The Host Country Narrative – The Burdensome, Economic Migrant Rohingya

Bangladesh is the primary proponent of the host country narrative which Malaysia, Thailand and other countries also buy into. It holds that the Rohingya are both victim and opportunist and always a burden and a security threat. This narrative recognises that the Rohingya face discrimination – even persecution inside Burma, but also labels those who have fled persecution as opportunistic economic migrants who impose undue pressures on job markets and social structures. This is a narrative of convenience which empathises with the suffering of the Rohingya as long as they remain inside Burma but vilifies those very same Rohingya who seek refuge on their shores. Its contradictions have led to confused and conflicting attitudes and policies. In Bangladesh, a small number (less than 30,000) of Rohingya are recognised as refugees, a much larger group (over 300,000) who share the same characteristics are viewed as economic migrants. Both groups are seen as burdens to already stretched state resources and as threats to national security. In Malaysia, the UNHCR is allowed to register the Rohingya but not to protect them as refugees.

The Burmese Narrative – The Illegal, Unwanted Migrant Bengali

Let’s begin with the most repellent narrative – the Rohingya are illegal immigrants; land stealing encroachers; criminals who procreate like rabbits; dark skinned and ugly. In this view they certainly do not belong in Burma. In fact, this narrative posits that the term ‘Rohingya’ is a fiction – they are all ‘Bengali’. This racist, totally unfounded and hate-inciting position is that of the Burmese regime. It is a narrative that is shared by many Burmese, including leaders of the democratic movement and those who have never seen a Rohingya in their lives. Dating back decades, it has been used to justify acute discrimination, exclusion, abuse and violence against the Rohingya. The power of this narrative is such that in 1982 it was the basis upon which the Rohingya were stripped of their nationality. They were thus rendered stateless, which means that they are not considered as nationals by any State under the operation of its law.

No rights for stateless Rohingya fleeing Burma Arakan

By Melanie Teff, Refugees International Washington, D.C. -

There are around 12 million people worldwide who lack citizenship and basic rights in the country in which they live. This stateless status often keeps children from attending school and condemns families to poverty. And it can be particularly hard on women – a fact that I had reinforced to me on a recent trip to Malaysia.

 In February, I and a colleague travelled to Malaysia and Bangladesh to assess the needs of the Rohingya population – a Muslim ethnic minority group from western Burma.

The Rohingya have no rights in Burma, and their lives are made impossible by such practices as forced labor, displacement and systematic physical assault and rape. They are not allowed to marry or travel to other villages unless they pay prohibitively high taxes.

Rohingya Muslim population, Human Rights said today.

(New York) – Burmese security forces have responded to sectarian violence in northern Arakan State with mass arrests and unlawful force against the Rohingya Muslim population, Human Rights Watch said today. Local police, the military, and a border security force known as Nasaka have committed numerous abuses in predominantly Muslim townships while combating the violence between the Rohingya and ethnic Arakan, who are predominantly Buddhist, that broke out in early June 2012.

Hundreds of thousands of Kiling Rohingya Muslims Book Of World Record

Will the people of Myanmar soon have their own derivative for the Nazi term Judenrein? For those who do not know what Judenrein means, it literally translates to "free of Jews", and was the term used by the Nazi administration when they had removed entire Jewish communities from Germany in the lead up to the Holocaust.

As so many Myanma shamelessly support the government and local authorities’ ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people from Western Myanmar, it might not be too long until we see "human rights defenders", and "political activists" running around the streets of Myanmar shouting: Rohingya-Kin-Zone ["Rohingya-clean area"]) or Bangali-ma-shi ["No Bangladeshis"].

Betrayed: Aung San Suu Kyi and the persecuted Rohingya of Burma

The poster girl of the pro-democracy movement, Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, was this month touring Europe in the latest move to normalize Burma’s relationship with the West and remove the pariah status it has lived with for many decades. Suu Kyi spent almost two decades under house arrest in Burma as a political prisoner until November 2010 when she was released following the victory of the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) in the first elections in Burma in 20 years. The USDP is seen as simply an extension of the military junta but it has introduced a number of reforms including the freeing of hundreds of political prisoners, the passing of labour laws allowing trade unions, and the signing a law allowing peaceful demonstrations for the first time. This year, the new government signed separate ceasefires with rebels of the Karen and Shan ethnic group and ordered the ordered the military to stop operations against ethnic Kachin rebels in the North. Such reforms have resulted in the lifting of all non-military sanctions by the EU and visits from a number of foreign dignitaries including US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (the first by a senior US official in 50 years), British Foreign Secretary William Hague, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. In April this year, David Cameron became the first Western head of state to visit the country since the military seized power in 1962.

Myanmar ဒု သမၼတဥပေဒအရ ေရြးခ်ယ္

လစ္လပ္သြားေသာ ဒု သမၼတ ဦးတင္ေအာင္ျမင့္ဦး ေနရာအတြက္ ရန္ကုန္တိုင္း ၀န္ႀကီးခ်ဳပ္ ဦးျမင့္ေဆြကို တပ္မေတာ္သား ကုိယ္ စားလွယ္မ်ားက ေရြးခ်ယ္လိုက္ေၾကာင္း သတင္းရရွိသည္။