Tag: Thailand

Rohingya Muslims on the way to the US, many others already here

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

I thought I was done today.  I was just going to tackle my bulging e-mail in box when I came across an e-mail from reader Judith alerting me to this news from the Bangkok Post yesterday.

Rohingya boat
Rohingya are coming to the US. This group of young MEN was apprehended by the Malaysian government, a Muslim government, that doesn’t want the Rohingya. So we are taking them! http://news.yahoo.com/malaysian-pm-orders-rescue-migrant-boats-041729887.html

24 Rohingya (Burmese) Muslims are on the way to the US, but the article tells us that since right after 911 we have admitted 13,000 Burmese Muslims (how many are Rohingya?).
Ahhhh!
While we focus on the fact that Syrians can’t be screened, frankly neither can Muslims who get on boats in Southeast Asia (claiming to have been kidnapped) be properly screened!
New readers of RRW don’t know that we have an entire category on the very ‘observant’ followers of Islam that are known as the Rohingya.
We have 180 posts in our ‘Rohingya Reports’ category extending all the way back to 2007.  Back in 2007 and early 2008 there was no way the US State Dept. was going to admit Rohingya Muslims, but clearly all that has changed
Here is the story at the Bangkok Post (which won’t let me snip much, so please go read it yourself):

At 46 years old, Basamai, an ethnic Rohingya Muslim man, will for the first time obtain identity documents that will allow him to resettle in the United States next week, along with 23 other trafficking victims.

The 24 to be resettled follow four who left Thailand earlier this month, in a humanitarian programme that has resettled 13,000 Muslims from Myanmar since 2002, according to the US Department of State Refugee Processing Center.

They are not saying if they are coming to your town!

Following their arrival in the US — the exact location remains unknown — the Rohingya group will undergo Cultural Orientation Training before they can be resettled, said a source from the Ministry of…

Cultural Orientation Training, here? in the US?  That is a new one on me.
They were screened by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and the star of this story hopes to bring his wife and 8 daughters to America real soon!

Rohingya Muslims are definitely being brought to American towns

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

We’ve suspected that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the US State Department are working to bring Rohingya boat people, who arrive illegally in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand to America, but yesterday we learned that 1,000 of them have come recently.
 

rohingya-migrants-may-16
A Rohingya-packed boat adrift in Thai waters last week. The breakdown of borders is happening all over the world.

 
This is what we reported earlier in the week:

How many Burmese refugees are we taking?

The mostly Christian Burmese are one of the largest (if not the largest) ethnic group of refugees we have resettled since 2005 (I checked the data from January 2005 until May 1, 2015).

This is what I learned:  We resettled 140,812 Burmese refugees since 2005.

This surprised me:  In that number were 12,615 Burmese Muslims!  The word Rohingya is not used, but most certainly the Rohingya represent a large portion (if not all) of that number.

According to activists, the UN is not moving the Burmese Muslims out to third countries fast enough!  And, there are 45,000 of them registered with the UN and expecting to be moved to the West.

Here is what we just learned, from the Borneo Post:

ALOR SETAR: A Rohingya welfare body in Malaysia is pressuring the United Nations (UN) to expedite re-settlement of Rohingya refugees to third countries.

Rohingya Society in Malaysia (RSM) chairman Dr Abdul Hamid Musa Ali said as of today, about 2,000 of the tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees residing in the country had been successfully placed in several third countries.

He said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) should play a role in safeguarding the welfare of Rohingya refugees in Malaysia.

“It is very disappointing as many questions are being raised on how just only 2,000 Rohingya refugees have been successfully relocated to third countries, from about 45,000 refugees registered with the UNHCR.

“This does not include the 60,000 to 70,000 Rohingya immigrants in Malaysia who are still not registered with the UN agency for refugees until now,” he told Bernama here today.

Abdul Hami, who is a Rohingya refugee and UNHCR card holder, said until today, just over 1,000 Rohingya refugees were re-settled in the United States, and the rest in several European countries.

There will be a regional summit on May 29th in Bangkok, Thailand in order to try to figure out what to do for the thousands of boat people arriving from Burma (Myanmar) and Bangladesh.  Be sure to watch the film clip here and see that one refugee says—THEY ARE LOOKING FOR A MUSLIM COUNTRY IN WHICH TO LIVE.  That is great!  There are many to choose from (including Indonesia, Malaysia and heh! how about Saudi Arabia?).
Get used to that ‘R’ word—Rohingya—listen to pronunciation here.
It appears that the PR push is on and that as we express our concerns about Syrian refugees arriving in the US in large numbers, the Rohingya are being quietly resettled here along with the thousands of Iraqi and Somali Muslims each year.
See our Rohingya Reports category here (it includes 177 posts and extends back almost 8 years).  Here is one post from 2008 where we said that as early as 2002, Time Magazine linked Rohingya refugees to Islamic terrorist groups.  You might be interested to see this post as well.  In 2012 a reader alerted us to the fact that the US State Department had removed from a terror watch list a group linked to Rohingya.
The next time you hear one of your friends or some dumb politician say that ‘LEGAL immigration is good,’ remember that this is legal!

US lectures Thailand on treatment of Muslim Uighurs seeking asylum

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Hmmm!  This is interesting.  Note in this story that Malaysia recently returned Uighurs to China.   Any connection to the missing plane?

From the Global Post (emphasis mine):

The United States on Friday urged Thailand to protect some 200 asylum seekers who are reportedly from China’s Uighur minority, after police said they discovered them at a secret camp.

Thai police said Thursday that they discovered the families in a raid in the kingdom’s deep south and that the asylum seekers, who appeared to be preparing to head elsewhere, said they were Turkish.

The Uighurs come from Xinjiang province. The March 1 terror attack occurred in Kunming.

US broadcaster Radio Free Asia, quoting relatives, said that the asylum seekers were actually Uighurs — a Turkic-speaking, predominantly Muslim group from China’s northwestern Xinjiang region.

“We are urging the Thai government to provide full protection to the victims (and) to ensure that their humanitarian needs are met,” State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters.

The annual US Human Rights Reports said that China carries out “severe official repression” of Uighurs in Xinjiang, including over their freedom of speech and religion.

March 1 mass stabbing at train station:

Xinjiang is periodically hit by violent clashes and Chinese officials blamed Uighur separatists for a March 1 mass stabbing at a train station in the southwestern city of Kunming that killed 29 people and injured 143 others.

Malaysia among countries forcibly returning Uighurs to China.

Under Beijing’s pressure, Cambodia, Malaysia and Pakistan have all in recent years forcibly returned Uighurs to China.

The UN refugee agency criticized Malaysia for its deportation of six Uighurs to China in December, saying that they were sent back to a country where they were at risk even though the group had registered asylum claims.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said that it is providing assistance to the 200 asylum seekers in Thailand but has not confirmed their identifies.

Graphic is from the Wall Street Journal report on the terrorist attack.

Thailand: Rohingya cry, put on act, when press is around

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

Update August 21:  86 “asylum-seeking” Rohingya break out of Thai detention facility and are on the run, here.

I’ve been ignoring the news lately in Asia about the Rohingya Muslims (so busy reporting on the flood of asylum-seekers in Europe and the US) which have been streaming out of Burma and Bangladesh trying to get to Australia and elsewhere and are ending up in Thailand where they are not “welcome.”

Rohingya boat people (mostly men) arrive on Phuket in January of this year. Photo: (EPA, Yongyot Pruksarak)

This is just a quick update from Phuket Gazette.  Seems they rioted and destroyed their detention facility earlier this month.

PHUKET: Deputy Interior Minister Wisarn Techathirawat says the presence of the media encourages Rohingya refugees to “act-up in front of the camera” in order to get sympathy.

Mr Wisarn was at the Phang Nga Immigration center yesterday to inspect the facility, following a Rohingya riot there earlier this month.

“The media often knows that the Rohingya are arriving even before the police do,” he said.

“And when the media are present, the Rohingya cry and put on a performance designed to get sympathy. When the media are not present, they act normally, and even seem to enjoy their interaction with the officers,” he said.

The “feigned pitifulness” of the Rohingya reported by the press is giving Thailand a bad name, Mr Wisarn said.

He called for special measures to be taken to find the Rohingya places to live, and said that government parties and officials must do more to respond to the needs of Rohingya refugees.

The rebellion at the Phang Nga Immigration center on August 8 occurred at the end of the Muslim fasting month, when refugees asked to be able to pray together and were refused (story here). The men, detained in cramped conditions for months, became enraged and damaged their detention cells as they tried to break out.

The rioting was contained, and subsequently, 261 men were transferred to police stations in Phang Nga; 24 remained at the Phang Nga Immigration center.

Just a reminder and for the benefit of new readers, Rohingya are being resettled in the US, Canada and Europe.  The numbers are small so far but the “humanitarian lobby” is pushing for the West to take more.

We have an entire category going back almost 6 years on the Rohingya, click here to learn more.

Mostly Christian refugees to be repatriated to Burma; US to end program for them

~ Ann Corcoran ~ Leave a comment

This story has been languishing in my posting queue for weeks, so I thought I better get it posted so as to keep our archives up to date.

Thailand’s Mae La Refugee Camp

After taking tens of thousands of Burmese refugees to the US, and turning cities such as Ft. Wayne, Indiana into the Burmese capital of America we are now saying, it’s o.k. for the rest of you to go back home.    Truth be told, I think we’re bored with the Burmese Christians and are planning to make room for Burmese Rohingya Muslims to diversify our refugee collection (after all that is only “fair”, right?).  We have already taken some Muslims from Burma.

This is the AP story from early last month:

Since the day she was born, 20-year-old Naw Lawnadoo has known almost nothing of the world beyond the fence and guard posts that hem her in with 45,000 others — ethnic minorities from Myanmar and those like her who were born and raised in the Mae La refugee camp in neighboring Thailand.

School, family, friends, shopping and churchgoing — many of the refugees are Christian — have all been confined to a valley of densely packed bamboo-and-thatch huts huddled under soaring limestone cliffs.

Now, she and other camp residents face a future that will dramatically change their constricted but secure, sometimes happy lives. With the end of 50 years of military rule in Myanmar, aid groups are beginning to prepare for the eventual return of one of the world’s largest refugee populations — some 1 million people in camps and hideouts spread across five countries.

The US took-in about 92,000 Burmese refugees in recent years.

Some may melt into Thailand, joining the 2.5 million migrant workers from Myanmar. A few may be resettled in third countries, though the United States is ending a program under which it has taken 80 percent of the 105,000 settled so far. With shrinking options, most will likely have no choice but to return.

While camp life is hardly cosmopolitan, some of the young can meet foreigners, have access to the Internet and occasionally slip out to a nearby town, or even the shopping malls and bright lights of Bangkok, Thailand’s capital. For them, the prospect of planting rice in isolated villages to which they would probably go holds little attraction.

I guess it wouldn’t.

Just goes to show the fickle nature of the US State Department’s refugee admissions program.