strength. Byat Wi’s nephews also perished under the reign of Mo, Burma’s king.

The Muslim population has been persecuted by successive Burmese governments ever since.

The Rohingya were citizens of Myanmar until the late dictator Ne Win promulgated the restrictive Citizenship Law of 1982. This law declared the Rohingya “non-nationals” or “foreign residents” and excluded them from one of the 135 “national races” recognized by the Burmese government. Expelled from the army and precluded from practicing certain religious practices – for example halal slaughtering – the Rohingya’s political rights have been severely constrained.

Despite settlements in Burma since the 15th century, the Rohingya are effectively stateless.

In June, sectarian violence erupted between Buddhists and Rohingya groups, resulting in 80 deaths, and the displacement of approximately 100,000 people, most of them Rohingya. This includes an incident in which a bus was attacked by Buddhist villagers who killed 10 Muslim passengers. Human Rights Watch has criticized the government for failing to prevent the conflict, and has presented evidence demonstrating government involvement in violence against the Rohingya. As such, the Burmese government may be in violation of basic international law, known as jus cogens, which includes a prohibition on crimes against humanity. It may be argued that the government may be in breach of international human rights law, as well as other international law obligations, such as the UN Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials, which provides that law enforcement officials shall apply non-violent means before resorting to the use of force.

Despite the government touting its political reforms, and releasing Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the opposition, from detention, the tide of anti-Rohingya sentiment is clearly mounting. Thein Sein, Burma’s President, proposed a resettlement plan to relocate Rohingya to a third country – effectively engineering the mass deportation of an unwanted ethnic minority. Unsurprisingly, the UNCHR rejected the proposal. Nonetheless, Buddhist protesters led demonstrations supporting the mass deportation of the Rohingya from Burma.

The world’s response to these events has been disappointingly weak. For a group that has been labeled the "most" persecuted in the world, the Rohingyas have also been one of the most ignored by the international community. As one Harvard Law School report has noted, “the UN Security Council has not moved the process forward as it should and has in similar situations such as those in the former Yugoslavia and Darfur.”

Burma’s recent economic liberalization must be welcomed with skepticism. Despite the much anticipated new Foreign Investment Law, due for further debate in the National Assembly this month, what comfort can investors have if they know that the country selectively enforces the rights of its own people? In other words, Burma’s commitment to the rule of law has yet to be tested.

Not only have the Rohingyas been severely persecuted at home. They also find themselves increasingly isolated in and ostracized by the global community. Having no safe haven in Burma, the Rohingya have fled the country in the thousands, primarily to Bangladesh. However, potentially in contravention of its international legal obligations, Bangladesh closed its border and pushed many Rohingya back across the border. Bangladesh sought to defend its actions by stating that it has no obligation to provide refuge since it was not a party to the UN Refugee Convention of 1951 and its Protocol of 1968. But under customary international law, the Rohingya deserve international protection following the targeted death of hundreds, according to Human Rights Watch.

Recent events in the Arab world have raised many people’s hopes that this will be the decade democracy triumphed. Burma, with its own recent democratic political reforms, would at first glance seem to share in some of this democratic excitement. Indeed, Burma has skillfully crafted a compelling public relations campaign showcasing reforms highly valued in the West: the freedom of the press, the release of political prisoners, and the liberalization of its economy. But the international community should hold its applause until Burma faces up to its responsibilities to the Rohingya. If the democratic project is to be complete, the voices of the weakest and most discriminated cannot be ignored.

Lucas Bento is an attorney in New York specializing in complex litigation and international arbitration. Guled Yusuf is a lawyer in London specializing in international law and arbitration.

No end in sight to the sufferings of 'the world's most persecuted minority' - Burma's Rohingya Muslims

Nearly 75,000 of those made homeless during inter-communal conflict in June and transferred to temporary camps are living in conditions “worse than animals”, according to the Rohingya Human Rights Association in Bangkok

There is no end in sight to the sufferings of what the UN has called “the world's most persecuted minority” - the Rohingya Muslims of Arakan state, in the far west of Burma.

Nearly 75,000 of those made homeless during inter-communal conflict in June and transferred to temporary camps are living in conditions “worse than animals”, according to the Rohingya Human Rights Association in Bangkok. In some of the camps 100 people are sharing a single latrine, and many are reportedly falling ill with diarrhoea and fever.

But the camp-dwellers may be the lucky ones: according to Tun Khin, President of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK, hundreds of thousands more Rohingya in northern parts of Arakan state, where outsiders are not permitted to travel, are being deliberately bottled up in their homes by security forces and antagonistic locals. Meanwhile in Sittwe, the capital of Arakan state, fire broke out in the grounds of the centuries-old central mosque, allegedly started by the Muslim community’s enemies. The extent of the damage is disputed.

The ghost of General Ne Win still haunts the country he tyrannised for so long. Most of Burma’s 130-plus minorities have been brutalised at one time or another by the Burmese army during its half-century of domination, but the Rohingya is the only major one barred from citizenship in the Citizenship Law introduced in 1982.

For Ne Win, a Burman chauvinist who did everything he could to ensure that the majority community faced no serious challenges to its power, this was perhaps second best to expelling them en masse – the fate of 300,000 ethnic Indians settled, many for generations, in Rangoon and other cities, who were sent penniless to their “homes”. But the consequences of the Rohingya’s legal marginalisation continue to rumble on today: on 12 July Burma’s new strongman President Thein Sein, hailed in Washington in recent days as a courageous reformer, said he wanted the Rohingya removed. “We will send them away,” he said, “if any third country would accept them.”

The pogrom of Rohingyas in June, the killings and house burnings that drove 100,000 of them from their homes, caught the outside world on the hop, coinciding as it did with real breakthroughs in the country’s reform process. It occurred precisely as Aung San Suu Kyi started travelling for the first time since 1988, visiting Thailand, Norway, Britain and most recently the US, picking up medals and prizes awarded long ago for her humanitarian stand. Meanwhile the Potemkin-like parliament in Naypyidaw, mostly packed with military stooges elected in the grotesquely fixed polls of 2010, started behaving like a real legislative body, challenging the executive, holding vigorous debates. Democracy, it seemed, was beginning to find its feet.

Meanwhile a community whose roots in the country go back at least two centuries – the term “Rooinga” was first mentioned by a British historian in 1799 – and probably much further, was being targeted for the most cold-blooded attempt at ethnic cleansing since Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic bombarded downtown Sarajevo.

The uncomfortable fact is that these two phenomena – the flourishing of Burmese democracy and the brutal crackdown on a community long stigmatised as alien – are closely related.

In the by-elections held in Burma in April, Ms Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won 43 of the 44 seats it contested. These were the first fair polls since the NLD won a landslide – ignored by the military – in 1990. The fact that they were relatively free and fair showed that President Thein Sein recognised that if Burma wished to continue to improve its ties with the rest of the world, it could not go on fixing elections as it had done in 2010.

His problem was that in April the party he leads, the Union Solidarity and Development Party, the military’s proxy, was trounced everywhere it stood. If this result was repeated in the general elections in 2015, it would be swept into the dustbin of history. Somehow the USDP must tear the support of the masses from the grip of Ms Suu Kyi and her colleagues.

It has tried to do so in a way that is as ugly as it is effective: by appealing to the strong chauvinistic vein in the majority population, manufacturing (Rohingyas claim) a local atrocity – the rape and murder of a non-Rohingya girl – then orchestrating the vicious reaction. Thein Sein is now reaping the reward: crowds greeting him as a hero, monks demonstrating in Mandalay demanding the Rohingyas’ expulsion.

Aung San Suu Kyi – who was persuaded to enter politics by a Muslim poet, Maung Thaw Ka – knows that if she speaks out against the persecution of the Rohingya she risks alienating at a stroke the millions who love and support her. Thein Sein knows it too. Negotiating this conundrum and emerging with both the support of the Burmese millions and the respect of the world may be the biggest challenge she has yet faced.

ARU-DG SPEAKS AT THE IILO CONFERENCE ON OPPRESSED PEOPLE IN MYANMAR

A conference on oppressed people of Myanmar was convened by the International Islamic Lawyers Organization (IILO) was held in Istanbul, Turkey, October 2-4, 2012. Over one hundred lawyers from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Sudan, Qatar, Bahrain, United States of America, Great Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy, Malaysia, and several other countries participated in the conference. Additionally representatives from Rohingya community including Director General of ARU Prof. Dr. Wakar Uddin, ARU Council Member from Turkey Mr. Eyup Han, Rohingya Jalia leaders from Saudi Arabia Mr. Mohammed Ayub, Mr. Abdullah Maruf, and others, RSO leader Dr. Mohammed Yunus, ARNO leader Mr. Nurul Islam, and other Rohingya representatives from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Malaysia, also attended the conference.

On behalf of Rohingya community worldwide, Dr. Wakar Uddin addressed the audience with details of the current situation on the ground in Arakan, role of ARU in OIC’s engagement with Myanmar Government, and the importance of concerted efforts by the international community to help advance the Rohingya cause. Dr. Uddin provided some compelling evidences of ethnic cleansing and genocide against Rohingya, and the ongoing atrocities against Rohingya committed by the Burmese/Rakhine police force and the Rakhine mobs. He also cautioned that those examples are just tips of the iceberg, and the depth of width of the crisis in Arakan is much more profound than the evidences presented in the conference. Dr. Uddin has appealed the IILO, the Muslim Umma, and the international community to help the Rohingya people bring the perpetrators to justice at the International Criminal Court and other entities for the crimes they committed against humanity in Arakan. There were several new developments at the conference, and the details will be available at due course of time.

The Silence of a Laureate: Ethnic & Religious Tensions Rise in Burma

Anushay Hossain, Contributor (Forbes)

When I was growing up in Bangladesh, Burma’sAung San Suu Kyi never ceased to amaze me. Burma is right next door to us geographically, but as a little girl, all I understood about the military junta in Burma was primarily through pictures.

I just could not wrap my head around what kind of threat a tiny woman, with her iconic bright and colorful flowers, carefully and always tucked behind her ear, posed to these big men with guns. Clearly the military’s worries went beyond what Suu Kyi represented to them physically. This woman personifies the heart and the spirit of the long winding road that Burma has had to democracy.

In my adult years, Suu Kyi’s imprisonment was constant, continuous, and lasted well over a decade. Forced to be a prisoner in her own home, Suu Kyi was world renown to be a fighter for the core principles of democracy. Nobody embodied the fight for a people to choose their government the way Burma’s Suu Kyi did. And it is clear that “The Lady” is not done fighting even after her much awaited release in 2010.

The legendary former political prisoner, and perhaps one of the most famous hostages of our time, declared this morning her willingness to run for Burma’s Presidency stating, “…As a political party leader, I also have to have the courage to be president.” Suu Kyi went on to say that her political party will remove an existing clause in the Burmese constitution, barring her from the Presidency. Suu Kyi’s words signal a new era in a country which is still waking up from the tight grip of five decades of military rule.

Could anything be more politically dramatic than witnessing the woman take the place of the very regime that placed her under arrest, separated her from her family, and banned her from taking office even after winning landslide elections? Aung San is arguably one of the most romanticized political figures of modern times.

However, is it what Suu Kyi is not saying that may be most telling of the kind of leader she will be, beyond the borders of our imagination? In reality, how will “The Lady” rule? Burma’s ethnic minorities may hold some clues.

This summer, ongoing cultural tension between Burma’s Muslim population, the Rohingyas, who are denied citizenship and legal rights by the government, reached new heights as social media helped propel the issue to global attention. Human Rights Watch also issued a new report documenting the role Burmese Security forces play in the violence.

Religious and ethnic violence displaced almost 80,000 people from their homes beginning in June, and to make matters worse, neighboring Bangladesh closed off entry of Rohingya refugees fleeing the violence in Burma.

Burma’s President suggested that the Muslim minority should be physically moved out of the country, while the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, stated that Bangladesh cannot help the Rohingyas. Bangladesh has even shut off foreign NGOs from being able to assist the thousands of people trapped between two countries, in desperate need of food and medical services.

But it is Aung San’s silence on this issue that is particularly deafening. How can a woman the world has watched fight for her people against the might of a military junta for decades not have a word to say when an entire part of her country’s population is being violently attacked? It is shocking to say the least. It also makes us ponder what kind of leader Aung San will be, and exactly how different will her government be from the military rule that preceded it?

Why is the world being silent about Suu Kyi’s silence? This is where the politics gets personal and begins to implicate all of us. When I first mentioned that I wanted to write about how Aung San has failed the Rohingyas, many people were shocked that I would ”attack” a woman the world holds so dear. No one wants to hear anything bad about Aung San. We clearly have idolized this woman to the point of no return. We want to believe that the fight she waged for a ‘free’ Burma includes the Rohingya people as well.

It got me thinking that when it comes to women leaders, women in positions of power, we still tend to gender them. We do not want anything to taint the perfect portrait of grace and political sacrifice we have built in our hearts and minds of Aung San Suu Kyi. We imagined and worshiped her as a maternal political warrior, and that is how we want her to remain. Even if this can be a considered a positive stereotype, it still is a stereotype.

But staying silent as the war on Rohingyas rages on, as both the Bangladeshi and Burmese governments dust their hands of any responsibility is wrong, and cannot continue with impunity any longer.

There is no single figure who could draw the attention and create a solution to the crisis the way Aung San can. We have waited decades to see Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi descend upon what we all believed was her rightful political throne. She even won the Nobel Peace Prize while in prison for her people.

And it just may be the Rohingyas who hold the key to the direction Suu Kyi’s political destiny will go in. And too many clues clearly lay in her silence on the situation so far.

Rohingyas daily being killed with government support

(A)A Rohingya tortured and hung by Military and Bengali Rakhine Gang

On 8th October, 2012, at around 3:45pm, a Rohingya from Gawdu Thara, Maungdaw south, was arrested on the way back from mountain by military and Bengali Rakhine gang. He went to the mountain for collecting firewood. He is identified as Abdu Karim (F) U Abdu Gawfurr, 28 years. As he was severely tortured and hung, his life survival is in a critical condition. Similar cases have been being occurred throughout Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships, some of which are known by the community and some are totally unknown. Although Act-144 imposed by the central government in most of the townships in Rakhine State, it is implied only for Rohingya communities. According to the said Act, not more than 5 people can gather. Interestingly, Rakhines can even do demonstration with mass people in any part of the Rakhine State, which has been continually heard from broadcasting channels. That clearly shows that the Act has been imposed only for Rohingyas.

(B) A detainee died in Buthidaung jail

On 8th October, 2012, at around 2:00pm, one of the detainees, who was arrested in June, 2012, falsely accused for involvement in the communal violence in Maungdaw, died in Buthidaung detention center during investigation process with inhumane torture by government authority. He is Moulvi Haroon (F)xxxxxxxxx, 38 years from Du-Thanda (Hawns Sawra) hamlet, Thanda village tract, Maungdaw south. He is originally from Sittway and got married with a woman from the village mentioned above. The dead body was seen on a push-cart by one of the Rohingyas who went to Buthidaung jail in order to meet a prisoner. Many Rohingyas have been died with severe torture in Buthidaung Detention Center, but few are known. As far as the information collected, the dead body of Rohingya is generally thrown somewhere that is in hide from the public.