Economic development and “trust-building” were two key topics of a DVB Business Debate held earlier this year in Thandwe, Rakhine State, where panelists discussed the fraught inter-communal dynamics still bedeviling the state.
International Relations Lead Story News Refugees Rohingya
China believes that Burma is now ready to take back hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims sheltering in Bangladesh who have fled violence in the former Burma, the Chinese government’s top diplomat tells his Bangladeshi counterpart.
Human Rights International Relations Lead Story News
The outgoing UN human rights chief kept Burma under the microscope in parting remarks to the UN Human Rights Council on Monday, noting the government’s failure to cooperate with multiple probes into alleged rights abuses.
Burma is willing to take back all 700,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees who have fled to Bangladesh if they volunteer to return, the country’s National Security Adviser Thaung Tun said on Saturday.
Campaign group Amnesty International said on Tuesday it had gathered evidence that insurgents from a Rohingya Muslim armed group killed scores of Hindu civilians in August last year, amid a surge in violence in western Burma.
International Relations Lead Story News Rohingya
The US government’s aid chief urged Burma on Sunday to take “concrete steps” to guarantee the rights of Rohingya Muslims and to show sincerity in that endeavour in order to encourage hundreds of thousands who have fled the country to return.
International Relations Lead Story News Rohingya
The UN Security Council has urged Burma’s government to carry out transparent investigations into accusations of violence against mainly Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State and to allow immediate aid access to the region.
International Relations Lead Story News
China does not want the UN Security Council to tell Burma that credible, transparent investigations into accusations of violence against mainly Rohingya Muslims are important, according to proposed amendments to a British-drafted statement.
International Relations Lead Story News
Britain’s UN envoy suggests the UN Security Council could consider helping Burma collect evidence of crimes committed during a military crackdown of the Rohingya, denounced by the world body as ethnic cleansing after most recent bout of persecution of the Muslim minority last year.
International Relations Lead Story News Rohingya
The US government is conducting an intensive examination of alleged atrocities against Rohingya Muslims, documenting alleged atrocities in an investigation that could be used to prosecute Burma’s military for crimes against humanity, said US officials.
Seven Burmese soldiers have been sentenced to “10 years in prison with hard labour in a remote area” for participating in a massacre of 10 Rohingya Muslim men in a village in northwestern Rakhine State last September, the army said on Tuesday.
International Relations Lead Story News Rohingya
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Thursday “genocide” was taking place in Burma and he was willing to accept Rohingya Muslim refugees fleeing from it, though Europe should help too.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres expressed “shock” at comments by Burma’s military chief in which he said the Rohingya minority shared nothing in common with the rest of the population and that their demand for citizenship had stoked recent violence.
International Relations Lead Story News Rohingya
Crimes verging on genocide were being committed against the Rohingya minority in Burma, and those crimes bore “the fingerprints of the Myanmar government and of the international community,” the United Nations special adviser on the prevention of genocide said on Tuesday.
UN human rights experts investigating a possible genocide in Burma said on Monday that Facebook had played a role in spreading hate speech there.
Lead Story News Rakhine Rohingya
Burma wants to see clear evidence to support accusations that ethnic cleansing or genocide has been perpetrated against its Muslim minority in Rakhine State, National Security Adviser Thaung Tun said on Thursday.
Lead Story News Rakhine Refugees Rohingya
Burma has bulldozed the remains of Rohingya Muslim villages to make way for refugee resettlement, not to destroy evidence of atrocities, an official leading reconstruction efforts in the troubled northern state of Rakhine said on Monday.
International Relations Lead Story News Rohingya
Burmese and Bangladeshi representatives held talks about 5,300 Rohingya Muslims trapped on a strip of unclaimed land between their two countries and visited the area on Tuesday, officials and Rohingya refugees told Reuters.
International Relations Lead Story News Refugees Rohingya
Representatives from Bangladesh and Burma will meet on Tuesday to discuss the repatriation to Burma of more than 6,500 Rohingya Muslims trapped on a strip of unclaimed land between the two countries, Bangladeshi officials said.
Interview Lead Story News Rakhine
Former Thai Foreign Minister Surakiart Sathirathai, head of the Advisory Board to the Committee for Implementation of the Recommendations on Rakhine State, discusses the challenges of his new role.
International Relations Lead Story News
The United States on Tuesday described Burma’s denials of ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims as “preposterous” as it called on the UN Security Council to hold the military accountable and pressure leader Aung San Suu Kyi “to acknowledge these horrific acts that are taking place in her country.”
Lead Story News Rakhine Rohingya
Reuters pieces together what happened in the days leading up to the killings in Inn Din, drawing for the first time on interviews with Buddhist villagers who confessed to torching Rohingya homes, burying bodies and killing Muslims.
International Relations Lead Story News Rakhine
Burma told the United Nations Security Council not to visit during February this year because it was “not the right time,” Kuwait’s UN Ambassador Mansour Ayyad Al-Otaibi said on Thursday, adding that the country did not completely reject the proposed trip.
International Relations Lead Story News Rakhine
Veteran US diplomat Bill Richardson was pursuing “his own agenda” when he was asked to step down from Burma’s international advisory board on the Rohingya crisis, the Burmese government said on Thursday.
Over 100 Rohingya Muslims have crossed into Bangladesh from Burma since Wednesday, with the latest refugees saying army operations are continuing in troubled Rakhine State, raising doubts about plans to send back 655,500 who had already fled.
Two senior government officials over the weekend inspected camps being readied in anticipation of the repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees from Rakhine State, who are currently sheltering in neighbouring Bangladesh.
Rohingya Muslim insurgents say 10 Rohingya found in a mass grave in Burma’s troubled Rakhine State last month were “innocent civilians,” and not members of their group.
Lead Story News Refugees Rohingya
Officials from Burma and Bangladesh meet on Monday to discuss how to implement a deal signed in November on the repatriation of more than 650,000 Rohingya who have fled Burma since late August. But many say fear returning.
International Relations Lead Story News Rakhine Rohingya
Burma’s admission that soldiers were involved in the murder of 10 Muslims in September was an important step and the United States hoped it would be followed by more transparency and accountability, the US ambassador said on Thursday.
Rakhine State Chief Minister Nyi Pu has cautioned that Muslim militancy is a continuing threat in the western state, where a military vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device last week, injuring at least five people.
