April 30, 2016

The battle over the word ‘Rohingya’

Hundreds of people gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in Rangoon, Burma, on Thursday with a simple demand: The United States must stop using the word "Rohingya."

"It is already clear that there is no such ethnicity as Rohingya in our country," a protester named Win Zaw Zaw Latt told Anadolu Agency before the demonstration. "We demand the U.S. as well as Western countries and the E.U. to stop using the term Rohingya."

To most of the world, the Rohingya are a Bengali-speaking Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Burma, also known as Myanmar. More than 1 million Rohingya are thought to live in Burma, the majority of them in Rakhine state, along the western border with Bangladesh and India. Despite the size and long-standing presence of this community, the government does not consider its members Burmese citizens. (Courtesy of The Washington Post)

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