Myanmar's military engaged in "extensive and systematic" preparations for a bloody crackdown on Rohingya Muslims, a rights group have said, in a damning new report that it says justifies a genocide investigation.

The global community stood transfixed as the story of the Moo Pa football team and their coach who found themselves trapped in a Chiang Rai cave complex in Northern Thailand unfolded. The world was with them every step of the way as an international group of rescuers weighed the options, prepared for the mission, lost a member, and later led the boys and their coach one by one out to safety. Their plight also caught the attention of the football world.

As Muslims worldwide celebrate the end of fasting for the holy month of Ramadan, a growing diaspora of Rohingya face the prospect of observing their faith under squalid, cramped conditions in refugee camps such as Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.Dubbed the most persecuted peoples in the world, the Rohingya are an Indo-Aryan speaking people from the Rakhine state in Myanmar, with Islamic influences tracing from intermarriage and conversion by Arab traders in the eighth and ninth centuries.The Rohing

On 6 June 2018, the government of Myanmar and the United Nations (UN) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on assistance for the repatriation of displaced persons from Rakhine State. Ever since the latest round of violence against the Rohingya occurred in August last year, more than 650,000 Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar, crossing the border into Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.

Armed Rohingya militants have been responsible for at least one – and potentially two – massacres of up to 99 Hindu women, men, and children, according to Amnesty International. They also committed unlawful killings and abductions of Hindu villagers in August 2017. The London based non-governmental organisation (NGO) revealed this after a detailed investigation inside Myanmar’s Rakhine State was carried out.

“Where is ASEAN?”. This is the question that Charles Santiago, chairperson of the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR), heard the most when he was in Bangladesh recently. Earlier this year, Charles led a team of current and former legislators from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand on a fact-finding mission to Bangladesh.

The recent repatriation deal between Bangladesh and Myanmar has been put on hold amid widespread criticism from human rights groups. Bangladesh and Myanmar signed a pact in November last year agreeing on the repatriation of its Rohingya refugees.

Bangladesh on Sunday sought to reassure the international community that a planned repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims to conflict-scarred western Myanmar would be "voluntary" and in coordination with the United Nations.In a briefing to foreign diplomats, Bangladesh Foreign Minister A.H Mahmood Ali insisted that the operation to return some 750,000 refugees who fled unrest and a military crackdown in Myanmar would involve the UN's refugee agency."In o

Bangladesh has counted more than a million Rohingya refugees living in camps near the border with Myanmar, higher than previous estimates, the head of its registration project said Wednesday as preparations for their return got under way.The Bangladesh army began biometric registering of the refugees last year after the latest mass influx of Rohingya from Myanmar, where the Muslim minority have faced decades of persecution.The registration is aimed partly at aiding repatriation of the refugee

Rohingya Muslims who fled a village where Myanmar has admitted its forces helped massacre 10 people said Thursday the victims were all civilians, not fighters as asserted by the army. The Myanmar army chief's office confirmed Wednesday that security forces took part in killing "Bengali terrorists" on September 2 in the village of Inn Din in Rakhine state, using a pejorative term for Rohingya. It was the first time Myanmar had admitted abuses during an army-led