Category: Rohingya Reports

UNHCR: We don’t want those Rohingya either, not our problem

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Too much of a hot potato for UN head honcho socialist and squanderer of our tax dollars Antonio Guterres also I see.

The gist of this story is that Burma’s (Myanmar) President apparently said to the UN—‘you take care of the Rohingya or send them to a third country for resettlement.’

From the Boston Globe:

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.

Clashes last month between Buddhist Rakhines and Muslin Rohingya left at least 78 people dead and tens of thousands homeless. The Rakhine consider the Rohingya to be illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh.

Readers the latest round of violence began when three Rohingya men raped and murdered a Rakhine girl.  Buddhists retaliated by killing Muslim “pilgrims” on a bus and there has been much rioting since.

Guterres, in rejecting Thein Sein’s plea, said this situation is not one the UN can undertake.

“The resettlement programs organized by UNHCR are for refugees who are fleeing a country to another, in very specific circumstances. Obviously, it’s not related to this situation,” said Guterres.

However, since the Rohingya are fleeing to Bangladesh (a Muslim country that doesn’t want them either), it strikes me as completely analogous to the Bhutanese situation (although that case doesn’t involve Islamist agitators).

Many people in Myanmar don’t recognize as legitimate settlers even those of Bengali heritage who came in the 19th century, when Myanmar was under British rule and called Burma.

Large exoduses of Rohingya to Bangladesh in the 1980s and 1990s because of persecution, and their subsequent return, also add to the confusion over who is an illegal immigrant.

The UNHCR (and mostly the US) did exactly what Sein is asking relating to the so-called Bhutanese who were really originally Nepali illegal aliens in Bhutan.  Bhutan wanted Bhutan for its people and expelled the formerly illegal alien Nepalis.  Nepal didn’t want them back, so camps were created by the UN and thanks to the Bush Administration State Department we now have tens of thousands of Bhutanese/Nepalis arriving in the US.  (We were going to take 60,000 over 5 years, but I bet we are over that number now).

Don’t misunderstand, I am not advocating that we take the Rohingya Muslim problem off their hands, I’m just pointing out that Guterres is being inconsistent here.

Thein Sein again:

“We will take responsibility of our ethnic nationals but it is impossible to accept those Rohingyas who are not our ethnic nationals who had entered the country illegally. The only solution is to hand those illegal Rohingyas to the UNHCR or to send them to any third country that would accept them,” Thein Sein told Guterres, according to his website.

Meanwhile, an Islamist pressure group is turning the screws on democracy advocate Suu Kyi.

The Organization of Islamic Cooperation is weighing in and demanding that Suu Kyi defend the Rohingya (from Democratic Voice of Burma):

The head of the 57-member pan-Muslim body called for the quick “return of the victims to their respective properties”, expressing his “deep concern about the unabated and continuous violation of Rohingya rights in [Burma]“.

In the letter, Ihsanoglu invited Suu Kyi to visit OIC headquarters in the Saudi Red Sea city of Jeddah.

Gee, while Suu Kyi is in Jeddah (with a headcovering) perhaps she could find out if there is truth to this 2009 story—that 3000 Rohingya are being held in Jeddah prisons.

New readers:  This is our 110th post in our category Rohingya Reports.  We have been following the issue for nearly 5 years and you should know that federal refugee contractors including the US Conference of Catholic Bishops are advocating for the continued resettlement of Rohingya “refugees” to your American towns and cities.

UN and US State Department pressure Bangladesh to take in more Rohingya Muslims

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

…and Bangladesh, a Muslim country, says NO!  Will we be next?

Here is more on the on-going battle for Burma (aka Myanmar) between the Buddhists and the Rohingya Muslims, from the Myanmar Times:

DHAKA – Bangladesh refused last week to open its border to Rohingya Muslims fleeing communal violence in Myanmar despite pressure from the United States and rights groups.

The impoverished South Asian country, already home to a Rohingya refugee population estimated at 300,000, turned away more migrants on June 14 and has sealed its 200-kilometre (125-mile) border with Myanmar.

At least 17 boats carrying nearly 700 Rohingya have been turned back on the Naf river that separates the countries since June 11 in the wake of violence between Rakhine and Rohingya – known in Myanmar as “Bengali Muslims” – that killed dozens in northern Rakhine State.

Bangladesh Foreign Minister Dipu Moni told parliament on June 14 that Dhaka was not “obligated” to host refugees from Myanmar, saying Bangladesh had not signed any international conventions, laws or norms on refugees.

“Some international organisations, some international NGOs and some friendly nations have requested us so that we open our border to allow their [Rohingya refugees] unrestricted entry into our country,” she said.

“I want to tell them it will not be proper to make this type of request to us.”

The United States on June 13 urged Bangladesh to allow in the Rohingya, described by the United Nations as one of the world’s most persecuted minorities.

[…..]

The UN Refugee Agency and New York-based Human Rights Watch have also called on Dhaka to open its border.

Why should we care about this?

I’ve been writing about Rohingya since 2008 and warning that the US State Department and its refugee contractors are building a case for us to take more and more Rohingya “refugees.”  The Rohingya are strict Islamists whose women are fully covered.  For those unfamiliar with Rohingya we have 108 posts in our Rohingya Reports category, here.

Hundreds of readers have visited this post from 2009 where we learned the US State Department had linked the Rohingya with a terrorist group, but now the State Department link to the report has been removed.

The drumbeat is growing to bring them to the US.

There is no sense trying to tell the US State Department anything, if you want to vent about not taking Rohingya refugees into your cities and towns, contact your elected officials in Washington—your Congressman and your US Senators.

Burma: Muslim Rohingya riot, burn homes, kill residents after leaving mosque

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update June 10th:  Fighting continues in Rakhine as armed Rohingya rebels continue to terrorize Buddhists, here.

Special note to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops—these are the “persecuted” people you want to bring to America?

From Eleven Media Group:

Eleven Media Group)- Dozens of Rakhine people were killed amidst the Rohingya terrorist attacks in border town of Maungdaw in Rakhine State, the western part of Myanmar on Friday.

Due to the violence, hundreds of houses and buildings were burnt down by mobs, said the reporter Ko Win Maung of the Eleven Media at the scene.

The death toll in the incident has reached 20 to 30 until the night of 8 June and the injured persons nearby villages of Maundaw Township have been taken to Maungdaw hospital.

The onset of the violence on 8 June was that the Rohingya Muslims who returned from the mosque yesterday afternoon started throwing the stones to the Rakhine houses and buildings in Maungdaw Township, according to the Eleven Media reporter whose house was also blazed amidst the violence.

As the riots could not be controlled, the police forces took security measures in the town where Muslims are majority and Rakhine people are minority. Rohingya mobs were setting fire on the nearby villages of Rakhine ethnics, said a Buddhist monk who resides in Maungdaw Township.

Readers, at the May 1 State Department meeting to discuss who should be resettled in the US, Anastasia Brown of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops made a case for more Rohingya “refugees” to be resettled in the US.  Is it the job of the US to bring every group of supposedly persecuted Muslims to our towns and cities?  Should the average American taxpaying citizen have to pay for the Islamic upheaval in large parts of the world by bringing the Islamists to their neighborhoods?  For what?  To help Burma or Somalia or  Syria (next!)?  To show we are good people?  To show we are fair by balancing out our Christians and Muslims?

Readers please focus on the word Rohingya and don’t let this happen.  We were asleep when these same contractor/church groups began the importation of Somalis, but we are awake now.

This is our 108th post on Rohingya since 2008, please glance through our Rohingya Reports category, here, for more information.

Update:  Here is the Reuters version of the riots, but it doesn’t matter who started what, the message for us is that we should let them fight it out in Burma!  We don’t need to be resettling all of the world’s problems into the US.

Buddhist v. Muslim violence erupts in Burma

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The gist of the story is that Buddhists were enraged earlier this week in majority Buddhist Burma (also known as Myanmar) when a Buddhist girl was raped and murdered supposedly by Muslims.  A mob of Buddhists then reportedly dragged eight Muslim “pilgrims” from a bus and beat them to death.   The suggestion is made that these eight had nothing to do with the rape/murder.

Why does this interest us?  Because when you read both of these articles, here and here (and there were many more), the reporters drag the alleged “persecution” of the Rohingya Muslim minority into the story even when a Rohingya leader said the dead Muslims are not Rohingya.  This is how the media keeps the Rohingya-are-persecuted drumbeat alive for western consumption.

If we find out who raped and murdered the Buddhist girl, I’ll update this post.   Actually one thing that puzzled me was what were eight Muslim “pilgrims” doing anyway, or were they perhaps Islamist agitators in Rakhine province to help stir up the locals?   This is what raised my suspicion from the BBC article:

Rakhine is home to Burma’s largest concentration of Muslims, including much-persecuted Rohingya Muslims, and their presence is often deeply resented by the majority Buddhist population.

In a joint statement quoted by Reuters, eight Rohingya rights groups based outside Burma condemned the attack on the Muslims on the bus, whom they termed “Muslim pilgrims”.

Although it appears those on the bus were not Rohingyas, the groups said the attack followed months of anti-Rohingya propaganda stirred up by “extremists and xenophobes”.  [Who else might be doing some stirring?—ed]

Here is one little nugget in the second article (from AFP) that I found interesting to explain some of the hatred the Buddhists have for the Muslims.   We have written before that some Rohingya rebels had traveled to Afghanistan in years past to fight with the Taliban.

Talking about hostility to Muslims in general, he said: “One day it will be a serious problem, they caused trouble in Thailand, Europe, USA. They try to make trouble in Rakhine State.”

Despite decades of isolation, Muslims have also suffered from the images of violence associated with radical Islam, according to a foreign researcher, who asked not to be identified.

He said Myanmar’s devout Buddhists had been particularly shocked by the destruction of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan* by Afghanistan’s Taliban regime.

“There is a feeling, a fear among the country’s Buddhists about being invaded,” he added.

Readers, I am not going to let you forget that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops testified on May 1 that they and the US State Department should be resettling more Rohingya to your towns.

This is the 105th post in our Rohingya Reports category, here.

*Dynamited by the Taliban in 2001.

Utah: Burmese refugee accused of murdering Christian girl is a Muslim

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Geez, I sure missed this one!  I’ve been wondering for years if the ‘diversity is strength’ gang in the US Refugee Resettlement Program had actually put Burmese Muslims (Rohingya?*) in the same apartment building as Christian Karen people in Salt Lake City.   Thanks to reader Melissa for spotting this lengthy story in the Salt Lake Tribune from right after the murder in 2008 of 7-year-old Hser Ner Moo that reports that the accused, whose case should be advancing in court this month, is a Muslim.

You really need to read the whole sorry and very sad story of the resettlement of these Burmese families in Salt Lake City by either Catholic Community Services or the International Rescue Committee.  “Mr. Tomorrow” worked (probably still works) for one of them.

In 2006, the U.S. invited thousands of Burmese refugees at Mae La to apply for resettlement. Cartoon and Pearlly signed up, believing America was going to save them. Their children would have a better education, and they would have the chance to work hard toward a house, a car, a more comfortable life.

But within weeks of their arrival in Utah in August 2007, Cartoon and Pearlly were confused.

They had been careful to ration the meat and rice provided by their resettlement agency, but now they were running low on food. They didn’t know how to find their resettlement caseworker, known by refugees as Mr. Tomorrow for his lack of follow-through. They couldn’t call for help because their phone wasn’t connected.

Gee, where have we heard that before?

Here, however, is the most important part of the story:

News of Hser Ner Moo’s murder raced across the ocean to Mae La [refugee camp—ed], where thousands of families believed immigration to the U.S. would be their salvation.

Some said her death proved America’s dangers. Perhaps refugees were sent to bad neighborhoods, home to gangs. Others worried she was killed because she was Karen. Some families skipped resettlement interviews, one of the first steps in applying to emigrate to the U.S.

The U.S. embassy finally posted a letter explaining the man accused in Hser Ner Moo’s death was not an American. He was one of their own, a refugee from Mae La.

Rage flashed through the muddy lanes where Hser Ner Moo had once skipped rope and played hide-and-seek. In the camp, tension lingers between the Karen and Muslims, and some choose to live apart. Hser Ner Moo and Esar had lived in separate sections of Mae La.

America had made them neighbors.

It is just as I thought when I first saw the story of the murder four years ago.  The multiculturalists’ myth is that decades of hatred and religious conflicts, more than a century in this case, can be simply forgotten when refugees are resettled in the great American melting pot.  Let’s put them all together and there will be love and understanding and religious harmony!—ahhhhh!

*For new readers:  I placed this post in my Rohingya Reports category, among others, however the ‘R’ word has not yet been used in connection to the alleged murderer (that I know of!).   You should know that there is an increasing drumbeat by the resettlement contractors, especially the US Conference of Catholic Bishops at the May 1 meeting, to bring more Rohingya Muslims to the US.