Myanmar’s Rohingya in the crosshairs as fighting escalates in Rakhine

Myanmar’s Rohingya in the crosshairs as fighting escalates in Rakhine
Tens of thousands of Rohingya are estimated to have fled for safety toward neighboring Bangladesh since mid-May. (AP file photo)
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Updated 27 May 2024
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Myanmar’s Rohingya in the crosshairs as fighting escalates in Rakhine

Myanmar’s Rohingya in the crosshairs as fighting escalates in Rakhine
  • Tens of thousands of Rohingya are estimated to have fled for safety toward neighboring Bangladesh since mid-May

NAYPVIDAW: Myanmar’s Muslim-minority Rohingya community is once again under threat of attacks and displacement as fighting between a powerful ethnic army and the country’s ruling junta escalates in the western state of Rakhine, according to UN and aid agencies.
Tens of thousands of Rohingya are estimated to have fled for safety toward neighboring Bangladesh since mid-May, which is reluctant to accept more refugees, and many of those remaining in Rakhine are in dire need of humanitarian aid.
The Arakan Army (AA) claimed control of Buthidaung town earlier in May following fighting during which the ethnic army was accused of singling out Rohingya community members. The AA denies the charges.
Reuters could not independently verify the claims, and a junta spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
The AA is now bearing down on the border town of Maungdaw, also home to a large Rohingya population, that the Myanmar junta will likely attempt to hold, raising the spectre of more serious violence.
“We see clear and present risks of a serious expansion of violence as the battle for neighboring Maungdaw town has begun — where the military maintains outposts and where a large Rohingya community lives,” a spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said.
The Rohingya have faced decades of persecution and, after a 2017 crackdown by the military, nearly one million fled to Bangladesh, where many now live in crowded refugee camps.
Mohammed Taher, a Rohingya refugee in Bangladesh, said he had recently spoken to a friend in Maungdaw, who described the community living in fear.
“Many want to flee from Rakhine but Bangladesh is not opening its door for Rohingya,” Taher said.
Recent fighting has forced some 45,000 Rohingya to flee to an area along the Naf river on the border, according to a UN estimate.
“No Rohingya will be allowed to enter Bangladesh,” a senior Bangladesh border guard official told Reuters last week.
Myanmar has been in turmoil since a 2021 military coup, which spurred a grassroots armed resistance that is fighting the junta alongside long-established ethnic minority rebel groups.
’CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE’
The fighting in Rakhine broke out last November when a ceasefire between the AA and the junta collapsed, leading to a string of battlefield successes for the rebels.
“Faced with mounting losses in Rakhine, the regime has resorted to arming members of the Rohingya ethnic minority to counter the Arakan Army’s advance,” Morgan Michaels of the International Institute for Strategic Studies said in a May report.
“The AA has reacted with inflammatory rhetoric and violence directed at the Rohingya.”
Amid the renewed conflict, Rohingya civilians are “increasingly being caught in the middle,” the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in its latest report last week.
The agency estimates that over 350,000 people are displaced across Rakhine after years of conflict, many of whom do not have access to basic services.
“We are witnessing a near total absence of humanitarian assistance for communities who rely on it,” medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said, adding that hospitals in Buthidaung and Maungdaw were closed.
The AA, which has a goal to form an autonomous state, has warned that more battles are coming, asking civilians in Buthidaung, Maungdaw, and Thandwe to dig bomb shelters or evacuate to safer areas.
The group, which has denied it has targeted the Rohingya, has also asked for international aid for some 200,000 internally displaced people that it says are sheltering in areas under its control in Buthidaung and Maungdaw.
“The situation is incredibly fraught and dangerous,” said Scot Marciel, a former USambassador to Myanmar.
“In some ways, this is an early test of whether a post-military-rule Rakhine State with significant autonomy can work.”


Jennifer Lopez to boost Harris at glitzy Las Vegas event

Jennifer Lopez to boost Harris at glitzy Las Vegas event
Updated 4 sec ago
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Jennifer Lopez to boost Harris at glitzy Las Vegas event

Jennifer Lopez to boost Harris at glitzy Las Vegas event
WASHINGTON: US pop queen Jennifer Lopez is set to campaign for Kamala Harris at a glitzy rally in Las Vegas, the vice president’s team announced Tuesday, as the Democrat seeks to turn out Hispanic voters in the home stretch of a nailbitingly close election.
The 55-year-old singer and “Unstoppable” actress — J-Lo to her army of fans — was among a number of stars of Puerto Rican heritage who publicly backed Harris after a speaker at her Republican opponent Donald Trump’s weekend rally called the US territory a “floating island of garbage.”
Lopez is not performing at Thursday’s event — the music will be provided by Mexican pop-rock band Mana — but she will drive home the importance of voting in the crucial swing state of Nevada, the campaign said, as well as explain why she is endorsing Harris.
In a campaign notable for its star-studded rallies and celebrity endorsements, Harris has so far earned the backing of music stars Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Lizzo, Stevie Wonder, Pink and Bruce Springsteen.
The rally is part of a series of “When We Vote We Win” events in key battleground states featuring recording artists focused on turning out the few remaining undecided voters, with polling showing a neck-and-neck race.
“These artists and public figures are trusted voices for millions of Americans, who listen to their music, follow them on social media, or otherwise are inspired by them,” the campaign said in a statement.
“The Harris-Walz campaign believes that by using their voices to lay out the stakes of this election, it will further encourage and mobilize people to go vote.”
Lopez, singer Ricky Martin and reggaeton star Bad Bunny — all of whom boast social media followings in the tens of millions — gave Harris a boost this week by sharing her campaign video targeting voters in Puerto Rico on social media.
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Trump says his New York rally marked by crude and racist insults was ‘an absolute lovefest’

Trump says his New York rally marked by crude and racist insults was ‘an absolute lovefest’
Updated 1 min 29 sec ago
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Trump says his New York rally marked by crude and racist insults was ‘an absolute lovefest’

Trump says his New York rally marked by crude and racist insults was ‘an absolute lovefest’

PALM BEACH, Florida: Urged by some allies to apologize for racist comments made by speakers at his weekend rally, Donald Trump took the opposite approach on Tuesday, saying it was an “honor to be involved” in such an event and calling the scene a “lovefest” — the same term he has used to describe the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.
Trump gathered supporters and reporters to his Mar-a-Lago resort two days after a massive rally at Madison Square Garden featured a number of crude remarks by various speakers, including a set by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe in which he joked that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.” Some of Trump’s top Republican allies have condemned the remarks, and his campaign took the rare step of publicly distancing itself from Hinchcliffe’s joke, though not the other comments.
But given the opportunity to apologize at events and in an interview, Trump instead leaned in. Speaking at his Florida resort, he said that “there’s never been an event so beautiful” as his Sunday rally in his hometown of New York.
“The love in that room. It was breathtaking,” he said. “It was like a lovefest, an absolute lovefest. And it was my honor to be involved.”
With just a week before Election Day, some Trump allies have voiced alarm that the rally, which was supposed to highlight the Republican presidential nominee’s closing message in grand New York fashion, has instead served as a distraction and even a liability, given the electoral importance of Puerto Ricans who live in Pennsylvania and other key swing states.
At a roundtable outside Philadelphia on Tuesday afternoon, Trump got some praise from a retired occupational therapist from Puerto Rico, Maribel Valdez. “Puerto Rico stands behind you and Puerto Rico loves you,” Valdez told him.
Trump thanked her and reminisced about his administration’s efforts to help the island after storms. “I think no president has ever done more for Puerto Rico than I have,” responded Trump, who delayed the release of billions of dollars in assistance to repair years-old hurricane damage in Puerto Rico until shortly before the 2020 election.
Trump was set to hold a rally later in Allentown, Pennsylvania, a city with a large Hispanic population, where Puerto Rico’s shadow US senator, Zoraida Buxo, will join him, according to a campaign official who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of a formal announcement.
Buxo, who does not have a vote in the Senate because Puerto Rico is not a state, voiced her support for Trump in a post on the social media site X. She said Trump is the “strong leader” that Puerto Rico needs.
The fallout from the Madison Square Garden event risked highlighting voters’ concerns about Trump’s rhetoric and penchant for controversy in the closing stretch as both campaigns are scrambling for votes. Speakers at the rally also made racist comments targeting Latinos, Black people, Jews and Palestinians, along with sexist insults directed at Trump’s Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
On Tuesday, Trump tried to move past the controversy and pivot back to Harris, lashing his rival’s record on the border and inflation, saying that, “on issue after issue, she broke it” and “I’m going to fix it and fix it very fast.”
Trump, who took no questions at the event, accused Harris of running a “campaign of absolute hate,” and claimed she keeps “talking about Hitler and Nazi, because her record’s horrible.”
Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff said in recent interviews with The New York Times and The Atlantic that the former president praised Adolf Hitler while in office and suggested that the Nazi leader “did some good things.”
In an interview with ABC News earlier Tuesday, Trump tried to distance himself from Hinchcliffe but did not denounce what he said.
“I don’t know him. Someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is,” Trump said, according to the network, insisting that he hadn’t heard Hinchcliffe’s comments. When asked what he made of them, Trump “did not take the opportunity to denounce them, repeating that he didn’t hear the comments,” ABC reported.
The comments have drawn outrage from Puerto Rican leaders.
The archbishop of Puerto Rico called on Trump to disavow them, saying it wasn’t enough for the campaign to say the joke didn’t reflect Trump’s views. The president of Puerto Rico’s Republican Party called the “poor attempt at comedy” by Hinchcliffe “disgraceful, ignorant and totally reprehensible.”
In Pennsylvania, where Trump was to campaign later Tuesday, the Latino eligible voter population has nearly tripled since 2000. More than half of those are Puerto Rican eligible voters.
Angelo Ortega, a longtime Allentown resident and former Republican who’s planning to vote for Harris this time, said he couldn’t believe what he’d heard about Trump’s rally.
“I don’t know if my jaw dropped or I was just so irritated, angry. I didn’t know what to feel,” said Ortega, who was born in New York but whose father came from Puerto Rico. Ortega has been campaigning for Harris and said he knows of at least one Hispanic GOP voter planning to switch from Trump to Harris as a result of Hinchcliffe’s comments.
“They’ve had it. They’ve had it. They were listening to (Trump), but they said they think that that was like the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Ortega, a member of the Make the Road PA advocacy group.
Still, some voters of Puerto Rican descent weren’t fazed. Maricelis Torres, 24, a waitress studying to be a radiologist, waited to get into the Allentown rally and said she and her family laughed at Hinchcliffe’s joke.
“If you don’t understand humor, then that’s what I’m saying, people are way too soft these days,” said Torres, whose father is from the island.
The Harris campaign has released an ad that will run online in battleground states targeting Puerto Rican voters and highlighting the comedian’s remarks.


Five killed in attack on dam construction site in Pakistan’s Balochistan

Five killed in attack on dam construction site in Pakistan’s Balochistan
Updated 52 min 6 sec ago
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Five killed in attack on dam construction site in Pakistan’s Balochistan

Five killed in attack on dam construction site in Pakistan’s Balochistan
  • Baloch Liberation Army (BLA): ‘We accept responsibility for killing seven informers and instrumentalists in Panjgur, Kech and Quetta’
  • Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif: ‘Such cowardly attacks will not deter the government’s resolve to develop Balochistan’

QUETTA, Pakistan: Five people were killed in an attack by armed men on the construction site of a small dam in Pakistan’s southwestern Balochistan province, officials said on Tuesday, underscoring a worsening security situation in the mineral-rich area.
The province has seen an increase in strikes by separatist ethnic militants. This month, 21 miners working at privately run coal mines were killed in an attack.
“We accept responsibility for killing seven informers and instrumentalists in Panjgur, Kech and Quetta,” said separatist militant group the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) in a statement emailed to journalists.
A decades-long insurgency in Balochistan by separatists has led to frequent attacks against the government, army and Chinese interests in the region to press their demands for a share in regional resources.
China runs a strategic deepwater port as well as a gold and copper mine in the province and has been working with Islamabad to improve infrastructure in the underdeveloped province. Several attacks have targeted migrant workers employed by smaller, privately operated mines.
The five dead, and two wounded, all worked at the construction site in Panjgur, spokesperson for the Balochistan government Shahid Rind said in a statement, saying the attack took place late at night.
A police official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said close to a dozen assailants were involved in the attack and that the victims were watching over equipment at the dam construction site on behalf of a private contractor.
“Such cowardly attacks will not deter the government’s resolve to develop Balochistan,” Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said in a statement.
Besides the separatists, the region is also home to Islamist militants, who have become resurgent since 2022 after revoking a ceasefire with the government.


Norway to ask ICJ to clarify Israel’s aid obligations to Palestinians

Norway to ask ICJ to clarify Israel’s aid obligations to Palestinians
Updated 29 October 2024
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Norway to ask ICJ to clarify Israel’s aid obligations to Palestinians

Norway to ask ICJ to clarify Israel’s aid obligations to Palestinians
  • For more than seven decades, UNRWA has provided critical support to Palestinian refugees
  • Israel claims that a dozen UNRWA employees were involved in Oct. 7 attack

OSLO: Norway on Tuesday said it would ask the UN’s International Court of Justice to clarify Israel’s aid obligations to Palestinians, a day after Israel banned the UN agency for Palestinian refugees.
Despite international concerns, Israeli lawmakers on Monday overwhelmingly voted to bar the agency, UNRWA, from operating in Israel and east Jerusalem.
For more than seven decades, UNRWA has provided critical support to Palestinian refugees.
But it has faced mounting criticism from Israeli officials that has escalated since the start of the war in Gaza after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack.
Israel claims that a dozen UNRWA employees were involved in the deadly assault.
Norway said it was “requesting that the ICJ pronounces on Israel’s obligations to facilitate humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian population, delivered by international organizations, including the UN and states,” Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said in a statement.
He said Norway would submit a resolution to the UN General Assembly with the request that the ICJ give an advisory opinion on the matter.
Norway angered Israel in May when it recognized the Palestinian state, together with Ireland and Spain.
And, unlike other donors, it increased its aid to UNRWA in June despite the controversy over whether the agency’s employees were involved in the October 7 attack.
“The Israeli government’s policy is making it increasingly difficult for Palestinians to access life-saving assistance and basic services such as health care and education,” Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said in the same statement.
The UNRWA ban would have “severe consequences for millions of civilians already living in the most dire of circumstances,” he said, adding that it “also undermines the stability of the entire Middle East.”
“Israel’s behavior contravenes international law and undermines efforts to establish a viable Palestinian state and the two-state solution,” Barth Eide said.


Germany recalls envoy to Iran over execution of dual national

Germany recalls envoy to Iran over execution of dual national
Updated 29 October 2024
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Germany recalls envoy to Iran over execution of dual national

Germany recalls envoy to Iran over execution of dual national
  • Sharmahd, who also holds US residency, was sentenced to death in 2023 on charges of “corruption on earth,” a capital offense under Iran’s Islamic laws

BERLIN: Germany has recalled its ambassador to Iran over the execution of German Iranian national Jamshid Sharmahd and summoned the Iranian charge d’affaires to voice Berlin’s protest, the German foreign office said on Tuesday.

“We have sent our strongest protest against the actions of the Iranian regime & reserve the right to take further action,” the Foreign Ministry said in a post on X.

Germany’s ambassador in Tehran protested in the strongest possible terms against the killing of Sharmahd, the post said, adding that German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock had recalled the ambassador to Berlin for consultations. Iranian state media said on Monday Sharmahd was put to death after he was convicted of carrying out terrorist attacks. “No terrorist enjoys impunity in Iran. Even if supported by Germany,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said on X.

“Iranian national Jamshid Sharmahd openly and unashamedly led a terrorist attack on a mosque that killed 14 innocent people.”

Iranian state media reported on Tuesday that the German ambassador was summoned by the Foreign Ministry over “interventionist comments” made by German officials against the Iranian judiciary’s decision.

“Support for Sharmahd contradicts the German government’s claims in regards to the rule of law, the protection of human rights, and the fight against terrorism,” the Foreign Ministry said according to state media.

Sharmahd, who also holds US residency, was sentenced to death in 2023 on charges of “corruption on earth,” a capital offense under Iran’s Islamic laws.

He was accused by Iran of heading a pro-monarchist group accused of a deadly 2008 bombing and planning other attacks.

His daughter Gazelle Sharmahd, also on X, demanded proof of his execution and called for the immediate return of her father.