Rohingya People - Importance for You

1. Short overview of the documentary

The documentary is all about the miserable living condition of Rohingya people who are denied by the Myanmar government as legal citizens in Myanmar, facing tortures and brutal violence from army. The journalist tries to interview different parties like Myanmar legal citizens, the Rohingya leaders and citizens, and officers, to bring us a broad view of this horrific human rights violation in Myanmar.

1. Research question of thesis statement

The main point of the documentary is about disclosing the brutality and anti-human crimes from Myanmar police and army towards the Rohingya race.

1. Arguments provided to support the question and thesis statement

1. Citizenship of Rohingya was abolished by the government in 1982 through the historical evidence indicating they were supposed to be part of Myanmar for centuries
2. Videotapes showing how their houses were burnt down and images showing how brutal and intolerable the way people got slain
3. Rohingya’s religion Muslim were not allowed in Myanmar. Churches are barricaded, and Muslim clerics were facing death threats from the authority
4. Rohingya people were banished to the outskirt of the country like Maungdaw. The connection with outside was cut and severely supervised by Myanmar soldiers. They could not get enough food, safe water, medicine to cure their terrible disease, and education. They were chilling in the cold air with no enough cloth and sleeping on the ground.
5. Buddhism was the country religion. Even though they claimed they felt sorry for those people, they tool an indifferent attitude towards what those Rohingya suffering, saying their history in Myanmar was just a lie, and encouraging them to go to 57 Islamic countries for support. They did not even try to sway the government to help those poor Rohingya but supporting in silence.

1. Data or evidence provides to support the argument

1. Before 1948, Rohingya were recognized as citizens in Myanmar. In 1962, the view of Rohingya as a legal part of citizenship changed. In 1982, the citizenship law was revised to go against the legal existence of Rohingya in Myanmar.
2. In 2017, the Muslim churches were strictly barricaded by the Myanmar soldiers. No one could access without the permission from the government
3. Since 2012, the Rohingya were facing death threats like slaughtering on street or house got burnt down. They had no choice but move to the outskirt of Myanmar for survival, where they built up their camp which was barricaded by barbed wire and guarded by the Myanmar soldiers.
4. The white card used to be a license for Rohingya people to have citizenship rights before 2012. But the government abolished it after 2015. They forced Rohingya people to hand in their white cards and calling them as Bengali invaders.
5. The entry of certain areas like Maungdaw was strictly supervised by the government and hardly could you access without the permission documents from the government. They tried to hide how horrific and abdominal the situations were out there from the media.

1. How information and data was collected

They were collected mostly by the journalists asking questions on different parties. She collected from both two main parties and the third parties by interviewing them face to face

1. Strengths and weaknesses of the argument

1. Strengths: Information were collected in an immediate way from both parties. The whole documentary did not have any subjective arguments or analysis, simply delivering information to the audiences and leaving us to have our own ideas. They did not hide anything from us, we could also see they violence behavior from the Rohingya armed group in killing policies from Myanmar.
2. Weaknesses: No prominent weaknesses in my opinion. Maybe they shall provide more information from Myanmar government perspective, like why they felt like the conflict between their two parties were dissolvable. Or a third-party historian’s information on whether the Rohingya was truly belong to Myanmar (since we could only head this information from Rohingya people’s mouth)      

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