The longstanding Rohingya crisis in Myanmar has generated massive human rights violations, becoming a humanitarian disaster. It is not only an internal matter for Myanmar, as it has destabilized the regional tranquility of South and Southeast Asia and triggered a global outcry. In this article, I will illustrate why major states, such as China, India, Russia, and the US, have adopted a policy of overlooking the Rohingya crisis. I have intentionally excluded the potential for a prominent leadership role from the already fragile Muslim world because of both their general absence from the central world leadership and their preoccupation with their own domestic crises. The Rohingya are the largest community among eight prominent Muslim groups in Myanmar and have lived in its Rakhine State (formerly Arakan) for generations. They are envisaged by the nation’s government and Buddhist population as illegal Bengali immigrants who came from what is …

After fresh re-election, Barack Obama skipped Europe. And no one is surprised. Instead, he made his first foreign trip to Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia and Thailand, thus clearly indicating the priorities of US foreign policy in the next four years.

For the first time since the massacre of protesting monks in 2007, Myanmar is suddenly in the news. The National League for Democracy (NLD)  has recently won 43 of 45 seats contested in a recent by-election and their leader and pro-democracy icon Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, beat her rival, former military doctor U Soe Min of the Junta-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP), in Kawhmu township just outside Yangon. These are the first significant multiparty elections in Myanmar in over twenty years and the results haven’t been simply annulled as they were last time. The NLD even won all four seats in the newly built capital, Naypiyadaw, where powerful men (they are all men) from the military establishment form over …