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![The US is displeased with Myanmar's discrimination against the Muslim Rohingya [Xinhua]](http://thebricspost.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/235255046_81-e1416002470237.jpg)
The US is displeased with Myanmar’s discrimination against the Muslim Rohingya [Xinhua]
The plan, known as the Rakhine State Action plan named after the western state where most of the minority live, is designed to possibly award citizenship to nearly 1.1 million Muslim Rohingya on the condition they identify themselves as Bengalis.
The Rohingya, who to this day are considered stateless, are of Bangladeshi origins but have lived in Myanmar for generations.
According to the plan, those Rohingya who refuse to be identified as Bengalis will be housed in the camps.
Rhodes, who is accompanying US President Barack Obama on a trip to attend a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian (ASEAN) countries, said that the Rohingya should be able to become citizens through “a normal process without having to do that type of self-identification”.
But it was Obama who had the strongest words for the Myanmary government.
During a meeting with pro-democracy and pro-reform activist Aung San Suu Kyi, Obama said Myanmar must end its discrimination of the Rohingya.
“Discrimination against a Rohingya or any other religious minority, I think, does not express the kind of country that Burma over the long term wants to be,” Obama told a news conference in the capital Yangon.
In the past two years, hundreds of Muslim Rohingya have been killed by mobs in Rakhine; at least 100,000 have fled the area for fear for further persecution.
Obama said he would push Myanmar officials to recognize the universal rights of all peoples in the country.
