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Burmese Muslims in crisis, relief group says
February 18, 2010
National Post: A violent crackdown against stateless Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh is forcing thousands of people to flee in fear, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) officials say.
More than 6,000 people have fled to a makeshift camp on the Bangladesh-Burma border since October – 2,000 of them arriving in January alone – says Paul Critchley, MSF’s head of mission in Bangladesh.
“Stateless Rohingya in Bangladesh are currently victim to unprecedented levels of violence and attempts at forced repatriation,” he said.
“Reports of people being pushed back across the border to meet an unknown fate are many. Attempts at forced repatriation by the Bangladesh Border Security forces are well documented by the local media and are repeated in stories of unregistered Rohingya throughout the Cox’s Bazar district [along the Burmese border].”
The Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority group from Burma, are probably among the world’s most destitute and persecuted refugees. Originally from the costal state of Arakan, they have been deprived of Burmese citizenship since 1982 and are regularly persecuted and exploited by the military government.
Rohingya in Burma are forbidden to own land and need government permission to marry or travel. They are also prohibited from practising their Muslim faith and denied access to public education or health services.
They are regularly harassed and driven from their homes and frequently forced to work as slave labour for the Burmese military.
Not surprisingly, hundreds of thousands of them have fled, most crossing over to Bangladesh, where they have set up huge squatters’ camps in the Cox’s Bazar and Banderban districts near the border.
However, overcrowded and impoverished Bangladesh refuses to recognize them as legitimate refugees, and regards all but 28,000 of the nearly 500,000 Rohingya now living in the country as illegal migrants.
As a result, most Rohingya in Bangladesh live in impoverished desperation.
“They remain trapped in a desperate situation with no future, vulnerable to neglect, abuse and manipulation, and to the kind of intense violent crackdowns they are suffering right now,” MSF says in a report released today.
The recent Bangladeshi crackdown on undocumented and unrecognized Rohingya is creating a “humanitarian catastrophe,” MSF warns.
Prevented from working and denied the food aid given recognized refugees, the Rohingya are regarded by Bangladesh as a burden and a threat to the local job market. Their unpopularity, “fuelled by local media, makes them an easy punch ball for unscrupulous local politicians wishing to score points,” the report says.
Since Bangladesh began trying to round up unwanted Rohingya last fall, MSF officials, who have provided medical services in Bangladesh since 1992, have seen a surge in Rohingya being treated for beatings, machete wounds and rape.
The sudden new surge of Rohingya into a makeshift camp at Kutupalong, near the Burma border, has also set alarm bells ringing.
Last March, an MSF survey of more 20,000 unrecognized refugees there found 90% were “severely food insecure.”
“Malnutrition and mortality rates were past emergency thresholds and people had little access to safe drinking water, sanitation or medical care,” the MSF report says.
In just one month, MSF doctors documented more than 1,000 malnourished children and treated more than 4,000 children under age five.
But since October the Kutupalong camp has grown by 25% and now has more undocumented refugees than Bangladesh and the United Nations have acknowledged for all Bangladesh.
Topics: Daily News, Human Rights |
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