Social development
Ethnic minorities and indigenous people
River Festival comes close to capital for first time
For the first time in four years the annual Mekong River Festival and multi-sport gala, a celebratory event to pay tribute to Asia’s seventh longest river, is to be held within easy distance of Phnom Penh. Running from March 9-11, the fourth edition of the ...
H S Manjunath
Deal on Rohingya repatriation inches forward, but hurdles remain
Myanmar and Bangladesh said Thursday that they had moved one step closer to the possible repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh over the past three months.More than 620,000 Rohingya, a mainly Muslim ethnic minority in Myanmar, have flooded ...
Hannah Beech
UN chief calls Myanmar's Rohingya crisis 'catastrophic' as Security Council condemns violence
In a rare rebuke, the United Nations Security Council has “expressed deep concern” about the situation in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, where over 370,000 Rohingya Muslims have been forced to flee across the border to Bangladesh to escape increasing levels of violence.In a statement issued Wednesday, ...
Ray Sanchez, Ben Westcott, and Jamie Tarabay
U.N. warns of catastrophe as Myanmar Rohingya exodus nears 150,000
Nearly 150,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh in less than two weeks, officials said on Wednesday after the United Nations chief warned there is a risk of ethnic cleansing in the former Burma that could destabilise the wider region.Myanmar leader Aung San Suu ...
Wa Lone and Simon Lewis
‘Indigenous peoples are the best guardians of world's biodiversity’
Today is the United Nations’ (UN) International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, numbering an estimated 370 million in 90 countries and speaking roughly 7,000 languages. To mark it, the Guardian interviews Kankanaey Igorot woman Victoria Tauli-Corpuz about the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of ...
New plan to boost community involvement in mining concessions
The government intends to draw up a new master plan on the mining industry in which regulations on ore processing and community participation will be tightened, according to a national policy committee.However, it remains uncertain if Akara Resources, formerly the largest gold mine operator in ...
Indigenous communities resisting dams in Indonesia claim they face repression, rights abuses
In October 2014, when developers entered Seko and Central Seko to begin preliminary work on a 480-megawatt hydroelectric dam, the communities living there say no one asked their permission. The area, in the Seko Subdistrict of North Luwu, in the southern part of Indonesia’s Sulawesi ...
Second 21st-century Panglong conference to begin on May 24
The Joint Implementation Coordination Meeting between the government and signatory groups, participants agreed to hold the Second 21st Century Panglong Conference beginning on May 24. The agreement was reached during a meeting in Nay Pyi Taw on April 24 between the government, Tatmadaw officials and armed ...
Hearing Myanmar: teaching artistry in Yangon
Community music center Gitameit’s brand new three-story building has just been finished. It sits with fresh concrete and sparkling glass right beside the center’s old, slightly ramshackle building in a small plot on a quiet road of Yangon’s Yankin Township. Gitameit’s music library—a collection of records, ...
Asylum seeker family awaiting deportation
The asylum applications of all but three Montagnards in Phnom Penh have been rejected, though an appeal window remains open for the group, an official said yesterday, as the government prepares to repatriate at least four members of the ethnic minority back to Vietnam. Yesterday’s ...
