Category: Rohingya Reports

Refugees in Connecticut

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Nothing much new here but we don’t often see information about refugees going to Connecticut, so if you live in CT then check out this article from the Republican-American about Burmese refugees to your state.  Burma is much in the news because the leader of the Karen was assasinated this past week.  

We mostly resettle the Burmese Christian Karen refugees from camps in Thailand, but there are rumblings that the Muslim Rohingya from Burma (now in Bangladesh) are being considered for resettlement in the US. 

More on Burmese refugees here from Reuters today.

Connecticut received over 20,000 refugees between 1983 and 2005.  The largest numbers are from the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia.

Rohingya drums and Rambo

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

You can hear the drumbeats, a little here, a little there.   We’ve told you about them before, Rohingyas are Burmese Muslims and the agitation has begun to bring them to America.   Take a minute and go back to my original post of a few weeks ago.  

Now comes another beat on the drum to find a “durable solution” in third country resettlement.   A Mr. Zafar Ahmad, President of Myanmar Ethinic Rohingyas Human Rights Organization Malaysia wrote this past week to the Geneva head office of the UNHCR (UN High Commissioner on Refugees) with his “demands.”

We, Myanmar Ethnic Rohingya Human Right Organization Malaysia
strongly demand on behalf of all that Frontier UNHCR’s Representative Head
Officer Dr.Volker Turk to tackle continuously and its recognized Rohingya
refugees may solve before his transfer . We Rohingya are forgotten
people on earth and well-founded fear of persecution subjected to Race,
Religion and Political opinion.

 Then Mr. Zafar Ahmad goes on to say:

This current situation pointing
that Rohingya have only a way of permanent solution to 3rd country
according to Refugees convention due to facing various as origin of the
persecution in the host.

That third country is going to be the United States, or some country in western Europe, maybe Australia.

I bet you are wondering how I have Rambo involved in all this.   Well don’t you know in his latest ‘blow ’em away’ flick he goes after the Burmese military junta to help save the Christian Karen people.   The Burmese Karen are one of the latest wave of refugees coming to America.   Rambo got guidance from the United Nations on his choice of human rights violators to film.   The UN will be slipping those Rohingyas by us as one more of Burma’s ethnic minority, just mark my words!

Incidentally there is speculation about why Rambo didn’t go after Al-Queda.    Actor Sylvester Stallone said in an interview I happened to catch that it was because he didn’t want to look tougher than our military men and women.  LOL, I will bet anything he didn’t want to be seen blowing Islamic radicals away, probably not good for his career (or personal safety).

More news from Walkersville, MD, Citizen leader answers bias charge

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

The debate continues in Walkersville, MD where an Islamic sect is seeking to purchase property for a 200 plus acre religious compound.   If you are new to this issue, please check our posts here and here.

Steve Berryman, a spokesman for the Citizens for Walkersville answered charges that he is biased in yesterday’s on-line Frederick County publication, The Tentacle.   An attorney for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community had suggested during hearings last week that Mr. Berryman (and I assume by extension his fellow citizens) is biased, citing a blog article written by Mr. Berryman last summer entitled “Deceiving the Infidel”.

The word ‘biased’ as used here is just a more subtle way of calling Mr. Berryman a racist.

Mr. Berryman counters that he is biased —biased toward a “peaceful” community.    

It’s maddening and we have written about it on numerous occasions.  We saw demonizing demonstrated in Hagerstown when we questioned the refugee program on-going in our county seat.   Somehow people who question the whole diversity is beautiful theme and want to live with people of their own culture are automatically labelled as racists, bigots or more politely as biased. 

For instance, I have never heard the Somalis called racists when they choose to live in separate enclaves with their own kind in American cities and towns?   When have you ever heard anyone refer to the inhabitants of Chinatown as those racist Chinese?  Why is it that only white Americans (or white Europeans) are presumed to be racists (bigots or biased)  and have no right to live with people like themselves.  I am not talking about color here!  I am talking about culture!

As for Mr. Berryman’s desire for a peaceful community.  He has reason to be concerned.  Last week when I researched the Rohingyas in Bangladesh (who may come to America as refugees), the Hudson Institute report entitled, “The Rising Tide of Islamism in Bangladesh”  also discussed the Ahmadiyya.

Radical Islamists have also targeted the Ahmadiyya community, a Muslim reformist and revivalist movement founded in Qadyan, India in the nineteenth century.

The implication is that although the Ahmadiyya may not be promoting violent Jihad themselves, the citizens of Walkersville might have a legitimate fear that feuds between factions within Islam could come to their little rural town. 

Why do elitists in Washington willy-nilly import the conflicting sects of Islam from the Middle East, Africa and Asia to America and expect they will live happily ever after side by side?    Judy tells me that her wise husband says when you can’t figure out why something is happening, turn to just plain stupidity as the cause.

The citizens of Walkersville are not stupid—they want a peaceful community and they have every right to demand one without being called racists, bigoted or biased.

So why the silence on the Saudis?

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday the Washington Post Outlook section ran an opinion piece by our buddy Ken Bacon at Refugees International—the lobbying organization hollering the loudest for us to open our gates to Iraqi refugees.  Come to think of it, Ken Bacon was also the guy testifying to Congress this past year about saving those poor Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, you know those refugees who will turn into terrorists if we don’t get them over here and on welfare ASAP.   Mr. Bacon is everywhere these days including feting the former Asst. Secretary of State;  could he be angling for something big in a possible Clinton Administration?   Maybe we should have a blog called Kenneth Bacon Watch!

Sorry,  I was getting off track.  There is nothing new in this blast at the Bush Administration, which I am sorry to say I can’t link because I can’t find it on line at the Post (very strange).  You will have to trust me that he said,  “The Administration isn’t doing its part to resettle Iraqis, either—not even former translators for the U.S. Military whose lives are at risk.”      See Judy’s post to see why it is so amusing (shocking really) that they are still using the Iraqi translator sob story, don’t they know that some translators have been found to be spies. 

What interested me in his Post opinion were the graphics that accompanied it, maps, graphs, charts, that showed who is, and by omission, who is not helping with Iraqi refugees in some way.  All of the humanitarian aid comes from the U.S., Europe and Japan.  All the countries bordering Iraq have displaced Iraqis, however, glaringly absent and apparently doing NOTHING is Saudi Arabia, Iraq’s oil RICH neighbor.  We hear so much about how the Koran calls for Muslims to be charitable (to fellow Muslims) so where is Saudi Arabia?  And where is the criticism from groups like Mr. Bacon’s? 

Rohingyas coming? State Dept. say it isn’t so!

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I’m starting to see a pattern.   News articles appear that tell us that this group or that group is living in some squalid camp somewhere in the world and a ‘durable solution’ is needed.  Watch out for that phrase ‘durable solution,’ that’s UN humanitarian refugee industry code for the West needs to take refugees pronto.  

So last night when I saw this article in the News from Bangladesh my alarm bells went off. 

The Rohingya refugee problem in Bangladesh is a decades-long pending issue. According to the official record, there are some 26,000 Rohingya refugees in two official camps in Cox’s Bazar, a southern district of Bangladesh bordering Burma. The government of Bangladesh manages these camps with assistance from UN refugee agency, UNHCR. These refugees are the remainder of some 258,000 Rohingyas who left Burma to escape the genocidal operation led by the Burmese military rulers against the Rohingyas in 1991- 92.
_________

So, as a part of their protection, the Bangladesh government should take urgent step to recognize them as refugees and to raise the issue in the international forum with a view to find out a durable solution to their problem.

The above is written by:    

Ahmedur Rahman Farooq, Chairman, The Council for Restoration of Democracy in Burma (CRDB) and a member of The Union of Rohingya Communities in Europe (URCE). Norway. 

Guess you folks in Norway already have Rohingyas and maybe we have too!    We were told in Hagerstown that the Burmese planned for our city were all Christian Karen people.  Were they?    I’ve also heard rumblings that the largest Burmese refugee community in the US, in Ft. Wayne, IN, has some tension growing between Karen and some Burmese Muslims.  Could it be Rohingya?

Who are the Rohingya?   Just google Rohingya and Al Qaeda and you will learn all you need to know.  Here is a quote from a Hudson Institute report.

In addition to minority flight, there have been other factors augmenting the relative power of the Islamists. Since 1991, perhaps as many as 300,000 Rohingya Muslims have entered Bangladesh across its southeastern border with Myanmar (Burma), a Jamaat-e-Islami stronghold.  Many reside between the port city of Cox’s Bazaar and the Myanmar border. Jamaat-e-Islami and its student wing, the Islami Chatra League, have worked to radicalize these refugees, who are probably more susceptible to religious indoctrination after their persecution in Myanmar. Indeed, according to reports by human rights groups on local minorities, many of Harakat ul-Jihad Islami’s newest members are recruited from the Rohingya settlements.

And, if you don’t believe the Hudson Institute, how about Time magazine:

Today, southern Bangladesh has become a haven for hundreds of jihadis on the lam. They find natural allies in Muslim guerrillas from India hiding out across the border, and in Muslim Rohingyas, tens of thousands of whom fled the ethnic and religious suppression of the Burmese military junta in the late 1970s and 1980s. Many Rohingyas are long-term refugees, but some are trained to cause trouble back home in camps tolerated by a succession of Bangladeshi governments. The original facilities date back to 1975, making them Asia’s oldest jihadi training camps. And one former Burmese guerrilla who visits the camps regularly describes three near Ukhia, south of the town of Cox’s Bazar, as able to accommodate a force of 2,500 between them.

So, by now you are thinking we can’t be that stupid.  We really wouldn’t even give a moments thought to bringing Rohingya into the United States.   Afterall, didn’t President Bush say we were fighting Al Qaeda over there so we didn’t have to fight them here?

You can imagine my shock to find this sandwiched in the testimony of Kenneth Bacon of Refugees International, the refugee industry’s lobbying arm,  before a House Appropriations Subcommittee hearing testimony on the funds needed for refugee resettlement for 2008:

I urge the Subcommittee to continue this support, while at the same time not forgetting often overlooked refugee and displaced populations, like the 29,000 stateless Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

So, State Department, tell me it isn’t so.  We aren’t actually bringing Rohingya into the United States?  These aren’t the refugees former Asst. Secretary Sauerbrey had in mind when she said we need to bring refugees here because they become terrorists in the camps?

By the way, these poor and destitute Rohingyas have their own English language website here.