Htay Lwin Oo

Htay Lwin Oo is a Rohingya native to Myanmar. He spent the majority of his childhood between the Thandwe Township, where he was born, and the Gwa Township in Southern Rakhine State, where he attended Kyeintali High School. When he was in ninth grade, he began to take note of the widespread oppression that people were facing, such as the destruction of mosques from Taunggouk, Gwa and Kyeintali orchestrated by the government itself. He also watched some of his Muslim friends coerced into conversion to Buddhism. 

In 1986, Lwin Oo pursued a college education in Sittwe, studying Burmese language and literature. After years of witnessing these injustices perpetrated by his country’s own military government, he decided to participate in a democratic movement as a student leader in 1988. Two years later, he was told to leave the college and relocate to Yangon, where he made a living as a private tutor. With several of his students, he incorporated teachings of democracy and dictatorship opposition into their conversations. As his quiet activism strengthened and his devotion to the movement grew, Lwin Oo reunited with friends who had recently been released from prison. He collaborated with them to establish a means by which tapes of Aung San Suu Kyi’s speeches, which advocated democracy, could be secretly issued to individuals across the country.

Shortly after, Lwin Oo was warned several times by military intelligence General Shwe Win that his recent actions had caught the military’s attention and that he was being very closely monitored. Despite these warnings, Lwin Oo persisted in his activist efforts. He was consequently arrested in November 1997 under the accusation of conspiring with the exiled activist group Students’ Army. His interrogation upon being taken into the custody of law enforcement consisted of severe beatings with a leather belt. He was held in a cell in the Eastern Yangon jail for a total of 27 days before being released due to his connections with police officers who were his former students. As several of his colleagues began to be arrested and tortured, Lwin Oo was advised to leave Burma. Obeying his close friends’ pleas to flee the country, Lwin Oo moved to Thailand, where he collaborated with human rights advocates to file reports of the injustices he has witnessed to the United Nations.

In June 2003, Lwin Oo was once again arrested, this time in Thailand, where he faced deportation back to Burma, which would almost certainly lead to his death. While in prison, his political activism was broadcasted by several media outlets and subsequently gained popularity, placing pressure on the US Embassy in Thailand to send him to the United States rather than to imminent death back in Burma. Accepting this demand, Lwin Oo was resettled in America in May 2004.

Between 2004 and 2008, he was the general secretary for the Democratic Burmese Community in upstate New York. Lwin Oo primarily learned English upon arrival in the US through his job as a waiter. In 2009, he opened his own grocery store, Golden Burma, which has assisted his efforts in social justice activism. He has collaborated with nongovernmental organizations, such as United to End Genocide. Later, he gathered Burmese Muslim activists internationally in order to establish the Burmese Muslim Association (BMA). 

Htay Lwin Oo’s ongoing activism not only advocates democratic governance in Burma but also the elimination of Rohingya oppression in the nation. In September 2013, police and the 969 Movement (an anti-Muslim Buddhist nationalist movement) beat Lwin Oo’s family, burned down his home, and burned down six other Rohingya houses. In October 2015, a civil lawsuit was filed by Htay Lwin Oo, along with the Burma Task Force and several Muslim organizations, against Myanmar President Thein Sein and five of Myanmar’s current and former officials for the "hate crimes and discrimination amounting to genocide" perpetrated by "the Burman Buddhist supremacist government." Htay Lwin Oo, one of the plaintiffs, sued for the religious and ethnic persecution that he and the Rohingya were forced to endure and their inability to obtain citizenship.

In August 2017, Lwin Oo spoke with New York congresswoman Claudia Tenney about taking steps to combat the Rohingya genocide. In 2018, he attended a convention on Myanmar's ongoing genocide with BMA. In addition to his countless other efforts to restore Rohingya rights and bring democracy to Burma, he has also participated in a number of live streams in the past year spreading awareness on the matter.