🇲🇲 As global calamities pile up, UNHCR worries for the Rohingya
Min Aung Hlaing's invite to Beijing's BRI fun fest must've gotten lost in the mail
Hello friends!
I am being SMASHED by Indonesia’s presidential election this morning so just pretend you didn’t notice that Thailand has not been included today. We’ll catch up with it tomorrow ✌️
See you then,
Erin Cook
🇲🇲 In a dark world, Rohingya are begging for light
Please, don’t forget about Myanmar’s Rohingya refugees. That’s the message from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees this week as conflict and environmental devastation elsewhere dominate the news cycle.
"It is important in this troubled world in which we live not to forget existing crises. The people who are impacted by the crisis — in this case, the Rohingya and countries hosting them, first and foremost, Bangladesh — would be penalised by this shift of attention,” Filippo Grandi told reporters in Bangkok yesterday, as reported by Nikkei Asia.
Speaking to Reuters, Grandi said the agency had secured just 42% of the US$875.9 million annual budget needed to safely house Rohingya refugees. “This decline in humanitarian assistance makes it more difficult to continuously, for example, renew the shelters. You have to invest money all the time and that money is becoming short, so conditions are now beginning to regress,” he told the wire.
While talks about safe repatriation bumble along, he called for more help from the international community: “What I have asked the participants in this meeting is to make big pledges in support of the Rohingya refugees: open policies for the host countries, contributions for the donor countries and for everybody else across the world, and attention by the international community,” Grandi told the Associated Press.
Three signatories ditched an event in Naypyitaw hosted by the military to mark the eight-year anniversary of a multilateral cease-fire between armed ethnic groups and the military. The AP notes the event is the first to be held between the militias and the military since the 2021 coup. Ethnic Armed Organisations in Myanmar get very complicated, very quickly and I’ll confess I’m not across it. This piece is fantastic as an explainer, however, so click through.
Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing might be feeling the burn. He’s one of few leaders to not be invited to Beijing for the Belt and Road Initiative Forum, which began yesterday. The Irrawaddy reports junta officials have been hard at work lobbying Beijing for an invite, but it never came through. “Badly in need of legitimacy abroad and respect at home, the regime saw the forum as a major public relations opportunity. But China evidently could not be persuaded,” the Irrawaddy writes.
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