Category: Rohingya Reports

Burmese champion of human rights silent on Rohingya

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Aung San Suu Kyi is not supporting the Rohingyas.

For some of you, this article from the Times of India about Rohingya Muslims demanding resettlement in India may be getting too deep into the weeds, but I am posting this so that my Rohingya Reports category is kept up to date. 102 posts so far!   LOL!  I’m developing the background history for future reference when something goes wrong as the US continues to resettle Rohingya.

After many column inches of sob story, we get to this section of the Times of India report about the terror connections of some Rohingya and how some were trained in Afghanistan.

But many suspect a “hand” behind them. Their synchronized appearance, apparently out of thin air from across the country, led to a question in the Rajya Sabha with BJP’s Balbir Punj objecting to their remaining in the country and demanding a probe to identify the “organizer”. After a monthlong standoff from April between the Indian government, UNHCR and the protesters, they were given permission to stay in the country till 2015 pending a series of verifications by sundry agencies.

Alongside, a strident letter to the PM and all-who-matter from VHP leader Praveen Togadia has demanded the Rohingyas be thrown out as they were a “security risk”. Togadia, whose letter and a series of attachments are available online refers to a 2005 paper by security analyst B Raman. The paper says the Bangladesh wing of HUJI recruited a “number of Rohingya Muslims” and took them “to Afghanistan to fight Soviet and Afghan troops” in the 1980s. The VHP’s note on Raman’s paper names “24 Bangladeshi/ Rohingya mujahideen” who died during the Afghanistan jihad.

Raman also mentions that a Rohingya group is “projecting itself as HUJI Myanmar”.
The Burmese regimes accuse them of being Bangladeshi infiltrators. One of the main attacks is to red-flag the bogey of Islamization of Myanmar via these ‘Bangladeshi Muslim infiltrators’. In Bangladesh, where lakhs have taken shelter, they are called Burmese. “Where do I go?” asks Khin.

In India, the call to throw out the Rohingyas is also based on reports of a number of such Muslims joining terror outfits. How much is the security risk from shelterless people mired in misery? B Raman says, “We don’t know their background. We don’t know who they were in contact with. One has to be cautious.” One of the reasons, says Raman, that Aung San Suu Kyi is not supporting the Rohingyas is because of certain Rohingya groups’ actions against the Burmese army. “While she is talking about some ethnic groupings, she has stayed quiet on the Rohingya,” says Raman, adding that they should simply be repatriated.

Maybe the Indian Rohingya illegal aliens should call the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and ask for help—after all they are pushing for more Rohingya immigration to America.  They want to show how open and with-it they are to bring Muslims to the US.   By the way, you know that murder case in Utah where a “Burmese” refugee killed a little Christian refugee girl, a reader tells me that he is Muslim, but I am still waiting to see that in print somewhere.

Rohingya connection to terrorist groups being searched here at RRW

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Just an interesting bit of information I noticed yesterday in looking at our stats—-lots of people are looking at a 2009 post about the State Department having identified Burmese Rohingya people as being connected to Islamic terrorist groups.   For some reason that three-year-old post is getting a lot of attention.   Unfortunately, the State Department has removed the link for the terrorist group list.

There is another post in 2009 here that also mentions the Rohingya connection to Islamic extremists.

As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve written over 100 posts on the Rohingya, categorized here.  My primary interest over the years was whether we would bring Rohingya refugees to the US, but now that we are and no one is paying attention it doesn’t matter much (until something goes wrong!).

By the way, several of those testifying at the May 1 State Department meeting were pushing Rohingya resettlement, including Anastasia Brown, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops representative.

An afterthought:  I have New Hampshire on my mind (next post) and I wonder if NH got its contingent of Rohingya this past year?

Rohingya Muslims pushing into India, want refugee status; already in the US

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that US federal refugee contractors and lobbyists are pushing for more Rohingya Muslim refugee resettlement into the US.   Here both the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Refugee Council USA (the lobbying arm of the refugee industry) asked for more Rohingya at the May 1 US State Department meeting.

You know the Rohingya drumbeat has begun in earnest when the New York Times trumpets their plight in a feature story, here.   You need to read about how Rohingya are arriving in New Delhi by the thousands and are squatting on “community land” described as Muslim land?

By the way, note that the New York Times reporter wrote 25 paragraphs before getting to the issue of the Rohingya’s “religion” and thus why the heightened concern about their influx.  Remember Mumbai.

Asad Ghazi Ansari, the president of the nongovernmental organization Nawa-e-Haque, which has been helping the Rohingyas with food and medicine, said that most of the Rohingyas returned from where the police had left them.

On Wednesday, about 500 of them had assembled in Batla House, in the Okhla neighborhood in south Delhi, on what Mr. Ansari called “community land,” which meant that the land belonged to members of the Muslim community.

He said that his organization is making arrangements to get the other Rohingya together and set up another makeshift camp for them at Batla House.

Meanwhile, the Indian Parliament discussed the growing problem (and much to my surprise India has never signed the UN Convention on Refugees).   Here is the nub of the argument and I am sure it is one our very own US Conference of Catholic Bishops uses—it isn’t fair if we resettle Christians (as in the Burmese Karen people we have been resettling by the tens of thousands) if we don’t also give fair treatment to Muslims.    Here the USCCB and the Communist Party of India are on the same page!

Another member of Parliament, Sitaram Yechury of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), told the home minister: “If people from other religions have been allowed and Muslims have been denied, then it is very unfair.”

For new readers, I have been writing about Rohingya since January 2008.  We now have over 100 posts in our Rohingya Reports category.  Be sure to see the one about resettling Rohingya in New Hampshire!  The United States did not resettle Rohingya until the last few years because there was adequate proof that certain Islamic terror groups had infiltrated Rohingya camps.  However, it is important that you see this post I wrote in 2010 where we learned that American Muslim advocacy groups are also pushing that Rohingya be resettled.  They are already also being resettled throughout Europe and Canada.

We learned from Dan Kosten of the Refugee Council USA on May 1 that Bangladesh is holding up the processing of Rohingya out of Bangladesh, so I will bet you a buck Islamists and refugee advocates are pushing Rohingya into India.  Watch for it!  We will soon be bringing Rohingya directly from India (a safe country if they are true refugees!) just as we are now doing with Malta—-we are taking illegal alien problems off the hands of some countries that need to deal with their economic migrant problems themselves!

Recap of the State Department meeting on refugee admissions for FY2013

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I hope no one out there has been holding their breath waiting for my report from the May 1 meeting in Arlington!   Primarily I am delayed in writing this because I was so blown away by the large amount of testimony sent in by some of you and others (I’ve never heard of) that I didn’t know where to start this report!

Much to my surprise, critics of the program sent more comments, by far! than the professional resettlers looking for more business with the government.   We are compiling those comments in Pdf format and hope to have links for you soon (the State Department is not going to make them available, but we will since they were made public for the meeting attendees).   The Refugee Resettlement program has stayed under the radar for so long because of things like this—no reporters present and the statements not distributed to the general public.

Here is what I’m going to do.  First give you a little sense of the meeting now and then in the days and weeks to come I will report on the various testimony received.   This post and all posts on the meeting will be in the category on the side bar entitled, “Testimony for 5/1/2012 State Department meeting.”  At this writing there are four other posts there.

The meeting whose purpose is to begin to determine how many refugees would be “welcomed” to America in FY2013 by President Barack Obama (in a formal letter to Congress in September) was held in a small room on the 11th floor of an Arlington, VA high rise building.  The meeting is obviously geared to those who have salaried staffers working in the DC metropolitan area. So, guess how many average American taxpaying citizens might ‘find their way there?’    LOL!  Next year we should push for regional meetings around the country so certain Mayors of certain beleaguered towns and cities might be able to attend.

I would love to have asked those in attendance (maybe around 100 max) to raise their hands if they were paid to be there.  I would guess only three critics actually gave up a day from work and other duties to attend.  The others had some financial stake in the event.   Although in fairness there were some speakers representing small advocacy groups of certain ethnic peoples they would like admitted to the US and who surely aren’t making 6-figure salaries like the big contractor reps.   Of the contractor behemoths, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Ethiopian Community Development Council, Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Kurdish Human Rights Watch and Church World Service gave testimony and had written statements available.

I can only assume the other biggies gave private testimony to the State Department.  The International Rescue Committee, one of the largest recipients of federal grant money, doesn’t need to present testimony when its Vice President has just recently been chosen by Obama and approved by the Senate to head the program, here.   Check out the IRC’s 2009 Form 990.  They received $200 million from the US taxpayers that year!  And, while you are at it, have a look at the 6-figure salaries of its top-grossing employees.  I wonder how they were able to exclude their President’s nearly $400,000 salary and benefits package of previous years on this tax return?

I’m digressing and that is one of the reasons I didn’t get started on this post earlier—I knew I would have too much to say!

Back to the meeting!

Sitting at the head table were the following:

Lawrence Bartlett

Director, Office of Refugee Admissions

Department of State

Barbara Strack

Chief, Refugee Affairs Division, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

Department of Homeland Security

Eskinder Negash

Director, Office of Refugee Resettlement

Department of Health and Human Services

I’ll tell you more about the principals (above) in later posts.

No public record of the meeting will be available, nor was anyone permitted to videotape it.   Efforts had been made to urge certain Members of Congress to request that videotaping be allowed or that C-Span be invited in to film the event so that Congress (which holds the purse strings) might have some idea of the process whereby contractors ask for more immigrants (and more money!).  I doubt any serious effort was made by Members of Congress because it would have happened if someone, or several Members, had pushed hard enough (What is that I hear? click here!).    After all, this isn’t the Supreme Court!  It is a meeting for government officials to hear from contractors!

Each person who had signed up IN ADVANCE was permitted 5 minutes to make a pitch.  Most of us read from our previously submitted statements (mine is here).  There were no questions permitted and those presiding asked no questions (although I am told in the past there was more give and take).  The meeting concluded in about an hour and a half.

More Muslims please!

I can’t wait to tell you about the testimony.  I haven’t read all of it yet.  But, one thing that jumped out at me in what I’ve read so far (or heard at the meeting) is that no one spoke for Christians persecuted by Muslims!  The US Conference of Catholic Bishops never even mentioned them, but they sure asked the State Department to send more Muslims to the US, in particular, they want more Somalis and Rohingya* (Burmese Muslims)!   Several of those testifying also called for the prompt re-opening of the P-3 family reunification program that has been closed for nearly 4 years due to the widespread fraud uncovered involving Africans, mostly Somalis.  The State Department has reported that as many as 36,000 Africans entered the US fraudulently in a 5 year period after 9/11!

Perhaps my favorite testimony came from a citizen of Lancaster, PA who is helping refugees, but critical of Church World Service (the contractor).

Watch for upcoming posts on the testimony!

* Please take a few minutes and begin to familiarize yourselves with Rohingya Muslims.  We have a whole category (Rohingya Reports) with 100 posts in it on this group of “stateless people” that the US State Department initially resisted when the UN told them to start letting them into the US.  They have begun to be resettled here (although at the moment there is some bureaucratic snafu with Bangladesh where many are located).

Mali: Rebels, Jihadists, making more refugees in Africa

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Here we go again.  This time it’s “rebels” flowing back to Mali, one of the few previously stable democracies in Africa, with large caches of Gaddafi’s sophisticated weapons, raping and pillaging as they go.  The chaos is making an opening for the Jihadists to push for a Shariah government.

The other day while driving some distance I listened to NPR (something I rarely do, but my usual talk radio wasn’t available) and I heard an interview with a western woman in Mali’s capital.  I didn’t catch who she was, but there was no doubt she was an expert on Mali.   She was giving stern warning to NPR listeners about the dangers of Shariah law coming to Mali.  I was frankly surprised to note the interviewer took her very seriously.  And, it made me wonder why the Left is so quick to dismiss Shariah law being instituted bit by bit in the West.  (Maybe it’s just a head-in-sand reaction that keeps them from discussing the horrible possibility for us.)

From the UK Telegraph:

The rebels, armed with weapons stolen from Muammar Gaddafi’s formidable arsenal, took over an area of the Sahara as big as France in an astonishing 72 hours, taking advantage of the chaotic aftermath of an army coup.

Few of the people they promised to free waited to find out what freedom would be like. Instead, an estimated 250,000 people left their homes, terrified families fleeing with their children and possessions. Many told tales of looting and rape by rebels who now control a vast area in the heart of Africa.

Foreign governments were left scrambling to find out exactly who the rebels were, amid fears that a base for al-Qaeda will now be set up in the Sahara similar to ones in lawless parts of Pakistan and Somalia.

Read it all.

I wonder if Obama (remember responsibility to protect!) will go down in history as the President who presided over the spread of Shariah Law across Africa—Egypt then Lybia, and now Mali?

Related!

LOL!  I’m eager to see who federal contractors will be adding to their refugee wish list on May 1st (see refugee hearing here).   Will it include Egyptians, Libyans and Malians?  It was at one such meeting a few years ago that one of the contractors was pushing for the resettlement of Rohingya (Burmese Muslims) to the US.  They eventually got their wish.  We have 100 posts to date on the Rohingya here, if you would like to learn more.