Myanmar

If you haven’t seen the movie, don’t spoil it here — watch it first, then come back. There are a substantial amount of films with the same rough outline: a protagonist is caught up in some violent conflict, is forced to stay or live among a more “tribal” people, and learns that what many consider […]

In contrast to the devastating drought in Afghanistan, Myanmar/Burma has been experiencing intensely heavy monsoons recently. The rainy season comes every year around this time, and every once in a while it is particularly bad — in 2015, 100 people were killed, and 330,000 people were driven from their homes. This year, so far approximately […]

Horrific violence has affected Myanmar/Burma for longer than any civil war in modern history. The violence has its own obvious effects — the people who suffer the incredible trauma of, for example, having their infant children dashed across trees. And in these domestic conflicts, there are many tangential effects. For example, when violence plagues an […]

Two Reuters journalists are on trial in Myanmar/Burma, under a colonial-era Official Secrets Act, arrested while they were working on an investigative piece on a massacre of 10 Rohingya men in the village of Inn Din. They have been fighting a legal battle that has caught the world’s attention ever since, especially as a milestone case […]

In December 2017, two Reuters journalists were arrested in Myanmar/Burma, by the names of Ko Wa Lone and Ko Kyaw Soe Oo. They had been reporting on the violence in Rakhine State in regards to the violence against the Rohingya. The story they were specifically working on was of a mass grave where 10 Rohingya men […]

When I was in Burma on my first trip, we had a guide leading us through the jungle who seemed to know every inch of the place. This was before my military experience, and I was fairly young and certainly dumb, but I did my best to follow all instructions laid out by light hearted, […]

The Rohingya are a Muslim majority people who have been forced to flee to the border of Bangladesh — approximately 700,000 people (90% of Rohingya in Rakhine State, Burma/Myanmar) have left their homes due to the recent conflict. Many of these people are only able to carry what they have on them at the time. […]

Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar/Burma, Yanghee Lee, spoke to the U.N. Human Rights Council on Wednesday. She said that, “I strongly recommend the persons allegedly responsible for the violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law be investigated and prosecuted by the ICC or a credible mechanism.” The […]

Human trafficking exists in virtually every country in some form or another. The easiest targets tend to be the most vulnerable ones — that could mean vulnerable in their life situation (for example, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reported that 88% of their endangered runaways are missing from social services), or it could […]

The Rohingya refugee camps run along the border of Bangladesh and Burma/Myanmar. There are approximately one million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, and many have been scrambling to prepare for the rainy season. The rains have come, and flooding has begun to devastate many of these communities — the majority of these refugees have only arrived […]

The fighting in Burma/Myanmar continues. The Rohingya are still in danger, as almost 700,000 of them have fled from their homes into refugee camps along the border of Bangladesh. However, now the Burmese military has shifted many of their efforts back to the Kachin, another ethnic minority that resides in the northern parts of the […]

The Burmese/Myanmar government has garnered intense international scrutiny with their handling of the Rohingya people. The conflict, which has been going on for decades and has begotten militant and civilian casualties on both sides, is nothing new. However, after some specific attacks on police checkpoints, the Burmese government decided to accelerate their offensives which escalated […]