Yangon Informer

Next bigots in Myanmar will try to claim that Rohingya are invading the ocean to establish and Islamic ocean.

Bangladesh's state sovereignty extends far to the south. An entire 'maritime province' was added to the country in 2014, when an international tribunal allocated a large chunk of the Bay of Bengal to Bangladesh. As a result, the country's territory expanded by 80 percent. Studies of Bangladesh are still weak in this region.

Read the full interview. Link in the comments.

“One major reason the Rakhine lost their land in Patuakhali is that successive cyclones physically washed away all their original deeds and land records,” Mustafa Majid said. “Once their documentation was lost, it opened the floodgates.”

He said officials and influential residents had used fraudulent auctions, false mutations and forged documents to claim Rakhine property.

“The Barisal Settlement Office essentially operated as a factory for fraudulent auctions,” he said. “Through anonymous listings, fake name-mutations (namjari), and systemic forgery, government officials and influential locals colluded to strip the Rakhine of their ancestral land.”

A 2024 survey by Caritas Barisal Region found that 41 of the 44 remaining Rakhine villages in Patuakhali and Barguna were involved in land-related court cases.

The quiet erasure of the Rakhine Villages, monasteries and cemeteries have been occupied or erased as one of the country’s smallest indigenous communities retreats into a point of no return.

Thailand’s ruling class cares about two things when it comes to Myanmar: cheap Burmese migrant labor (and keeping it cheap), and cheap natural gas from Burma’s offshore gas fields.

Thailand’s ruling class gives precisely zero f***s about democracy in Myanmar (or in Thailand, for that matter).

Thailand has welcomed a meeting between an International Committee of the Red Cross representative and detained Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi, describing it as a positive development. Thai officials expressed hope that Myanmar will take further steps toward lasting peace and stability. The meeting comes amid ongoing diplomatic engagement between Thailand, Myanmar and regional partners, highlighting Thailand’s continued interest in promoting dialogue and stability in the region.

Listen to the story or get the full story in the 1st comment.

Wild.

"Non-violence is a piece of theatre. You need an audience. What can you do when you have no audience? People have the right to resist annihilation." - Arundhati Roy

My Thai professor told us that Shwedagon is made of Thai gold from Ayutthaya. They are still mad.

Bencharat Chua is a Thai academic and human rights activist who has spent more than twenty-five years working along the Thailand–Myanmar border, studying displacement, nationalism, education, and the long psychological afterlife of conflict between the two countries. In this conversation, she traces how anti-Burmese sentiment in Thailand was never simply inherited naturally from the past, but deliberately cultivated through modern state-building projects: textbooks, television dramas, war films, political rhetoric, and school curricula repeating the same story again and again — that the Burmese destroyed Ayutthaya, looted its gold, burned its beauty to the ground, and humiliated the Thai kingdom.

Listen: https://insightmyanmar.org/complete-shows/2026/5/14/episode-536-the-fire-next-door

She says this in "The Fire Next Door" while explaining how deeply that narrative still lives inside Thai consciousness. The destruction of Ayutthaya happened more than three centuries ago, yet generations of Thai students were raised inside a political mythology that keeps the wound permanently alive. Not only in classrooms, but in blockbuster historical films funded by the state, in television series portraying Burmese invaders as barbaric enemies, in nationalist storytelling that turns old imperial wars into emotional fuel for modern politics. The ruins of Ayutthaya remain standing as physical evidence of that memory, and around those ruins, an entire cultural imagination was built: civilized Thailand violated by the foreign aggressor next door.

What Bencharat is describing is larger than Thailand and Myanmar alone. It is the way states manufacture emotional history in order to shape the present. The past becomes a reservoir of grievance that can always be reopened when nationalism is needed, when borders harden, when migrants arrive, when fear must be redirected outward. And what makes her reflection so unsettling is that she is speaking as someone who watched those inherited narratives begin to crack after the 2021 coup, when young Thai activists suddenly saw Myanmar not as the ancient enemy from their textbooks, but as fellow human beings resisting military rule under impossible conditions. For a brief moment, centuries of propaganda collided with living reality. And reality proved harder to contain.

“Marxism offers the kind of subversive truths that cause fear and trembling among the high and mighty, those who live atop a mountain of lies.”

Michael Parenti, Blackshirts & Reds - Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism