Six weeks after a state of emergency was declared in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, targeted attacks and other violations by security forces against minority Rohingyas and other Muslims have increased, Amnesty International said today.

July 16
Francis Wade
AID groups have warned of an impending humanitarian catastrophe in western Myanmar as authorities attempt to isolate tens of thousands of the displaced ethnic Rohingya minority in camps described by one aid worker as “open air prisons”.

Aid has struggled to reach those affected by sectarian unrest in early June. The UN announced on Friday that 10 aid workers in Arakan state had been arrested, five were UN staff. Some have been charged, although the details remain unclear.

July 17,
As president of the Asean Inter-Parliamentary Myanmar Caucus (AIPMC), I feel it is important to express my deep regret for the failure of the world to react appropriately to the killing and persecution of Muslim ethnic Rohingya in Rakhine State, Myanmar.

It is also regrettable that the recent visit of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Southeast Asia occupied the attention of most international media while neglecting and thus tolerating grave crimes against humanity in Myanmar.

Date: 15/07/2012

The Secretary General of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, in a statement issued in Jeddah today, strongly condemned the renewed repression and violation of human rights of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim nationals since last June 2012 that has resulted in deaths of innocent civilians, burning of their homes and mosques and forcing them to leave their homeland.

Yangon – Aid workers are concerned about access to healthcare in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State, more than a month after communal violence left over 50,000 people displaced.

“Even before the recent unrest, there was limited access to healthcare for many in Rakhine State,” said Victoria Hawkins, deputy head of mission of the medical charity, Médecins sans Frontières (MSF-Holland), which has been working in the region for 18 years. “Now the situation is becoming desperate.”

A 2012 report by the Arakan Project, an advocacy group that works with Rohingya, an ethnic, religious and linguistic minority numbering about 800,000 in Rakhine, noted that the health indicators were appalling.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims are threatened by an increase in sectarian violence.

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.

Two months of horrific escalations of violence have engulfed western Burma’s Rakhine State. While the conflict lurches between reproach and revenge, the media seems to be at a crossroads between better reportage and being forgotten by the drive of the news cycle. The violence threatens to extinguish the tentative embers of hope that have been kindled by the last year’s incomplete reform process.