Category: In The News

Rights group denounces Japan envoy for ‘disturbing’ comments on Myanmar Rohingya By Reuters | January 15, 2020 TOKYO (Reuters) – Tokyo-based human...

The Free Rohingya Coalition, for example, is currently seeking international civil society support for a boycott campaign targeting corporations complicit with Myanmar's crimes.

With the Rohingya genocide finally on trial, now is not the time for international self-satisfaction, but reinvigorated solidarity with the victims of the world's violated promise of "never again".

"Aung San Suu Kyi is not simply defending the Burmese military, which is only an organ of the state. Aung San Suu Kyi is there defending Myanmar as a member state and its racist society," Zarni said.

Zarni said he was extremely saddened that Suu Kyi still has a lot of support inside the country; tens of thousands of people attended rallies in Myanmar as she departed for the Netherlands.

Nay San Lwin, the campaign coordinator for Free Rohingya Coalition, said the visit of the Myanmar delegation appears to be nothing but an eyewash and the Bangladesh government was wasting time by allowing their visit to the camps.

“Myanmar wants to show to the international community that they want repatriation to be done,” he told The Daily Star from Germany yesterday.

“We are waiting for the ICJ ruling next month. We already have begun ‘Boycott Myanmar campaign’ and will strengthen it so that Myanmar is obliged to change its laws and grant our citizenship and ethnicity,” he said.

Nay San Lwin, a Rohingya organizer of the Boycott Myanmar Campaign, wants the foreign funding of those local media in Myanmar that continue to use the term “Bengali” to be shut down. “Rohingya worldwide do not accept this name ‘Bengali,’” Lwin explains. “How dare they call us Bengali? We are not Bengali or Bangladeshis.”

"We are doing this to correct the wrongdoings of Myanmar government and military...not because we hate our fellow Burmese," Ro Nay San Lwin, a Rohingya Muslim and cofounder of the FRC, told Al Jazeera.

"We want to see our country as a developed country but as the investments are financing the genocide we are compelled to do this," he added.

ISCI deplores the threats extended by powerful Myanmar business and political forces against human rights defenders Maung Zarni and Nay San Lwin, and stands side by side with them in the struggle against Myanmar state crime.

The Free Rohingya Coalition said in a statement it was starting the “Boycott Myanmar Campaign” with 30 organizations in 10 countries. It called on “corporations, foreign investors, professional and cultural organizations to sever their institutional ties with Myanmar”.

To keep the global pressure on, Nay San Lwin said, Free Rohingya Coalition is going to launch an online campaign called “Boycott Myanmar” on December 9. On this day in 1948, UN General Assembly adopted the genocide convention.