News Lelemuku

NEW YORK, LELEMUKU.COM - Reuters won two Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, one for an investigative report that revealed the massacre of 10 Muslim Rohingya men by Buddhist villagers and Myanmar security forces, and one for photographs of migrants on the U.S. border, the Pulitzer administrator announced.

The Pulitzers, the most prestigious prizes in American journalism, have been awarded since 1917 after being established in the will of newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer. The 18-member Pulitzer board is made up of past winners and other distinguished journalists and academics.

Reuters and the Associated Press were both awarded prizes for international reporting.

The Reuters entry featured an investigative report that revealed the massacre of 10 Muslim Rohingya men by Buddhist villagers and Myanmar security forces at the village of Inn Din, in the heart of the conflict zone of Rakhine State. The story can be read here.

Two young Reuters reporters, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, both Myanmar citizens, found a mass grave filled with bones sticking out of the ground. They went on to gather testimony from perpetrators, witnesses and families of victims. They obtained three devastating photographs from villagers: two showed the 10 Rohingya men bound and kneeling; the third showed the mutilated and bullet-ridden bodies of the same 10 men in the same shallow grave.

Before Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo could complete their story, they were arrested in December 2017 in what international observers have criticized as an effort by authorities to block the report. The article, "Massacre in Myanmar," was completed by colleagues Simon Lewis and Antoni Slodkowski and published in February of last year.

In September, they were sentenced to seven years behind bars. As of Monday, they have been in jail for 490 days.

In the breaking news photography category, 11 Reuters photographers contributed pictures to "On the Migrant Trail to America," a package of images of asylum seekers and others from Central America to the U.S. border.

One photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon showed migrants fleeing tear gas launched by U.S. authorities into Mexico at the San Diego-Tijuana border. In the image a mother grabs her twin daughters by the arm, one in diapers and wearing rubber sandals, the other barefoot, as a teargas canister emits its fumes.

In another image, an aerial photo, Mike Blake was the first to photograph the detention facility in Tornillo, Texas, where children walked in single file, like prisoners.

Goran Tomasevic captured an image in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, a city with one of the highest murder rates in the world, of a rooster scratching in the dirt next to the slain body of a Barrio 18 gang member. Tomasevic was a previous finalist for his pictures of the war in Syria. (VOA)

NAYPYITAW, LELEMUKU.CO - The U.N. refugee agency says it is worried by reports of people fleeing escalating violence in Myanmar's southern Chin State and Rakhine State, adding to growing instability in these regions.

The U.N. refugee agency says it cannot assess the scale of the current humanitarian situation in these volatile areas because it has little access to these and other regions in Myanmar.

But the UNHCR says reports it has received of the deteriorating security situation in southern Chin State and Rakhine State are very worrying. It says it does not know how many people have fled their homes and have become internally displaced since violence flared up there in December.

Additionally, in Rakhine State, UNHCR spokesman Andrej Mahecic said a number of Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh in search of asylum.

"We understand from some of the reports that some 200 people have sought shelter, have sought safety. This is reportedly in a very remote area where we do not really have access," he said.

More than 720,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to Bangladesh since August 2017 to escape persecution and violence in Myanmar. Because of previous refugee crises in Myanmar, Bangladesh currently is home to nearly one million Rohingya refugees.

The UNHCR praises the country's generosity and appeals to the authorities to continue to allow people fleeing violence in Myanmar to seek safety in Bangladesh.

Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, is a predominantly Buddhist country. It has a long history of tension with its ethnic minorities, much of it based on religion. Southern Chin State is the only State in Myanmar with a Christian majority. It also is the poorest and least developed region in the country.

The large Rohingya Muslim population in Rakhine State continues to suffer discrimination and repression from the majority Buddhist community. Though they have lived in Myanmar for generations, the Rohingya are denied citizenship and remain stateless. (VOA)