The photojournalist Danish Siddiqui was shot dead last week while documenting the Taliban offensive in Afghanistan. His award-winning work for Reuters spanned some of the world’s most era-defining crises.
He said: ‘I shoot for the common man who wants to see and feel a story from a place where he can’t be present himself.’
Siddiqui leaves behind his wife, Rike, and two children. And a breathtaking body of work
Category Archives: Rohingya
Hungary’s LGBT protests and Juneteenth Day: human rights this fortnight – in pictures
A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms from China to Colombia
Continue reading...UN put Rohingya ‘at risk’ by sharing data without consent, says rights group
Refugees tell Human Rights Watch they fear forced repatriation and persecution after personal details passed on to Myanmar
The UN may have put hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees at risk of persecution or involuntary repatriation back to Myanmar after improperly collecting and sharing refugees’ personal information with Bangladesh, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW), which is urging an investigation.
Over the past three years, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has registered more than 800,000 Rohingya refugees living in Bangladeshi camps in order to provide them with identity cards needed to access essential aid and services.
Continue reading...UK accused of a ‘abandoning’ Rohingya with ‘catastrophic’ 40% aid cut
Children in overcrowded Cox’s Bazar settlement likely to suffer most from reduced humanitarian spending, say campaigners
The government has been accused of abandoning Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh after cutting aid to the humanitarian response by more than 40%.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) pledged £27.6m to the humanitarian sector’s joint response plan launched this week, compared with £47.5m last year.
Continue reading...‘I’ve lost everything once again’: Rohingya recount horror of Cox’s Bazar blaze
Refugees caught up in the deadly blaze describe panic and despair after fire tore through the Balukhali area on Monday
Marium Khatun, 40, was feeding her 10-month-old son at home when she first saw the fire and smoke nearby. Realising a huge blaze was ripping through the Cox’s Bazar refugee camp just metres from her two-room shack, she panicked.
“I suddenly noticed people were running, scattered on the road in front of my house. I came to the door and saw this huge fire around 30 metres (100ft) away from my house. I couldn’t think straight.
Continue reading...Hundreds of people missing after Rohingya refugee camp fire
At least 15 people killed as blaze spread across Bangladesh camp of about 124,000 refugees from Myanmar
Hundreds of people are missing with at least 15 confirmed dead, including three children, after a fire tore through a camp for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.
The toll was exacerbated by barbed wire fencing that caged refuges into areas of the sprawling Balukhali camp that were going up in flames, aid workers said.
Continue reading...Hundreds of people missing after fire in Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh – video
At least 15 people have been killed and another 400 are missing after a fire tore through Balukhali camp near Cox’s Bazar late on Monday. More than 17,000 shelters were destroyed, leaving 45,000 people displaced. Emergency services, volunteers and Red Cross staff worked for several hours to control the blaze. The camp houses about 124,000 people, although the surrounding area shelters approximately 1 million Rohingya refugees
Continue reading...Bangladesh: ‘massive’ fire in Rohingya refugee camps forces 20,000 to flee
- 1 million who fled Myanmar live in camps in Cox’s Bazar
- No reports of deaths or injuries so far
At least 20,000 Rohingya have fled a huge blaze engulfing shanty homes at refugee camps in south-eastern Bangladesh, officials said on Monday, in the third fire to hit the settlements in four days.
Nearly 1 million of the Muslim minority from Myanmar live in cramped and squalid conditions at the camps in the Cox’s Bazar district, with many fleeing a military crackdown in their homeland in 2017.
Continue reading...‘Falling off a cliff’: pandemic crippling world’s most fragile states, finds report
The world’s poorest are becoming poorer as the impact of Covid compounds existing crises, says Disaster Emergency Comittee
Thousands could starve in the world’s most fragile states as the pandemic comes on top of existing crises, warns a new report today which found aid workers are deeply pessimistic about the coming year.
The survey of aid workers by the Disaster Emergency Committee (DEC) found that they believed humanitarian conditions were at their worst in a decade.
Continue reading...Pro-choice protests in Warsaw and Myanmar coup: 20 photos on human rights this week
A roundup of the best photography on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Algeria to Uganda
Fears for Rohingya stranded at sea for 10 days, as engines fail and eight die
UN calls for boat to be rescued, saying ‘immediate action’ needed to ‘prevent further tragedy’
The United Nations refugee agency has called for the immediate rescue of a group of Rohingya refugees adrift in their boat in the Andaman Sea without food or water, many of them ill and suffering from extreme dehydration.
The UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) said it did not know the exact location of the vessel and understood that some passengers had died. The boat had left southern Bangladesh about 10 days ago and experienced engine failure, it said.
Continue reading...‘We cannot hope for anything good’: Myanmar coup sparks despair for Rohingya
While Aung San Suu Kyi defended a genocidal campaign against the Muslim minority, refugees fear military rule will end dreams of a return home
For the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar, news of the fall of Aung San Suu Kyi after the military coup was bittersweet.
After all, no community had felt more betrayed by Myanmar’s civilian leader. When she came to power in 2015, the belief was that she would overturn decades of persecution and finally bring about peace and citizenship, following in the footsteps of her father, Gen Aung San.
Continue reading...‘There is no noise’: inside the controversial Bhasan Char refugee camp – a photo essay
Amid concern from charities and NGOs, Bangladesh is relocating Rohinghya refugees to a remote island. One resident describes his new life there
I wanted to come here. No one forced me, and my wife also agreed in a snap.
To be honest, though, I didn’t tell my brother. He lives where I used to live – Kutupalong camp. He is very against this island for some reason. He might have tried to stop me coming if I dared to discuss the topic. So I didn’t. I only told him after I arrived. I was amazed that he didn’t yell at me.
Continue reading...Calls for release of man arrested photographing transfer of Rohingyas
Bangladesh authorities under pressure from rights activists including Bianca Jagger over detention of Abul Karam
Bangladesh authorities are facing calls to release a Rohingya man arrested while photographing the transfer of refugees to a controversial island camp this week.
Abul Kalam, 35, has been held since Monday morning when he was reportedly beaten before being taken to police barracks near the Kutupalong refugee camp, where he has lived since leaving Myanmar as a child refugee in the early 1990s.
Continue reading...Bangladesh moves more Rohingyas to remote island despite rights concerns
Activists say the island of Bhasan Char is not safe and that the refugees are being moved against their will
Bangladesh has begun moving the second group of Rohingya refugees from crammed camps in Cox’s Bazar to a remote island in the Bay of Bengal, in defiance of safety and security concerns from international rights advocates.
Groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) have urged the Bangladeshi government to halt the relocation of Rohingya to Bhasan Char, which is hours by boat from the mainland, flood-prone, vulnerable to frequent cyclones and could be completely submerged during a high tide.
Continue reading...Bangladesh begins moving Rohingya families to remote island
Operation to move 2,500 families begins despite safety concerns and lack of consent from refugees
Bangladesh has begun moving Rohingya families from camps near the Myanmar border to a settlement on a remote island, despite concerns about its safety and a lack of consent from the refugees.
More than 1,600 Rohingya refugees set sail on Friday from Bangladesh’s southern port of Chittagong for the remote island of Bhasan Char in the Bay of Bengal, a naval official said, Reuters reported.
Continue reading...Aung San Suu Kyi expected to keep power in Myanmar election
‘Mother Suu’ remains popular despite coronavirus, conflict in Rakhine state and genocide charges
Voters across Myanmar have gone to the polls for an election that is expected to return to power the party of Aung San Suu Kyi, who remains hugely popular at home despite allegations of a genocide that have destroyed her reputation abroad.
Queues of people waited in line, in some cases for hours, to cast their ballots on Sunday in the country’s second general election since the end of full military rule. Most were wearing masks as a precaution against the coronavirus. The country has confirmed more than 60,000 infections, the majority of which were reported since mid-August.
Continue reading...Myanmar minorities, including Rohingya, excluded from voting in election
Rights groups say poll, which Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD is expected to win, is ‘fundamentally flawed’
Myanmar is preparing to go to the polls for the country’s second general election since the end of full military rule, a vote that is expected to return Aung San Suu Kyi to power, but will exclude about 2.6 million ethnic-minority voters.
While Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy rose to victory on a wave of optimism in 2015, this year’s elections are overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic, an economic crisis and intense conflict in parts of the country – where the military has been accused of atrocities reminiscent of those inflicted on Rohingya in 2017.
Continue reading...Gang violence erupts in Bangladesh Rohingya camps forcing families to flee
Fighting leaves seven dead as rival factions fight for control of drugs trade and terrorise vulnerable refugees
Fighting between rival gangs in the Rohingya refugee settlements in Bangladesh has forced hundreds of people to leave their shelters in a week where at least seven have died.
“When it is night, it becomes hell. When you try to sleep you hear a lot of firing, you hear a lot of bullets, people are screaming, people are fleeing from home,” said a Rohingya refugee who lives close to where the fighting has taken place.
Continue reading...Justice and the Rohingya people are the losers in Asia’s new cold war
Attacks against the Muslim minority in Myanmar have gone unchecked as regional players focus on their own interests
The persecution, ethnic cleansing, and attempted genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s Rakhine state is an affront to the rule of law, a well-documented atrocity and, according to a top international lawyer, a moral stain on “our collective conscience and humanity”. So why are the killings and other horrors continuing while known perpetrators go unpunished?
It’s a question with several possible answers. Maybe poor, isolated Myanmar, formerly Burma, is not important enough a state to warrant sustained international attention. Perhaps, in the western subconscious, the lives of a largely unseen, unknown, brown-skinned Muslim minority do not matter so much at a time of multiple racial, ethnic and refugee crises.
Continue reading...