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.

(Washington, DC – July 12, 2012) The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) expresses its profound concern about the current violence against members of the Rohingya Muslim community, which have long experienced great hardship and oppression in their home country of Myanmar.  In addition, Rohingya Muslims require government permission to marry, are forbidden from having more than two children per family, and are subjected to modern-day slavery through forced labor.  Because the national government denies them the right to citizenship in their homeland, many Rohingyas have their land confiscated and they are restricted from travel.

Aid workers have warned of an impending humanitarian catastrophe in western Burma 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, as abusive treatment by Burmese authorities continues. The UN announced on Friday that 10 aid workers in Arakan state had been arrested, five of whom were UN staff. Some have been charged, although the details remain unclear.

2012-07-13
The Southeast Asian body vows to monitor the plight of the ethnic group unwanted in Burma and Bangladesh.
The head of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) raised the issue of the Rohingyas with the top diplomats of Burma and Bangladesh on Friday, vowing to monitor the Muslim ethnic group unwanted by both countries.

July 12, 2012
By MOSHAHIDA SULTANA RITU

Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh

LAST spring, a flowering of democracy in Myanmar mesmerized the world. But now, three months after the democracy activist Daw Aung San Suu Kyi won a parliamentary seat, and a month after she traveled to Oslo to belatedly receive the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, an alarm bell is ringing in Myanmar. In the villages of Arakan State, near the Bangladeshi border, a pogrom against a population of Muslims called the Rohingyas began in June. It is the ugly side of Myanmar’s democratic transition — a rotting of the flower, even as it seems to bloom.

Updated 10:25 a.m., Friday, July 13, 2012

SIEM REAP, Cambodia (AP) — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton declared Myanmar open to American investment Friday, introducing the reformist president to leaders of some of the U.S.’s biggest corporations and still prodding him to do more to expand democracy in his long-reclusive country.

Following the Obama administration’s recent loosening of sanctions against Myanmar, Clinton met President Thein Sein for an hour in the Cambodian city of Siem Reap, praising him for several pro-democracy reforms while suggesting more could still be done.

YANGON, Myanmar — The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees on Thursday rejected a suggestion by Myanmar’s president that the world body resettle or take care of ethnic Rohingyas who have settled in the Southeast Asian country.
UNHCR chief Antonio Guterres told reporters it was not his agency’s job to resettle the Rohingya, who live in western Myanmar but without Myanmar citizenship.
On his website, President Thein Sein said he told Guterres in a meeting Wednesday that the solution to ethnic enmity in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state was to either send the Rohingya to a third country or have the UNHCR look after them.

Published: 12/07/2012 at 04:48 PM

Myanmar’s president Thursday told the UN that refugee camps or deportation was the “solution” for nearly a million Rohingya Muslims in the wake of communal unrest in the west of the country.

Myanmar’s president Thursday told the UN that refugee camps or deportation was the “solution” for nearly a million Rohingya Muslims in the wake of communal unrest in the west of the country.