Maung Sawyeddollah, Founder of the Rohingya Students Network, addresses the high-level conference of the General Assembly on the situation of Rohingya Muslims and other minorities in Myanmar Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elías

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 1 2025 (IPS)

The international community convened for a high-level meeting at UN Headquarters, this time to mobilize political support for the ongoing issue of the persecution of the Rohingya Muslims and other minorities in Myanmar.

On Tuesday September 30, representatives from Rohingya advocacy groups, the UN system and member states convened at the General Assembly to address the ongoing challenges facing Rohingya Muslims and the broader context of the political and humanitarian situation in Myanmar.

UN President of the General Assembly Annalena Baerbock remarked that the conference was an opportunity to listen to stakeholders, notably civil society representatives with experience on the ground.

“Rohingya need the support of the international community, not just in words but in action,” she said.

Baerbock added there was an “urgent need for strengthened international solidarity and increased support,” and to make efforts to reach a political solution with unequivocal participation from the Rohingyas.

“The violence, the extreme deprivation and the massive violations of human rights have fueled a crisis of grave international concern. The international community must honor its responsibilities and act. We stand in solidarity with the Rohingya and all the people of Myanmar in their hour of greatest need,” said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

In the eight years since over 750,000 Rohingyas fled persecution and crossed the border into Bangladesh, the international community has had to deal with one of the most intense refugee situations in living memory. Attendees at the conference spoke on addressing the root causes that led to this protracted crisis—systematic oppression and persecution at the hands of Myanmar’s authorities and unrest in Rakhine State.

Muhammad Yunus, Chief Adviser of the interim Government of Bangladesh, addresses the high-level conference on the situation of Rohingya Muslims and other minorities in Myanmar. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias

The military junta’s ascension in 2021 has only led to further unrest and instability in Myanmar and has made the likelihood of safe and sustained return far more precarious. Their persecution has only intensified as the Rohingya communities still residing in Rakhine find themselves caught in the middle of conflicts between the junta and other militant groups, including the Arakan Army.

At the opening of the conference, Rohingya refugee activists remarked that the systemic oppression predates the current crisis. “This is a historic occasion for Myanmar. But it is long overdue. Our people have suffered enough. For ethnic minorities—from Kachin to Rohingya—the suffering has spanned decades,” said Wai Wai Nu, founder and executive director of the Women’s Peace Network.

“It has already been more than eight years since the Rohingya Genocide was exposed. Where is the justice for the Rohingyas?” asked Maung Sawyeddollah, founder of the Rohingya Student Network.

For the United Nations, the Rohingya refugee crisis represents the dramatic impact of funding shortfalls on their humanitarian operations. UN Secretary-General António Guterres once said during his visit to the refugee camps in Bangladesh back in April that “Cox’s Bazar is Ground Zero for the impact of budget cuts”.

Funding cuts to agencies like UNICEF and the World Food Programme (WFP) have undermined their capacity to reach people in need. WFP has warned that their food assistance in the refugee camps will run out in two months unless they receive more funding. Yet as of now, the 2025 Rohingya Refugee Response Plan of USD 934.5 million is only funded at 38 percent.

Volker Türk, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, addresses the high-level conference of the General Assembly on the situation of Rohingya Muslims and other minorities in Myanmar. Credit: UN Photo/Manuel Elias

“The humanitarian response in Bangladesh remains chronically underfunded, including in key areas like food and cooking fuel. The prospects for funding next year are grim. Unless further resources are forthcoming, despite the needs, we will be forced to make more cuts while striving to minimize the risk of losing lives: children dying of malnutrition or people dying at sea as more refugees embark on dangerous boat journeys,” said Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

As the host country of over 1 million refugees since 2017, Bangladesh has borne the brunt of the situation. Chief Advisor Muhammad Yunus said that the country faces its own development challenges and systemic issues with crime, poverty and unemployment, and has struggled to support the refugee population even with the help of aid organizations. He made a call to pursue repatriations, the strategy to ensure the safe return of Rohingyas to Rakhine.

“As funding declines, the only peaceful option is to begin their repatriation. This will entail far fewer resources than continuing their international protection. The Rohingya have consistently pronounced their desire to go back home,” said Yunus. “The world cannot keep the Rohingya waiting any longer from returning home.”

Along with the UN, Myanmar and Bangladesh, neighboring and host countries also have a role to play. Regional blocs like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are also crucial  in supporting the Rohingya population as well as leading dialogues with other stakeholders across the region.

“In my engagements with Myanmar stakeholders, I have emphasized that peace in Myanmar will remain elusive until inclusive dialogue between all Myanmar stakeholders takes place,” said Othman Hashim, the special envoy of the ASEAN Chair on Myanmar. “For actions within Myanmar, the crucial first step is stopping the hostilities and violence. Prolonged violence will only exacerbate the misery of the people of Myanmar, Rohingya and other minorities included.”

“Countries hosting refugees need sustained support. Cooperation with UNODC [UN Office of Drugs and Crime], UNHCR, and IOM [International Organization for Migration] must be deepened,” said Sugiono, Indonesia’s foreign minister.

Supporting the Rohingya beyond emergency and humanitarian needs would also require investing resources in education and employment opportunities. Involved parties were encouraged to support resettlement policies that would help communities secure livelihoods in  the long-term, or to extend opportunities for longterm work, like in Thailand where they recently granted long-staying refugees the right to work legally in the country.

“Any initiative for the Rohingya without Rohingya in the camp, from decision making to nation-building is unsustainable and unjust. The UN must mobilize resources to empower Rohingya. We are not only victims; we have the potential to make a difference,” said Sawyeddollah.

As one of the few Rohingya representatives present that had previous lived in the camps in Cox’s Bazaar, Sawyeddollah described the challenges he faced in pursuing higher education when he applied to over 150 universities worldwide but did not get into any of them. He got into New York University with a scholarship, the first Rohingya refugee to attend. He reiterated that universities had the capacity to offer scholarships to Rohingya students, citing the example of the Asian University of Women (AUW) in Chittagong, Bangladesh, where it has been offering scholarships to Rohingya girls since at least 2018.

The conference called for actionable measures that would address several key areas in the Rohingya refugee situation. This includes scaling up funding for humanitarian aid in Bangladesh and Myanmar, and notably, pursuing justice and accountability under international law. Türk and other UN officials reiterated that resolving the instability and political tensions in Myanmar is crucial to resolving the refugee crisis.

Kyaw Moe Tun, Permanent Representative of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar to the UN, blamed the military junta for the country’s current state and called for member states to refuse supporting the junta politically or financially. “We can yield results only by acting together to end the military dictatorship, its unlawful coup, and its culture of impunity. At a time when human rights, justice and humanity are under critical attack, please help in our genuine endeavour to build a federal democratic union that rooted in these very principles.”
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Dr Mohsina Chaklader, a doctor with Humanity Auxilium, walks through Cox’s Bazar. Chaklader says while physical conditions in the refugee camps that house more than 900,000 more needs to be done. Credit: Humanity Auxilium

By Sania Farooqui
NEW DELHI, India, Aug 25 2022 (IPS)

It has been five years since the forced exodus of the Rohingyas from Myanmar, and their plea for justice and accountability continues.

On August 25, 2017, “Myanmar military began a sweeping campaign of massacres, rape, and arson in northern Rakhine State”, said Human Rights Watch in its latest report, Myanmar: No Justice, No Freedom for Rohingya 5 Years On: Anniversary of Atrocities Highlights International Inaction.

Today, this day is marked as Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day, the day that forced almost 750,000 Rohingyas to flee to Bangladesh, while about 600,000 remain under “oppressive rule” in Myanmar.

Patients throng the Humanity Auxilium medical centre in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. More than 900,000 Rohingyas from Myanmar live in the refugee camps in the region. Credit: Humanity Auxilium

“No one has been held accountable for the crimes against humanity and acts of genocide committed against the Rohingya population. This anniversary should prompt concerned governments to take concrete action to hold the Myanmar military to account and secure justice and safety for the Rohingya in Bangladesh, Myanmar, and across the region,” the report said.

For the hundreds and thousands of Rohingya refugees who entered southern Bangladesh through beaches and paddy fields in 2017, “they brought with them accounts of the unspeakable violence and brutality that had forced them to flee,” UNICEF said in this report.

“Those fleeing attacks and violence in the 2017 exodus joined around 300,000 people already in Bangladesh from previous waves of displacement, effectively forming the world’s largest refugee camp,” the report said. As of August 2022, about one million Rohingya live in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh.

Dr Mohsina Chaklader, a doctor with Humanity Auxilium, in an exclusive interview with IPS, said: “Rohingya refugees arrived with physical and mental trauma that were directly attributable to the offenses from the Myanmar army – which includes physical violence, deaths of loved ones, many days of journey with no food.”

Humanity Auxilium is a health-based NGO that provides health care and training to the world’s most marginalized communities.

Chaklader said she treated visible wounds and deep psychological trauma.

“The conditions I witnessed included fractures, deep wounds, malnutrition, infections, and post-traumatic stress disorders. Rohingya women and girls comprised more than 50 percent of the population that came to these camps. They faced unique challenges as many were tortured and gang-raped during the genocide, and many gave birth to children as a result of those rapes. These victims were also rejected by their husbands due to the rape and assault. These days women are worried about the future of their children who are born in these camps.”

While there have been improvements, the Rohingya refugees’ conditions are still dire.

“From my very recent visits, I saw greater structural organization, but camps still continue to lack infrastructure – proper drainage systems, toilets, safe, clean water supply, and mudslides across the camps hinder mobility. The challenges are still enormous. Medical care is not sufficient to meet the demands of a population living in cramped and unhealthy conditions,” Chaklader said.

About half a million Rohingya refugee children are exiled from their home country. Many born into this limbo today have little access to education.

According to a study by the Norwegian Refugee Council, approximately 96 percent of surveyed youth aged 18 to 24 are currently unemployed, and 9 out of 10 aged 18-24 are in debt, having borrowed money within the last six months. Ninety-nine percent of women aged 18 to 24 are unemployed.

“In the absence of a political solution and resettlement of refugees in third countries, it will be important to develop economic self-sufficiency within the camps,” says Chaklader.

“While Bangladesh has been generous in receiving the refugees, the government can do more to provide educational and economic opportunities to the people in the refugee camps. Bangladesh, being a developing country, needs more urgent cooperation and funding from the international community in order to deliver to the needs of the refugees,” said Chaklader

Earlier this year, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet met with religious leaders and women and visited camps in Cox’s Bazar housing Rohingya refugees during her first visit to Bangladesh.

The High Commissioner reiterated the importance of ensuring that “safe and sustainable conditions exist for any returns and that they be conducted in a voluntary and dignified way. The UN is doing the best we can to support them, we will continue doing that, but we also need to deal with the profound roots of the problem. We need to deal with that and ensure that they can go back to Myanmar –  when there are conditions for safety and voluntary return”.

In Myanmar, however, most Rohingyas have no legal identity or citizenship, and statelessness remains a significant concern. Rohingya children in Rakhine State, meanwhile, “have been hemmed in by violence, forced displacement and restrictions on freedom of movement”.

Until the conditions are in place in Myanmar that would allow Rohingya families to return, they continue to remain refugees or internally displaced persons living in overcrowded and sometimes dangerous conditions.

With looming evidence of human rights violations committed by Myanmar security forces against ethnic minorities in Myanmar, in November 2019, the Gambia initiated proceedings against Myanmar based on the Genocide Convention, invoking state responsibility for Myanmar’s self-described “clearance operations” in 2016 and 2017 against the Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority in Myanmar.

Based on this application filed in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in 2020, the court issued a provisional measures order pursuant to Article 41 of the ICJ Statute ordering Myanmar to prevent the commission of genocidal acts; to ensure its military, police, or any other irregular force supported or directed by it or under its control not commit genocidal acts, and to submit a status report every six months until a final judgment by the Court.

Dr Mohsina Chaklader, a doctor with Humanity Auxilium, pictured here in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, says she has Rohingyas refugees for physical and psychological wounds after they were forced to flee unspeakable brutality in Myanmar. Credit: Humanity Auxilium

In February 2022, court hearings were held to consider Myanmar’s objections to the jurisdiction of the ICJ and the admissibility of the case filed in January 2021. The court rejected Myanmar’s four contentions prima facie in the 2020 provisional measures order.

Welcoming the progress at the ICJ despite concerns regarding the military representing Myanmar at the ICJ, Asia Justice Coalition, in a press statement, said: “The case provides an opportunity to see the junta respond to allegations of genocide before an international legal forum and to fight against entrenched impunity in Myanmar. The proceedings before the ICJ are a significant means to hold Myanmar accountable for the mass atrocities against Rohingya.”

Garnering some momentum for justice and to end the rampant culture of impunity in Myanmar, in March 2022, the United States government formally determined that the Myanmar military committed crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity against ethnic Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State.

While human rights groups have welcomed these efforts, there is still a rising concern about the migrant flow into South Asian and Southeast Asian countries, as these regions continue to see an increase either in anti-Muslimism, anti-refugee, or uneven refugee protection sentiments. It would also be necessary for governments to adhere to international conventions regarding refugees when addressing these ongoing migration and mass humanitarian crises.

With Myanmar’s unstable state since the military seized power in February 2021, conditions for safe repatriation to this region are not yet an option. On the fifth anniversary of the Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day, any further delay in international justice processes for genocide, reporting of gross human rights violations, or lack of the much-needed humanitarian support from neighbouring countries, funding, and international community support, we are only going to continue prolonging the plight of the most persecuted minority in the world.

They have already lost their homes, they have been unable to claim citizenship in a country as it refuses to recognize them, are living in camps, fleeing on boats, and have been beaten, raped, abused, displaced, and many killed. In any international legal discourse, human dignity always performs a central role. It is time the world gives the Rohingya the one thing that has been stripped off them: their right to human dignity.

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A Rohingya girl proudly holds up her drawing at a UNICEF school at Balukhali camp, Bangladesh.As Rohingya refugee families settled in the Cox’s Bazar Kutupalong Refugee Camp, the area had one of highest rates of primary and secondary age children out of school. Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the multilateral global fund dedicated to education in emergencies and protracted crises, immediately allocated US$3million to urgently scale up learning spaces for displaced Rohingya children. In 2018, the Fund increased its support with an additional US$12 million for the continuous learning of refugee and host community children. (file photo) Credit: Farid Ahmed/IPS

By Rafiqul Islam
DHAKA , Apr 9 2021 (IPS)

Although learning centres in Cox’s Bazar Kutupalong Refugee Camp are closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Mariom Akhter, a Rohingya mother of four, is grateful not only for the schooling her children have had but the training sessions she as a parent was able to attend. The skills she learnt has helped her assist her children with their education at home in a crisis.

It’s something she’s likely needed to help her children with over the last few weeks after a Mar. 22 fire spread through the camp, destroying the shelters of at least 45,000 people as well as important infrastructure, including hospitals, learning centres, aid distribution points and a registration centre. At least 15 people were reported dead and 400 missing.

“I have learnt many things from the sessions about the education assistance of the children that should be given in any crisis. The sessions played a significant role in ensuring education of the children during this crisis period when all the learning centres are closed due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic,” Akhter told IPS before the fire.

In 2017, Bangladesh became host to 1.1 million Rohingya when 750,000 people fled a brutal military crackdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. [Some 300,000 Rohingya had already taken refuge in the country after various insurgencies in earlier years.]

And as families settled in the Cox’s Bazar Kutupalong Refugee Camp, the area had one of highest rates of primary and secondary age children out of school.

As the crisis escalated, Education Cannot Wait (ECW), the multilateral global fund dedicated to education in emergencies and protracted crises, immediately allocated $3 million to urgently scale up learning spaces for displaced Rohingya children. In 2018, the Fund increased its support with an additional $12 million for the continuous learning of refugee and host community children. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, ECW provided partners with an additional $2.1 million to support home-based and distance learning opportunities.

“Since 2017, ECW has continued to prioritise the learning needs and well-being of Rohingya refugees and affected Bangladeshi children in the district of Cox’s Bazar. Yet, with no longer term solution in sight, we must not abandon these girls and boys to their hardship. The deadly recent blaze that ravaged parts of the camp and left 45,000 people homeless overnight is a stark reminder of the perilous and overcrowded conditions children endure in the largest refugee camp on Earth,” said Yasmine Sherif, the Director of Education Cannot Wait.

“For a girl or boy living in such difficult circumstances, education is a lifeline, it is their only hope of a better future. ECW is committed to stand with them. We are preparing an additional multi-year allocation to support continuous learning opportunities for Rohingya children in 2021 and beyond, and I call on other donors to join our efforts to fill the financial gap of over $100 million in coming years.”

A Rohingya girl goes to fetch water in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. A Mar. 22 fire spread through the camp, damaging important infrastructure including hospitals, learning centres, aid distribution points and a registration centre. While a few learning centres were burnt down, a number of them were not affected by the fire. (file photo)Credit: Umer Aiman Khan/IPS

Akhter was grateful for the diversity of the curriculum offered to her children.

“Before coming to Bangladesh, our children did not have the opportunity to study in this way. They only learnt Arabic from Maulavis (religious teachers). They did not have the opportunity to go far from home. They could [only] play around their houses,” Akhter told IPS.

Nine-year-old Jouria never thought it possible that she would continue her education after fleeing Myanmar in 2017. Now she receives a broader education and has since learnt other languages.

“We learnt Burmese and English alphabets from the learning centres. Now we can read and write (in these languages). We learnt how to take care of ourselves through healthy and safe practices,” Jouria told IPS.    

She loves school.

“We enjoy learning as these centres are equipped with educational and sports materials. The facilitators of our learning centres explain everything to us through songs and stories, writing, drawing and games.”

Ten-year-old Asoma is in Grade 2. She told IPS that apart from conventional lessons, basic life-skills are also taught.

“We have learnt lessons on how to keep clean, on food habits and hygiene, when we should go to sleep and other life-skills. I enjoy learning at my centre,” she said.    

Asma said her learning centre was very clean, well-decorated with different colours and equipped with educational materials and toys.

“We get enough time to play at the learning centres and that’s why I like my centre.”

Children are also given mental health and psychosocial support and aided with behavioural and language development, among other thing.

Seno Ara, a mother of three, told IPS: “Our children are being able to cope with mental trauma as they are busy making toys, drawing and playing at the learning centres.”

“From the parenting education sessions, we also learn about the risks to children…how to prevent drug addiction, how to take care of our children with disabilities, and how to keep the children safe in times of crisis,” Ara said. 

In 2020, piloting of the Myanmar Curriculum began and is currently being scaled up.

The implementation of the ECW-funded multi-year programme is coordinated by various United Nations implementing agencies and partners, including the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). Other partners include members of Cox’s Bazar Education Sector, local administration, the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner and the Cox’s Bazar District Primary Education Office.

UNICEF Bangladesh Cox’s Bazar Chief of Field Office, Dr. Ezatullah Majeed, said over 230,000 children were reached through UNICEF-supported learning centres that received funding from multiple donors. Of these, 27,000 children — half of whom are girls — benefitted directly from ECW funding. According to UNICEF, the recent fire damaged 141 of their learning centres.

“Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the learning centres have been the learning area for the children. The learning centres in the camps also provide a venue where the children get a sense of normalcy, joy, stability, and hope for the future. To date, the centres remain closed following the national directive on school closure in order to contain the COVID-19 pandemic,” Majeed told IPS.

UNHCR Education Officer in Cox’s Bazar, Selamawit Berhanu, said that ECW funds enabled UNHCR to reach 61,300 children and youth – both girls and boys – with home-based education during the COVID-19 pandemic. “UNHCR was able to support caregiver’s in assisting learners to continue learning at home, with the support of teachers, who were conducting shed visits on regular basis,” she said.

UNHCR also constructed a teachers’ training centre. “The centre helps to ensure a continuous supply of well trained and qualified teachers and also allows both refugee and host community teachers to come together in one place to exchange ideas and learn from each other,” she said.

UNESCO Programme Officer for Education, M. Shahidul Islam said that the agency supports parent education for community engagement and education system strengthening that benefits 88,500 children — half of whom are girls. UNESCO supports 40 learning centres in Rohingya camps and 78 host community government primary schools in the Cox’s Bazar district. Since parenting education contributes greatly to the wellbeing and education of children, it is being scaled up by 15 implementing agencies through their own arrangements.

None of the UNICEF learning centres were damaged in the fire. 

Nurul Islam, project manager of Plan International Bangladesh – the implementing partner of UNESCO – told IPS that parents were educated on how to care for their children as well as how to protect themselves and their families against COVID-19.

“About 3200 parents have already taken part in these parenting education sessions. Of them, 1,850 were mothers, while 1,450 were fathers,” he added.  

According to project officials, through educating parents, children are able to receive appropriate care from their family.

Children will continue with home-based and caregiver-based learning until COVID-19 restrictions are eased. 

“The continuity in education services through the caregiver-led home-based learning has contributed positively in providing alternative learning opportunities among the Rohingya children. In doing so, it mitigates the psychosocial impact of the conflict and disasters by providing a sense of normalcy, routine, stability, structure and hope for the future,” Majeed, told IPS.

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Excerpt:

Nearly 400 Rohingya refugees have been rescued in Bangladesh after being at sea for two months. Experts are concerned about the spread of coronavirus if these refugees are housed in the Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar along Bangladesh border with Myanmar. Credit: ASM Suza Uddin/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 16 2020 (IPS)

Nearly 400 Rohingya refugees have been rescued in Bangladesh after being at sea for two months. 

Bangladesh coast guards reported rescuing 382 Rohingyas, including many women and children, who were starving and stuck on a boat as they were trying to reach Malaysia, the BBC reported on Thursday. 

Coast guard spokesman Lt Shah Zia Rahman told AFP news agency that they were on “a big overcrowded fishing trawler” and were brought to a beach near Teknaf. 

In the midst of the current coronavirus pandemic — on Mar. 26 Bangladesh went into a nationwide lockdown in an attempt to contain the spread of the coronavirus — this rescue effort poses particular concerns about potential coronavirus cases and/or it being spread in the camps, where people remain at extremely high risk of contracting and spreading the disease. 

The Bangladesh government also closed the 34 refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar district on Apr. 8, allowing only medical aid and essential food into the camps.

Latest figures show that the country has just over 1,500 reported cases of the coronavirus and 60 deaths.

“They have not been moved to any refugee camps, they’re getting the medical attention that they need,” Stéphane Dujarric, Spokesperson for the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, told IPS on Thursday.

“The survivors, who include a large number of women and children are all in weak physical condition, many dehydrated and malnourished and in need of immediate medical attention,” Dujarric said at a press briefing on Thursday. 

A photo shared on social media by the Rohingya Women’s Education Initiative showed a large group of people, all sitting extremely closely. IPS was not able to independently verify if this photo was of the rescued refugees. 

Dujarric also added that according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), those on board said about 30 more refugees may have died while on the ship because of lack of food, water, and fuel. 

Citing reports and rumours where people have reportedly said the refugees have tested positive for coronavirus, he said there is currently no evidence to substantiate these claims. 

Even though there are currently no positive cases of coronavirus among the rescued refugees, he said they’re “being watched medically”. 

Other advocates have also raised concerns about the refugees being rescued especially under current circumstances. 

Biraj Patnaik, Amnesty International’s South Asia Director, lauded the Bangladeshi government for taking the refugees into the country, but called for authorities to ensure proper care for those rescued. 

“Given the ordeal they have passed through, adrift on the sea for two months, they need to be provided with immediate medical attention and adequate food and shelter,” he said in a statement.

“At a time when there are fears that COVID-19 could strike the densely populated and poorly resourced Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar,” he added, “there’s also a need for the authorities to ensure that the rescued refugees are protected from the spread of the virus and will receive medical attention if they need it.”

Advocates have been sounding the alarm for how the coronavirus crisis will affect South Asian countries, given living situations where many often live together in close quarters. 

Currently, about more than one million refugees are living in the camps in Bangladesh, a large number of whom arrived during the latest exodus in 2017, fleeing the Myanmar military’s violent crackdown on the community. 

On Thursday, in response to the Associated Press’ query about whether the U.N. will call on the Myanmar government to respond, Dujarric further reiterated Guterres’ recent plea for a ceasefire on all areas of conflict under the current coronavirus threat, given that can further exacerbate the current situation especially for vulnerable communities, putting them further at risk of contracting the disease.  

Mohammad Rafique (right) and other refugee children gathered at the Rohingya market in Kutupalong camp to sell vegetables he brought earlier from a local market in this photo dated Mar. 11, 2020. This was two weeks before Bangladesh went into a nationwide lockdown in an attempt to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Credit: Rafiqul Islam/IPS

By Rafiqul Islam
COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh, Apr 15 2020 (IPS)

Nine-year-old Mohammad Rafique used to collect vegetables from Kutupalong Bazaar and sell them at a market inside Kutupalong camp, a camp of some 600,000 Rohingyas, in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar.

But nowadays he has to stay home with his parents inside their makeshift home built on the slopes of a hill in the sprawling refugee settlement because of the coronavirus or COVID-19 pandemic.

On Mar. 26 Bangladesh went into a nationwide lockdown in an attempt to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Latest figures show that the country has just over 1,200 reported cases of the coronavirus and 50 deaths.

The Bangladesh government later followed with a lockdown of the 34 refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar district on Apr. 8 and, aside from essential food and medical aid, people are not allowed to leave or enter the district.

Cox’s Bazar is the world’s largest refugee camp. Fleeing persecution in the predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, over one million Rohingyas have been living in the overcrowded camps in the southeastern Bangladeshi district.

“My parents have strongly asked me to stay at home after they are informed that people are getting infected with a lethal virus around the world and it started infecting people nearby the camps too,” Rafique told IPS.

“Not only me and my parents, the Rohingya population living in the camp are very concern about the infectious virus as they have heard that many people are dying around the world after getting infected with the virus,” he said.

Although no coronavirus case have been recorded in the Rohingya camps as yet, one person in an area nearby has tested positive for COVID-19. And this created a wave of panic among the refugees.

“It is true that panic grips Rohingyas in the camps. But, along with the local administration, we are conducting awareness campaign among the refugees so that they can be aware of the infectious coronavirus,” Rohingya community leader Hafez Jalal told IPS over phone.

He said the refugees have been advised to stay in their homes and follow health guidelines to keep safe from infection. 

Social distancing is the main way to prevent coronavirus but this is very hard to maintain in the overcrowded camps where makeshift homes are built alongside each other, with only narrow lanes and paths bisecting areas. There are few water points in the camp, and while it is not known exactly how many there are, one water point is believed to serve the needs several thousand people.

Experts are concerned that if the coronavirus emerges in the camp, it could spread rapidly in the crowded conditions.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees spokesperson Louise Donovan said the overcrowded conditions in the camps pose a greater risk for the virus spreading rapidly in the event of an outbreak as currently around 40,000 people are living in one square kilometre.

Social distancing is particularly challenging in such an environment, despite measures which have been put in place at distribution points throughout the camps to maintain this.

“At the moment, it is a race against time to establish isolation and treatment facilities in order to cater for patients if there is any outbreak in the camps,” Donovan told IPS.

She said all humanitarian partners, in support of the Bangladesh government, were working round-the-clock to ensure a minimum response capacity in the case of an outbreak since the situation was very concerning.

Rohingya refugee traders selling chickens at market inside the Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar in this photo dated Mar. 11, 2020. This was two weeks before Bangladesh went into a nationwide lockdown in an attempt to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Credit: Rafiqul Islam/IPS

Sharing information about the coronavirus has also been key.

According to one aid worker, communication about COVID-19 is ongoing in the refugee camps through radio spots, videos, posters, and messages, in Rohingya, Burmese and Bengali languages. The messages are also passed on by Imams and other community leaders and volunteers, who explain how the coronavirus spreads, how people can protect themselves and their families, what the symptoms are and how they can seek care. 

The government is also disseminating awareness messages through multiple channels, including mobile phone networks and over loudspeakers.

Locals have told IPS that law enforcement agencies and army personnel have installed roadblocks on the main roads of the district and are carrying out patrols inside and around the refugee camps to prevent people moving about.

In a recent Facebook post, Deputy Commissioner of Cox’s Bazar Kamal Hossain said 34 Rohingya camps were under lockdown, which includes prohibiting mass gatherings and rallies.

“Refugees of one camp would not be to go to another camp and they are not allowed to set up markets haphazardly inside the camps. But, steps have been taken to keep the refugees at homes and ensure supply of essential commodities for them. The law enforcing agencies have intensified their surveillance there,” he said.      

Hossain warned that legal actions would be taken against those who violate the order.

Yet despite knowing the risks, many have had no choice but to leave their homes for food and water.

“Many refugees are going out of their homes for daily needs, ignoring the directives of the authorities concerned, which is a matter of concern,” Jalal added. 

The Bangladesh government has extended the nationwide shutdown till Apr. 25.

The International Court of Justice instructed Thursday that Myanmar halt all measures that contribute to the genocide of the Rohingya community. More than 910,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to and settled in neighbouring Bangladesh. Pictured here are Rohingya children at Cox’s Bazar, a refugee camp in Bangladesh. Credit: Farid Ahmed/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 24 2020 (IPS)

In a groundbreaking and much anticipated ruling delivered on Thursday, the International Court of Justice demanded that Myanmar halt all measures that contribute to the genocide of the Rohingya community. 

The order was lauded by international bodies and organisations who have been involved with and/or closely following the case since the Gambia filed a lawsuit against Myanmar for human rights violations against the Rohingya community. 

The United Nations Secretary General has said he “welcomes” the order and “will promptly transmit the notice of the provisional measures ordered by the Court to the Security Council,” according to a statement from the the Spokesman for the Secretary-General. 

The order states Myanmar “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts” of genocide or harming the Rohingya; that its military not be involved in committing or being complicit in genocide of the community; and that Myanmar “shall take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts”. 

Following the order, Adam Combs, Regional Director of the Norwegian Refugee Council, told IPS that this measure “marks an important turning point for the Rohingya people as it means there is now the prospect for their rights to be recognised after years of discrimination, segregation, citizenship barriers and movement restrictions”.

While more than 910,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to and settled in neighbouring Bangladesh, hundreds of thousands of the persecuted community still remain in Myanmar; they remain in grave threat of discrimination and violence and it is for them that the provisional measures remain crucial. 

As Combs points out, upwards of 100,000 internally displaced Rohingya remain in camps with poor living conditions and with a lack of access to proper services and healthcare. 

“They remain reliant on humanitarian aid, year after year,” he told IPS. “In Northern Rakhine, we are still lacking access to parts of Northern Rakhine where the conditions for the Rohingya communities are likely to be dire and where there will be high levels of humanitarian need.”

“This ruling, especially in its unanimity, is a huge victory for the Rohingya, international justice, and The Gambia,” L. Grant Shubin, Deputy Legal Director at the Global Justice Center (GJC), told IPS on Thursday. 

“Especially after Myanmar threw the weight of its Nobel laureate leader behind a spurious defence, its heartening that the Court could unanimously acknowledge the genocidal danger facing the Rohingya still in Rakhine state,” he added. 

One of the key asks in the lawsuit was the “provisional measures” that would require, with “extreme urgency”, the halt of any conduct and activities by Myanmar that was perpetuating harm over the Rohingya community. 

As Shubin of GJC points out, the ruling was unanimous, which implies that these obligations were supported even by “the ad hoc Judge appointed by Myanmar.”

“The measure requiring Myanmar to report on the measures its taken to comply with the order is an extremely important opportunity for the international community, and the U.N. Security Council specifically, to fulfil their own obligations to prevent genocide,” he added. 

“This is the first step on a path to justice for the Rohingya,” said Dr. Simon Adams, Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, according to a statement from GJC. 

Combs of NRC reiterated the need for “a concerted effort and renewed engagement by the Myanmar Government” that would ensure a safe livelihood for Rohingyas in Myanmar, and for them to receive their basic rights “in line with the principle of non-discrimination.” 

The ruling requires Myanmar to submit a report on all the measures it takes in four months.

The United Nations on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance has recently offered her assistance to the Indian Supreme Court in a long hearing about India deporting Rohingya refugees to Myanmar. Pictured here are Rohingya refugee women in Jammu, India. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 20 2020 (IPS)

University of California professor E. Tendayi Achiume, who is a United Nations Special Rapporteur, has recently offered her assistance to the Indian Supreme Court in a long hearing about India deporting Rohingya refugees to Myanmar.

The hearing, which began in 2017, has this update at a crucial time when the world’s largest democracy is reeling from citizenship rulings that explicitly exclude Muslims from certain neighbouring countries. 

Achiume, who is a U.N. Special Rapporteur on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, submitted the application to the Supreme Court on Jan. 10, according to local news agency The Wire. 

“Litigation schedules are long and complex, and the timing of my filing reflects that,” Achiume told IPS this week, in reference to why she made her application at this time. 

According to the Wire, which reviewed the application, Achiume did so in order to “aid the court in upholding India’s obligations under various international law instruments and principles to which it has committed”. 

• India, although not the most common destination for Rohingya refugees, has a large number of the population, many of whom migrate from neighbouring Bangladesh.
• At the time of reporting, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had documented 17,911 Rohingyas in India as registered with the organisation. 

In 2017, when the hearing began, the Indian government, responsible for the current crisis in Kashmir as well as the Citizenship Amendment Act, told the court that Rohingyas pose “a threat to national security”. 

Two years later, this sentiment remains relevant given the recent citizenship ruling as well as the crisis in Kashmir have stoked further anti-Muslim rhetoric in India. In the past, Indian Home Minister Amit Shah has used similar rhetoric of “threat” to national security against Bangladeshi immigrants in the country.  

Last week, at the launch of 2020 World Report Human Rights Watch (HRW), the organisation’s head reiterated that the current rulings in the country are discriminatory. 

“We are extremely concerned about the anti-Muslim drift by the Modi government,” Kenneth Roth told IPS at the launch where he also blasted Aung San Suu Kyi for her defence of Myanmar’s practices against the Rohingya population in the country.  

While the recent rulings do not directly affect Rohingyas from Myanmar, the current anti-Muslim sentiment heightened by these rulings adds another layer of complication for a community that is known to be largely Muslim and has their share of challenges already. 

As it is, the Rohingya community already is vulnerable to discrimination in India. India’s decision to deport Rohingyas “raises critical issues as to its compatibility with these instruments and principles of international human rights law,” Achiume wrote in the application. 

“In India, Rohingya face protection risks due to difficulties in obtaining legal documentation and access to basic services,” Kathryn Mahoney, Senior Communications Officer at UNHCR told IPS. “UNHCR is also aware of instances of arrest and detention of Rohingya refugees and asylum-seekers at the border.” 

This already festering sentiment against the Rohingya, when viewed under current circumstances, can prove grave for the community. 

“I believe there is strong reason to believe there are heightened concerns for Rohingya and others in the current legal and political climate that is fostering intolerance and discrimination against Muslims,” Achiume told IPS. “India’s judiciary has an important role to play in upholding the country’s human rights commitments.” 

In their statement to IPS, UNHCR reiterated the urgency with which forced repatriation efforts by India must be stopped for the Rohingya community that still remains vulnerable to violence and displacement in Myanmar. 

“UNHCR is deeply concerned by the return of Rohingya asylum-seekers from India to Myanmar, who may be at risk of serious human rights violations or persecution,” Mahoney told IPS. “UNHCR does not believe that current conditions in Myanmar are conducive to the safe and dignified repatriation of Rohingya refugees.” 

Rohingya after they fled Myanmar in 2017 arrive at Shahparir Dip in Teknaf, Bangladesh. On Nov. 11, the Gambia filed a lawsuit against Myanmar in the International Court of Justice for the southeast asian country’s atrocities against the Rohingya population. Credit: IPS

By Samira Sadeque
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 3 2019 (IPS)

On Nov. 11, the Gambia filed a lawsuit against Myanmar in the International Court of Justice for the southeast asian country’s atrocities against the Rohingya population. 

Over the past years, hundreds of thousands of Rohingyas have fled to neighbouring Bangladesh for refuge, sparking one of the more dire refugee crises of the decade. They continue to remain in camps in Bangladesh, where they are vulnerable to human trafficking and other forms of violence.

Even though the crisis has been ongoing for decades, it’s a crucial time for the lawsuit to be filed, advocates say. And the Rohingya people’s continuing refusal to go back is only testament to the lack of security for them in Myanmar. 

“No one has been held accountable,” Akila Radhakrishnan, President of Global Justice Center (GJC), told IPS. “It’s the same forces [that] remain in Rakhine state, they remain kind of [as a] part of the military with no punishment. There’s no feeling that there’s safety and security to go back to Myanmar.”

Radhakrishnan pointed out that even though the lawsuit may be “far away” from when the crisis began, the continued fear of Rohingyas to return to their home shows how deeply the crisis persists. 

“I think there’s a recognition of the impossibility of the return of the Rohingya, a solution to the humanitarian crisis,” she said, adding that the lawsuit will push for the Myanmar government to take actions that focus on changing the laws and policies that enabled the genocide. 

The lawsuit by the Gambia is supported in large part by the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, and is being led by Attorney General and Minister of Justice of the Gambia Abubacarr M Tambadou, who decided to pursue actions after a recent visit to Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, a region where about 900,000 Rohingya refugees are living in camps in that the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has termed the world’s biggest refugee camp. 

Tambadou, who also worked to bring justice for the case of the Rwandan genocide, immediately recognised a similar pattern and was moved to take action, he said during an event held during U.N. General Assembly in September. 

One of the key things being asked in the lawsuit is the request for provisional measures that would require the Myanmar government, on a basis of “extreme urgency”, to set a hearing date for Myanmar government to “restrain certain conduct” by Myanmar that’s enabling the genocide, Paul Reichler, head of Foley Hoag, the law firm leading the lawsuit, explained to IPS. 

“When you file a suit, you want to make sure the very object of the suit is not destroyed while the case is pending in court,” he explained. “The Gambia will be asking the court to order Myanmar to cease all acts of genocide against the Rohingya.”

But a challenge remains here: how can Myanmar stop actions they don’t acknowledge as genocide denial? 

“The court may wish to define what kind of acts should be stopped so the order makes clear what Myanmar is prohibited from doing,” Reichler said. “[The] main thing we’re asking for is final judgment…in the interim to prevent further irreparable harm.” 

In case Myanmar does not comply with the requirements of the lawsuit, Reichler says the court can take further actions or the international community “can react with political measures”. 

Within a few days of the lawsuit being filed by the Gambia, a lawsuit was filed by Argentina against leaders in Myanmar, including Aung San Suu Kyi, who is the first Nobel peace laureate to face such legal charges.  

Suu Kyi, however, has not budged from her position. She continues to justify the torture of Rohingyas while branding them as “terrorists” owing to a 2017 attack that sparked the most recent exodus. 

In the aftermath of the lawsuit, her government has set up a legal unit while she aims to lead the country’s defence at the ICJ, with a hearing expected on Dec. 10.  

“Aung San Suu Kyi and the civilian government failed to act against genocide in Rakhine State with any level of urgency and have taken no steps to hold the military to account,” Radhakrishnan said in a statement for Suu Kyi’s announcement.

“Now, they are going to defend the military and government’s genocidal actions on one of the world’s largest and most influential stages. The international community should no longer have illusions where Suu Kyi and the civilian government stand and must act to support the Gambia and take other measures to hold Myanmar accountable.”

A Rohingya girl goes to fetch water in Balukhali camp, Bangladesh. Credit: Umer Aiman Khan/IPS

By External Source
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 15 2019 (IPS)

Judges of the International Criminal Court (ICC) on Thursday authorized an investigation into alleged crimes against humanity, namely deportation, which have forced between 600,000 and one million Rohingya refugees out of Myanmar, into neighboring Bangladesh since 2016.

The pre-trial judges “accepted that there exists a reasonable basis to believe widespread and/or systematic acts of violence may have been committed that could qualify as crimes against humanity of deportation across the Myanmar-Bangladesh border” the Court said in a press statement, in addition to “persecution on grounds of ethnicity and/or religion against the Rohingya population.”

After a reported military-led crackdown, widespread killings, rape and village burnings, nearly three-quarters of a million Rohingya fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state in August 2017 to settle in crowded refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is the world’s only permanent criminal tribunal with a mandate to investigate and prosecute individuals who participate in international atrocity crimes, including genocide and crimes against humanity.
This is the second strike against the alleged crimes this week, as the tribunal’s decision follows a Monday submission by Gambia to the UN’s principal judicial organ, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), accusing Myanmar of “mass murder, rape, and genocidal acts” which violate its obligations under the Genocide Convention, in addition to destruction of villages, arbitrary detention, and torture.

As a member to the Genocide prevention treaty, Gambia “refused to stay silent”, and as a member of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the small African nation has taken legal action to assist the persecuted majority-Muslim Rohingya, with support by other Muslim countries.

While the UN’s ICJ, known as the ‘World Court’, settles disputes submitted by States on a range of matters, the ICC is the world’s only permanent  criminal tribunal with a mandate to investigate and prosecute individuals who participate in international atrocity crimes, including genocide and crimes against humanity.

In July, the ICC’s top Prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, requested an investigation be open into the alleged crimes committed since October of 2016, concerning Myanmar and Bangladesh.

At that time, her Office’s preliminary examination found “a reasonable basis” to believe that at least 700,00 Rohingya were deported from Myanmar to Bangladesh “through a range of coercive acts causing suffering and serious injury.”

Under the Rome Statute that created the ICC, which highlights crimes against humanity as one of its four crucial international crimes, the top Prosecutor concluded sufficient legal conditions had been met to open an investigation.

While Myanmar is not a State party to the treaty, Bangladesh ratified the Statute in 2010, meaning authorization to investigate does not extend to all crimes potentially committed in Myanmar, but will focus on violations committed in part on Bangladeshi territory, the ICJ said in July.

‘Only justice and accountability’ can stop the violence

Judges forming the pre-trial chamber, Judge Olga Herrera Carbuccia, Judge Robert Fremr, and Judge Geofreey Henderson received views on this request by or on behalf of hundreds of thousands of alleged victims.

According to the ICC Registry, victims insist they want an investigation by the Court, and many “believe that only justice and accountability can ensure that the perceived circle of violence and abuse comes to an end.”

“Noting the scale of the alleged crimes and the number of victims allegedly involved, the Chamber considered that the situation clearly reaches the gravity threshold,” the Court said.

The pre-trial Chamber in addition authorized the commencement of the investigation in relation to any crime, including future crime, so long as it is within the jurisdiction of the Court, and is allegedly committed at least in part in the Rome Statute State Party, Bangladesh, or any other territory accepting the jurisdiction.

The alleged crime must also be sufficiently linked to the present situation, and must have been committed on or after the date of the Statute’s entry into force for Bangladesh or the relevant State Party.

Judges from the ICC have given the greenlight for prosecutors to commence collection of necessary evidence, which could result in the judge’s issuance of summonses to appear in court or warrants of arrest. Parties to the Statute have a legal obligation to cooperate fully with the ICC, nonmembers invited to cooperate may decide to do so voluntarily.

This story was originally published by UN News

Over a million Rohingya refugees are without a state as Myanmar refuses to recognise them as citizens. Pictured here is the refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar along Bangladesh border with Myanmar. Credit: ASM Suza Uddin/IPS

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 8 2019 (IPS)

Movie star Cate Blanchett and businessman Richard Branson spoke up this week for the millions of people around the world who cannot get passports and other papers because they lack an official nationality.

The United Nations says the problem — known as “statelessness” — is getting worse, as a worldwide trend towards nationalism means governments are increasingly loath to help people viewed as unwelcome outsiders.

From the mostly-Muslim Rohingya people across Myanmar and Bangladesh to the masses of stateless folks in Côte d’Ivoire, Thailand, Latvia, Syria and Kuwait, Blanchett, Branson and others urged governments to tackle the problem.

“Statelessness has a devastating impact on millions of people around the world,” Blanchett, an Australian double Oscar-winner, told journalists on Monday during a week of intergovernmental talks in Geneva.

“They experience marginalisation and exclusion from cradle to grave … It’s total invisibility.”

By one count from 2017, some 70 countries reported on 3.9 million stateless individuals, but the U.N. agency for refugees, UNHCR, says the real figure globally is likely three times higher with some 12 million people impacted.

The world’s biggest stateless population are the Rohingya, hundreds of thousands of whom have sought safety in Bangladesh after fleeing violence in Myanmar, which does not recognise them as citizens.

“No one should have to suffer the indignity and exclusion that comes with being stateless,” Branson, a British billionaire wrote on Monday.

“Fortunately, over a hundred states have come together in Geneva this week to commit to do more to put an end to statelessness once and for all.”

It’s difficult to imagine how any country can maximise its potential by ignoring significant populations of stateless people. My take on statelessness and how to solve it https://t.co/R5gRApf5pa #IBelong @Refugees pic.twitter.com/SoGgG1rJtb

— Richard Branson (@richardbranson) 7 October 2019

The U.N. calls statelessness a “man-made problem” stemming from a “bewildering array of causes” — often legal directives and the re-drawing of national borders. Some 600,000 people remain stateless after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Stateless people are often denied certificates at birth and remain excluded for the rest of their lives, the U.N., says. They lack the papers for travel, marriage, work, schooling, healthcare, and opening bank accounts.

“Statelessness can deny people and communities their identity and sense of self, contributing to the breakdown of family and social relationships and creating legal problems for generations,” said U.N. deputy secretary-general Amina Mohammed. 

“And stateless people are voiceless people. Prevented from voting or participating in public life, they are without representation anywhere.”

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said the decade-long “#IBelong” campaign was making gains towards ending statelessness by 2024, with more than 220,000 stateless people acquiring a nationality since 2014.

“This is an area in which – for relatively little investment – wide-reaching impact is within our reach,” said Grandi.

In July, Kyrgyzstan became the first country to officially end statelessness. The U.N. says Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan could also meet the 2024 deadline; while Thailand is boosting efforts on its 479,000 ethnic hill tribespeople and other stateless individuals.

Madagascar and Sierra Leone have rewritten their laws so that mothers can confer citizenship to their children, as fathers have long been able to do. Still, 25 nations do not readily grant mothers this right – one of the leading causes of statelessness globally. 

But Grandi also highlighted the Rohingya, and the Indian state of Assam, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has vowed to disenfranchise millions of Muslim immigrants amid a polarising election campaign.

“The progress is far from assured: damaging forms of nationalism, and the manipulation of anti-refugee and migrant sentiment – these are powerful currents internationally that risk putting progress into reverse,” said Grandi.

By James Reinl
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 23 2019 (IPS)

Two years after the start of an exodus of Rohingya civilians from genocide-like attacks in Myanmar, members of the mainly Muslim minority have little hope of securing justice, rights or returning to their homes, according to the United Nations and aid groups.

Reports this week from the U.N. and Oxfam, a charity, show that, on the second anniversary of the ethnic violence in Rakhine state, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya remain refugees in neighbouring Bangladesh or are effectively interred in domestic, government-run camps.

“Rohingya people feel as though they are in limbo with no end in sight. They are alive, but merely surviving,” said Elizabeth Hallinan, an Oxfam advocate on Rohingya issues, in a statement marking the beginning of the exodus on Aug. 25, 2017.

More than 730,000 Rohingya civilians fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state into Bangladesh amid a military-led crackdown in August 2017 that the U.N. and Western governments say included mass killings and gang-rapes.

Oxfam says some 500,000 Rohingya remain in Myanmar, including almost 130,000 confined in government-run camps and where red tape often leaves them unable to send children to school or to visit a doctor.

This week, Bangladesh and the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) announced plans to assess whether some 3,450 Rohingya refugees will accept Myanmar’s offer to return home, nearly a year after another major repatriation scheme failed.

Many refugees refuse to go back, fearing more violence, Radhika Coomaraswamy, an expert from the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, told reporters Thursday, as persecution continues to threaten them in the South Asian nation.   

Coomaraswamy described satellite images of what had been Rohingya villages in Rakhine state, where the government’s slash-and-burn approach had seen settlements “bulldozed” until there was “not a tree standing”.

Sending Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar would expose them to “near-apartheid laws”, and a government that must give approval for marriages between Buddhist women and men of other faiths, including Muslims.

“What are we sending them into, unless there’s some kind of promises being made for a pathway to citizenship that will give them rights?” Coomaraswamy asked in a press briefing in New York 

“It’s not only the issue of safety, physically, but also the fact that they should not have to live like people are living in” the displacement camps in Sittwe and elsewhere in Rakhine state, she added.

In Coomaraswamy’s report, the panel of independent investigators, set up by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2017, said the sexual violence committed by Myanmar troops against Rohingya women and girls in 2017 showed a genocidal intent to destroy the group.

“Hundreds of Rohingya women and girls were raped, with 80 percent of the rapes corroborated by the mission being gang rapes. The Tatmadaw (military) was responsible for 82 percent of these gang rapes,” the 61-page document said.

Myanmar’s government has denied entry to the U.N. investigators, who instead visited refugee camps in Bangladesh, Malaysia and Thailand, and spoke with humanitarians, academics and researchers.

Myanmar’s mission to the U.N. did not answer requests for comment from IPS. Myanmar denies widespread wrongdoing and says the military campaign across hundreds of villages in northern Rakhine was in response to attacks by Rohingya militants.

Coomaraswamy called on world leaders and CEO’s to cut business ties with the Tatmadaw’s businesses, and said there was a small window of hope for prosecutions under a U.N. investigation mechanism in Geneva.  

The panel has gathered new evidence about alleged perpetrators and added their names to a confidential list to be given to U.N. human rights boss Michelle Bachelet and another U.N. inquiry that is readying cases for possible future trials.

Rohingya girls taking religious education lessons at a Madrasah in the camps. Since January, the Government of Bangladesh has ordered the expulsion of Rohingya refugee children from the country’s schools, prompting an outcry from human rights groups. Credit: Kamrul Hasan/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Apr 3 2019 (IPS)

Young Rohingya refugees are now facing new hardships as the Bangladeshi government cracks down on their education and future opportunities.

Since January, the Government of Bangladesh has ordered the expulsion of Rohingya refugee children from schools, prompting an outcry from human rights groups.

“The Bangladeshi government’s policy of tracking down and expelling Rohingya refugee students instead of ensuring their right to education is misguided, tragic, and unlawful…education is a basic human right,” said Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) senior children’s rights researcher Bill Van Esveld.

“If education is for all, education should be for Rohingya,” an expelled Rohingya student told HRW.

The expelled students, who are among the 34,000 registered Rohingya refugees living in camps in the Teknaf and Ukhiya sub-districts in Cox’s Bazar, were born in Bangladesh after their families fled Myanmar in the early 1990s.

However, the majority of Rohingya children, including those born in Bangladesh, are not formally recognised as refugees and are not allowed to enrol in Bangladeshi schools.

Without access to education, Rohingya families often paid for Bangladeshi birth certificates or other documents in order for their children to attend school.

One student said his family spent months saving to pay 3,500 taka or 42 dollars to buy a Bangladeshi brith certificate so that they can pass as Bangladeshi nationals.

Another student pretended his parents were dead to avoid listing their refugee camp address on his school application.

In January, officials sent a notice to the directors of seven secondary schools in Teknaf and a government official in Ukhiya which warned about the increase in Rohingya children’s school attendance and the “dishonest public representatives” who have helped them acquire documents.

“We were informed by the intelligence agencies under the Prime Minister’s Office that Rohingya children are attending different educational institutions in Teknaf sub-district. It is ordered … to take strict measures so that no Rohingya children can attend any Bangladeshi educational institutions outside of the camps,” the notice said.

While it is unclear how many Rohingya were expelled, the notice listed the names and addresses of 44 Rohingya students and included orders to expel them as well as any others.

The founder of one secondary school said intelligence officials warned him that having Rohingya students was “not safe for the country, not safe for our people.”

Van Esveld criticised the move, stating: “The solution to children feeling compelled to falsify their identities to go to secondary school isn’t to expel them but to let them get the education they deserve.”

Mohammed recounted the day he got expelled to HRW, stating: “[The headmaster] said that if there were any Rohingya, the Education Ministry will cancel the license of the school. When the notice was read out, the headmaster said, ‘I know who all the Rohingya are. Don’t hesitate, leave your books and IDs here and go.’ In the class, in front of the Bangladeshi students, they separated us out, and told us to leave.”

Rahim was in English class when a vice principal came and asked the Rohingya students to leave.

“I went to a secret place and I cried. My aim was to be a doctor. What should I do now?” he said.

While there are some schools in refugee camps, they are not formally accredited and only run through to grade 8.

Refugee children at camp schools are also barred from taking national examinations or receiving official certifications indicating that they passed any level of education.

Without formal education, Rohingya children have no proof of their education and are unable to apply to universities.

HRW urged Bangladesh to stop the expulsion of Rohingya students and to ensure all children are able to receive a formal education.

In April 2018, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights also expressed concern over the Rohingya’s lack of access to education and recommended Bangladesh to fully incorporate the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR), of which Bangladesh is a party to, into domestic law.

CESCR includes the importance of children’s rights to all levels of education regardless of immigration or refugee status.

“As long as Rohingya refugee children aren’t able to obtain a formal education in the camps, Bangladesh should allow them to enrol in local schools,” Van Esveld said.

“The government should stop thwarting Rohingya students’ right to learn,” he added.

Rohingya after they fled Myanmar in 2017 arrive at Shahparir Dip in Teknaf, Bangladesh. Credit: IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 26 2018 (IPS)

Policies that allow for impunity, genocide, and apartheid are “intolerable” and make repatriation of Rohingya refugees impossible, say United Nations investigators.

While presenting an annual report to the member states at the U.N., Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar Yanghee Lee expressed disappointment in Myanmar’s government under State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, stating her hope that it “would be vastly different from the past, but it really is not that much different.”

“The government is increasingly demonstrating that it has no interest and capacity to establish a fully functioning democracy for all its people,” Lee said during a press conference.  

She also added that the Nobel peace prize laureate is in “total denial” about the mistreatment and violence against the Rohingya which forced over 700,000 to flee across the border to Bangladesh, and questioned her staunch support for the rule of law.

“If the rule of law were upheld, all the people in Myanmar, regardless of their position, would be answerable to fair laws that are impartially applied, impunity would not reign, and the law would not be wielded as a weapon of oppression,” Lee said.

The Chair of the U.N. fact-finding mission on Myanmar Marzuki Darusman, who also presented a report to the U.N., echoed similar sentiments, noting that the government’s “hardened positions are by far the greatest obstacle.”

“Accountability concerns not only the past but it also concerns the future and Myanmar is destined to repeat the cycles of violence unless there is an end to impunity,” he said.

One of conditions that contributed to the atrocities committed since violence erupted in August 2017 is the shrinking of democratic space, they noted.

While the arrests of Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo gripped international headlines, the government has been increasingly cracking down on free speech and human rights defenders in the country.

Most recently, three journalists from Eleven Media—Nayi Min, Kyaw Zaw Linn, and Phyo Wai Win—were detained and are being investigated for online defamation. If charged and convicted, the journalists face up to two years in prison.

Lee and Darusman also expressed concern over the apartheid-like conditions in Myanmar that persist today including restrictions on movement and access to services such as healthcare and education.

While the government is building new infrastructure for both Rohingya still inside the country and those who fled, Lee noted they are usually segregated from Buddhist communities.

If a policy of separation rather than integration continues, atrocities will be committed yet again.

“It is an ongoing genocide,” Darusman said.

In the fact-finding mission report which looked into the past year’s events, investigators found that four out of five conditions for genocide were met: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

Of those, three conditions can still be seen in the country.

For instance, in 2015, Myanmar’s government imposed “birth spacing” restrictions on women, requiring a 36-month interval between children with forced use of contraception in the interim.

The Population Control Healthcare Bill was introduced in response to a 2013 government report that saw “the rapid population growth of the Bengalis [Rohingya] as an extremely serious threat.”

Prior to this, the government enacted a two-child limit on the Muslim community in Rakhine.

And it is because of these conditions that Rohingya refugees cannot go back.

“Repatriation is not possible now. Unless the situation in Myanmar is conducive, I will not encourage any repatriation. They should not go back to the existing laws, policies, and practices,” Lee said.

She urged for the civilian government to adopt laws that protect and advance human rights for all, and for Suu Kyi to use “all her moral and political power” to act.

“Myanmar now stands at a crossroads—they can respond as a responsible member of the United Nations and take up the call for accountability or they can be on the same self-self-destructive road,” Darusman said.

Of the actions that can be taken towards the path to accountability is the pardoning of human rights defenders and journalists who have been arbitrarily detained in order to restore democratic space.

Myanmar should also allow for unhindered access for humanitarian actors and U.N. investigators, Lee added.

“I think we are at a point where Myanmar and the international community both are at [a] juncture where the right choice to make will determine the future of not only Myanmar but peace and security in the region and the world,” she said.

A Rohingya woman and her child at a refugee camp in Bangladesh. Credit: Kamrul Hasan/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 26 2018 (IPS)

Over one year ago, Bangladesh opened its doors in response to what is now the world’s fastest growing refugee crisis. But questions still remain on how to rehabilitate the steadily growing population. 

After a military crackdown on suspected terrorists in August 2017, over 700,000 Rohingya fled from their homes in Rakhine State, Myanmar to Bangladesh, bringing with them stories of the horrors they have experienced.

The United Nations described the military offensive as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing” and a recent fact-finding mission called for the investigation and prosecution of top officials from Myanmar’s military for possible crimes of genocide.

However, recurring cycles of violence can be traced back to 1978 and now 1.3 million Rohingya reside in Bangladesh, leaving the small South Asian nation straining for resources to provide to grief-stricken refugees and overcrowded camps.

So far, only one third of the humanitarian appeal for refugees and local host communities have been met and still many challenges remain from environmental stress to trafficking to the lack of shelters.

Bangladesh’s prime minister Sheikh Hasina, who was in Time Magazine’s list of 100 most influential people of 2018, has been lauded for her humanitarian gesture and her government’s work in addressing the crisis.

Many international and national organizations are working to support the Rohingya refugees. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) in particular and its head William Lacy Swing have worked relentlessly to not only provide support to the refugees but also to find a lasting solution to the crisis. Swing has worked closely with the prime minister and her government and engaged with the many parties involved to bring about an end to the tragedy.

In recognition of his untiring efforts, Inter Press Service (IPS) is honouring Swing with the Person of the Year Award at an event to be held at the U.N. headquarters on Sept. 27. The prime minster will receive the IPS U.N. North America’s Humanitarian Award for her decision to give shelter to the over one million Rohingya refugees who were driven out of their homes, tortured, burnt, raped and left stateless and hopeless.

Ahead of the Hasina’s speech to the U.N. General Assembly, which is expected to focus on the Rohingya crisis and call for international action to resolve the crisis, IPS spoke to ambassador Masud Bin Momen, permanent representative of Bangladesh to the U.N.about the ongoing challenges, support, and future action plans.

Excerpts of the interview follow:

Inter Press Service (IPS): Could you talk about the situation in Bangladesh—are refugees still arriving? What conditions are Rohingya refugees arriving in and what conditions are they seeing and living with in Bangladesh?

Masud Bin Momen (MBM): The situation in Cox’s Bazar is terrible. Having to shelter more than 700,000 Rohingyas from Myanmar’s Rakhine state, which is the fastest-growing crisis of its kind in the world, and provide them with humanitarian support is an onerous responsibility. It was the bold decision of our honourable prime minister to take up such a huge responsibility responding to humanity’s call. It takes a lot of courage and magnanimity of heart to make such a politically sensitive decision.

And the influx of Rohingyas has not stopped. It is continuing although in much smaller numbers. The freshly-arrived Rohingyas are still giving a grim picture of the ground situation in the Rakhine state. They are telling us about insecurity, threat, persecution, hunger, lack of livelihood opportunities, which is forcing them to leave Myanmar.

IPS: What has the government been doing as of late with regards to supporting Rohingya refugees there now? What have been some of the challenges to support these refugees?

MBM: The camp conditions in Cox’s Bazar may not be perfect and surely, one would understand how difficult it is for a developing country to cater to the humanitarian needs of such a huge population. But our government is trying its best to further improve the camp conditions to ensure basic necessities of the Rohingyas.

The challenges are manifold, I would mention only a few. Providing them with the basic amenities has been the biggest challenge.

For firewood, the Rohingyas have destroyed the forest and vegetation around the camps creating serious threat to the ecology of the area. The shelters that they have built on the slope of the hills are vulnerable to landslide during the monsoon.

For livelihood they are competing with the locals. This is reducing employment opportunities of the local population thus creating concern among the host communities. Their presence is affecting the local law and order situation. The possibility of radicalisation looms large. As their stay lingers, there is the possibility of mingling with the local population which could make their repatriation more difficult.

A Rohingya girl proudly holds up her drawing at a UNICEF school at Balukhali camp, Bangladesh. Credit: Farid Ahmed/IPS

IPS: Could you talk about the controversies surrounding repatriation? Why has it been stalled, and are conditions favourable or safe for Rohingya refugees to go back to Myanmar right now? 

MBM: Although Rohingyas want to return to their homes in Rakhine they would not return to Myanmar until and unless the ground condition in the Rakhine state is conducive for their return. This is the singular impediment to return. Improving ground conditions is entirely Myanmar’s responsibility. Since the ground condition is not yet conducive, the Rohingyas are not signing the declaration for voluntary return and hence repatriation is being delayed.

IPS: If refugees cannot return to Myanmar yet, what does Bangladesh plan to do with regards to support? Are there future actions planned to enhance camps and living conditions?

MBM: If they do not return in the foreseeable future we perhaps have no other option but to continue to give them refuge. We would not send them back against their will. As our prime minister said, we would share our meals with them (Rohingyas). There cannot be a more poignant message of our goodwill to the Rohingyas. Our government is relentlessly working to improve the camps and the living conditions therein. We are also developing an island for relocation of some of the Rohingyas.

IPS: What are your thoughts to the criticism that the island which you mentioned is not safe to live, particularly due to violent weather and high risk of floods? 

MBM: This is an entirely wrong perception. Keeping the entire Rohingya population in a geo-politically sensitive place like Cox’s Bazar is not feasible at all. Cox’s Bazar simply does not have the physical capacity or the infrastructure to sustain such a huge Rohingya population. So, they have to be relocated and the island you are talking about is one such place for possible relocation.

Initially about 100,000 Rohingyas are planned to be relocated. The criticism that you have referred to is baseless coming from ill-informed quarters. Our government is working hard to make the island livable with self-sustaining livelihood options. And until it is made entirely livable, Rohingyas are not going to be relocated there.

IPS: What are your thoughts on the International Criminal Court (ICC) launching a preliminary examination? 

MBM: We feel that this is a positive development in ensuring accountability of the perpetrators. If the ICC can come up with some concrete outcome, it might also serve as an important factor in building confidence among the Rohingyas which will facilitate their repatriation.

IPS: Do you have a response or message to Myanmar’s government regarding the crisis? And perhaps a message to the International community in addressing the situation? 

MBM: We would urge upon Myanmar to make ground conditions in the Rakhine state conducive for return and take back the Rohingyas as soon as possible. The comprehensive implementation of the Kofi Annan Commission’s recommendations would be able to address the root causes of the Rohingyarians.

We urge upon the international community is to take custodianship of the bilateral arrangements for return that Bangladesh and Myanmar have signed and impress upon Myanmar to take back the Rohingyas.

*Interview has been edited for length and clarity

Excerpt:

Rohingya alight from a boat as they arrive at Shahparir Dip in Teknaf, Bangladesh in 2017. Credit: IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 4 2018 (IPS)

After the release of a scathing report on Myanmar’s human rights violations, next steps to achieve accountability and justice remain elusive and uncertain.  

A year after the re-escalation of violence that forced almost a million people to flee to neighbouring countries, a fact-finding mission found a “human rights catastrophe” in Myanmar.

“The gross human rights violations and abuses committed in Kachin, Rakhine and Shan States are shocking for their horrifying nature and ubiquity,” the report states.

“Many of these violations undoubtedly amount to the gravest crimes under international law,” it continued.“The U.N. system really failed the people of Myanmar particularly the Rohingya by treading softly.” -- Human Rights Watch’s U.N. Director Louis Charbonneau

Triggered by insurgent attacks on security forces, the report pointed a finger to Myanmar’s military, known as the Tatmadaw, for committing the gravest of crimes including indiscriminate killing, burning of houses, and sexual violence.

The investigators identified six generals, including the commander in chief of the Tatmadaw Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, and recommended that they be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court (ICC) or at an alternative tribunal.

“There needs to be an unequivocal message sent that Myanmar’s military cannot act with impunity against ethnic minorities in Myanmar again,” Amnesty International’s Asia Advocacy Manager Francisco Bencosme told IPS.

“Never again has to mean never again – and the entire world is watching to see what the international community does,” he continued.

Like Bencosme, Human Rights Watch’s U.N. Director Louis Charbonneau also told IPS that the Security Council should refer the situation in Myanmar to the ICC or create a special criminal tribunal for prosecution.

But how did we get here?

Years of systematic oppression against Myanmar’s ethnic minorities made the crisis “foreseeable”—so what happened?

A System-Wide Failure

In 2008, the U.N. failed to heed warnings of increasing violence between the Sri Lankan military and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and did not report evidence of widespread government violations and casualties.

A 2012 internal review found that various U.N. agencies including the Security Council failed at every level to protect civilians and meet their responsibilities in the last months of the civil war in the South Asian nation.

In the wake of the fiasco, the U.N. implemented the Human Rights Up Front Initiative to ensure a better system of monitoring and responding to international crises. Though Myanmar was identified as a situation requiring the Action Plan’s human rights response to crises, the approach was rarely, if ever, used, the report stated.

Instead, U.N. agencies continued to prioritise development goals, humanitarian access, and quiet diplomacy—an approach which “demonstrably failed.”

“The U.N. system really failed the people of Myanmar particularly the Rohingya by treading softly,” Charbonneau told IPS.

“Now instead of us saying ‘never again’ after Sri Lanka, Rwanda, Srebrenica—here we are saying well yet again it happened. The U.N. didn’t do what it was supposed to be doing, it didn’t raise the alarm bells to the extent that they could have,” he continued.

The Security Council’s response, or lack thereof, has been equally disappointing. The U.N. organ has had only a handful of meetings on Myanmar and none have resulted in any resolution.

In contrast, Syria has received special attention over the last seven years with numerous meetings in the “triple digits.”

“Given the scale of the crisis in Myanmar, it is difficult to reconcile the different responses of the Security Council particularly given a situation where the U.N. for sometime has been warning about the possibility of the ‘g’ word that is genocide,” Charbonneau said.

“It would be good to see an attempt to really push the Council to try something. We haven’t seen that yet and I don’t know if we will see it,” he continued.

China and Russia, Security Council members with veto power, have consistently pushed back on efforts to act on Myanmar’s crisis, stating that the crisis should only be resolved by the parties directly affected including Bangladesh where over 700,000 Rohingya refugees have fled to.

In the Security Council’s first open meeting on Myanmar in eight years, Russia’s ambassador Vasily Nebenzya warned against claims of ethnic cleansing and blaming Myanmar’s authorities as it “will make it more difficult to achieve lasting interethnic peace inside the country.”

Whether it is genocide or crimes against humanity, Bencosme highlighted the need for the international community to act with respect to Myanmar.

“We don’t need a legal diagnosis to understand that something desperately tragic and clearly unlawful has been happening in Myanmar. What matters most is that a civilian population is under attack because of its race or religion, and that these violations must stop immediately,” he told IPS.

Myanmar has repeatedly denied accusations of violations including those most recently published through the fact-finding mission’s report.

“Myanmar authorities have shown themselves to be both unable and unwilling to investigate and prosecute those responsible. As a result, the ICC is the appropriate route to deliver justice,” Bencosme said.

However, since Myanmar is not a member of the ICC, only a member of the Security Council can bring the case to the tribunal.

“The time for rhetoric is over – there needs to be action. There needs to be genuine accountability and justice. There needs to be an honest conversation about referring the situation to the International Criminal Court. We need to pursue all avenues of justice for these victims and their families who are the heart of the crisis,” Bencosme concluded.

Urgent Action Needed

While Charbonneau expressed hope that the new report will “reenergise” the U.N., he noted that we should not idly wait.

“I don’t think we should be waiting around for the Security Council—too often the Council doesn’t move on issues and it’s more deadlock than ever these days. We may have to keep using these work-arounds like the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council,” he told IPS.

Among the alternative avenues for action is the establishment of an impartial mechanism by the Human Rights Council or General Assembly to collect, analyse, and preserve evidence for future potential criminal proceedings in the ICC or another criminal tribunal.

The report also recommends that the U.N. urgently adopt a common strategy to address human rights concerns in Myanmar in line with the Human Rights Up Front Action Plan, as well as a comprehensive inquiry into whether the U.N. did everything possible to prevent or mitigate Myanmar’s crisis.

“The time has past for these feeble condemnations or expressions of concern that we are so used to from the U.N.—we just really need action,” Charbonneau said.

A damning reporting by the United Nations on the Myanmar’s army crimes against the Rohingya may come too late for these Rohingya children, many of whom remain traumatised as witnesses of the genocide. Credit: Farid Ahmed/IPS

By Farid Ahmed
DHAKA, Aug 27 2018 (IPS)

At 12, Mohammed* is an orphan. He watched his parents being killed by Myanmar government soldiers a year ago. And he is one of an estimated half a million Rohingya children who have survived and been witness to what the United Nations has called genocide.

According to accounts in a U.N. fact-finding report released today, the children were likely witnesses to their homes and villages being burnt down, to mass killings, and to the rape of their mothers. As girls, they would have likely been raped themselves.

It has been a year since the atrocities in Myanmar’s Rakhine state led to the exodus of some 700,000 Rohingya—some 60 percent of whom where children, according to the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF)—into neighbouring Bangladesh and to the coastal Cox’s Bazar district were the refugee camps have been set up.

And life remains difficult for the children in these camps.

While some who live in the squalid camps find it hard to envision themselves returning to a normal life; others, like Mohammed, dream of justice.

“I want justice… I want the soldiers to face trial,” he tells IPS, saying he wants justice from the soldiers who “ruined his life”.

“They killed our people, grabbed our land and torched our houses. They killed both my mother and father. I am now living with my sister,” he says.

A year ago, on Aug. 25, Myanmar government forces responded to a Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attack on a military base. But, according to the report by the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, “the nature, scale and organisation of the operations suggests a level of preplanning and design on the part of the Tatmadaw [Myanmar’s military] leadership.”

The report outlines how  “the operations were designed to instil immediate terror, with people woken by intense rapid weapons fire, explosions, or the shouts and screams of villagers. Structures were set ablaze and Tatmadaw soldiers fired their guns indiscriminately into houses and fields, and at villagers.”

It also notes that “rape and other forms of sexual violence were perpetrated on a massive scale” and that “sometimes up to 40 women and girls were raped or gang raped together. One survivor stated, “I was lucky, I was only raped by three men.””

The report calls for a full investigation into genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, calling for Myanmar’s top generals to be investigated for genocide in Rakhine state.

Senior-general Min Aung Hlaing is listed in the report as an alleged direct perpetrator of crimes, while the head of state, Aung San Suu Kyi, was heavily criticised in the report for not using her position “nor her moral authority, to stem or prevent the unfolding events, or seek alternative avenues to meet a responsibility to protect the civilian population.”

While rights agencies have responded to the report calling on international bodies and the U.N. to hold to account those responsible for the crimes, local groups have been calling for long-term solutions to aid the surviving Rohingya children.

A Rohingya girl proudly holds up her drawing at a UNICEF school at Balukhali camp, Bangladesh. Credit: Farid Ahmed/IPS

Since their arrival in Bangladesh many Rohingya children have not received a proper education, while the healthcare facilities have been strained by the large numbers of people seeking assistance.

While scores of global and local NGOs, aid groups, U.N. agencies and the Bangladesh government are working to support the refugees, aid workers are concerned as many of the children remain traumatised by their experiences.

While they are receiving trauma counselling, it is still not enough.

“Whenever there is a darkness at night, I’m scared and feel somebody is coming to kill us… sometimes I see it in my dream when I’m asleep… sometimes I see our room is filled with blood,” 11-year-old Ayesha Ali*, who was studying at a madrassa at Kutupalong camp in Cox’s Bazar, tells IPS.

UNICEF in an alert last week warned that denial of basic rights could result in the Rohingya children becoming a “lost generation”.

“With no end in sight to their bleak exile, despair and hopelessness are growing among the refugees, alongside a fatalism about what the future has in store,” the alert states.

It is estimated that 700,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar are housed in Cox’s Bazar district in Bangladesh. Credit: Mojibur Rahaman Rana/IPS

A number of children in the camps have lost either one or both parents. Last November, Bangladesh’s department of social services listed 39,841 Rohingya children as having lost either their mother or father, or lost contact with them during the exodus. A total of 8,391 children lost both of their parents.

“Most of the children saw the horrors of brutality and if they are not properly dealt with, they might have developed a mind of retaliation. Sometimes the small children talk like this: ‘We’ll kill the army…because they killed our people.’ They are growing up with a sort of hatred for the Myanmar army,” aid worker Abdul Mannan tells IPS.

And while there are 136 specialised, child-friendly zones for children and hundreds of learning centre across Cox Bazar, UNICEF notes it is only now “developing a strategy to ensure consistency and quality in the curriculum.”

BRAC, a development organisation based in Bangladesh, points out current learning centres and other facilities for children are not enough for the proper schooling and future development of the children.

“What we’re giving to the children is not enough to stand them in good stead,” Mohammed Abdus Salam, head of humanitarian crisis management programme of BRAC, tells IPS.

Newly arrived Rohingya refugees enter Teknaf from Shah Parir Dwip after being ferried from Myanmar across the Naf River. Credit: Farid Ahmed/ IPS

Salam says that the children and women in the camps also remain vulnerable. “Especially the boys and girls who have lost their parents or guardians are the most vulnerable as there was no long-term programme for them,” he says, adding that many were still traumatised and suffered from nightmares. Cox Bazar is a hub of drugs and human traffickers, and children without guardians remain at risk.

Both the Bangladesh government and international aid officials say that they are trying hard to cope with the situation in Cox Bazar which is the largest and most densely-populated refugee settlement in the world.

But Salam says that it is urgent to formulate long-term plans for both education and healthcare if the repatriation process was procrastinated. “Otherwise, many of the children will be lost as they are not properly protected,” he says.

*Names changed to protect the identity of the children.

Additional reporting by Nalisha Adams in Johannesburg.

Rohingya refugees now cramped in hilly terrains of Ukhiya in southeastern regions of Cox’s Bazar along Bangladesh border with Myanmar. Credit: ASM Suza Uddin/IPS

By Jan Egeland
OSLO, Aug 22 2018 (IPS)

Aid funding for refugee relief is running out while conditions are still not in place for the safe return of over 700,000 people forced to flee Myanmar to neighbouring Bangladesh after violence broke out one year ago.

The mass human exodus of refugees from Myanmar to Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, which started on 25 August 2017, was one of the fastest growing refugee crises last year. It then attracted huge international attention, but one year on only 34 percent of the United Nations aid appeal to help the refugees and the host community has been funded.

The Rohingya refugees are living in limbo. The safety of families returning to Myanmar cannot be guaranteed, yet they’re receiving scant international support in Bangladeshi camps.

We urgently need to scale up the support. The international community must shoulder more of the enormous responsibility that the Bangladeshi authorities and local communities have taken on, as well as show persecuted Rohingya refugees they are not forgotten.

“I have not cooked any food for my children today. I do not feel safe enough to go out and collect firewood, so I exchanged some food items for fuel, but now I do not have enough to eat,” Janoara, a single mother of two sons, told the Norwegian Refugee Council.

The humanitarian emergency was further compounded by the onset of the monsoon season in June, with heavy rain, flooding, landslides and high winds damaging or destroying refugees’ shelters. Despite ongoing relocations to safer land, the camps are still dangerously overcrowded, with the average usable space reported to be a mere 10.7 square meters per person.

Far more appropriate land is needed – a major challenge in one of the already most densely populated countries in the world. In Cox’s Bazar, rumours abound and people are worried about being expected to return to their villages before their own preconditions for repatriation are met.

“I will not return before Rohingyas get citizenship, equal rights, free movement and compensation for the houses they burned down and my land. I will not return with my family before we feel completely safe,” Nurul Amin (35) told the Norwegian Refugee Council. He fled Rakhine about one year ago and his demands are echoed by many others in the camps.

The Rohingya people have the right to return. One year after the start of this crisis, we urgently need to speed up efforts to ensure conditions for voluntary, safe and dignified return, in line with international standards.

Access for humanitarian agencies to people requiring assistance in northern Rakhine State is currently restricted and it is not possible to independently verify information about conditions in the locations of return. There are also no guarantees in place that returnees will be allowed to return to their original homes and land, or to a place of their choice.

Humanitarian agencies need full access to people in need in northern Rakhine State to make independent assessments, provide assistance and protect communities who want to return.

Excerpt:

This photo, taken in 2012, shows desperate Rohingya refugees from Myanmar attempting to get past border patrol guards in Bangladesh. Now, in 2015, a fresh exodus of mainly Rohingya migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh has the international community on edge. Credit: Anurup Titu/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, May 16 2015 (IPS)

On Thursday, May 14, a group of journalists rented a boat from Ko Lipe, a small island in Thailand’s southwest Satun Province, and headed out into the Andaman Sea – a water body in the northeastern Indian Ocean bounded by Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Strait of Malacca.

Ten miles into the journey, they came upon a sight not often spied in these waters: a three-storey, rickety wooden vessel, filled with ragged men, women and children who, upon seeing the boatload of journalists, began crying out for help.

“We don’t have a flotilla to go out and help them, but there are plenty of countries in the region that do, and plenty of reasons for them to do it – if they don’t, they’ll be dealing with a floating graveyard soon, rather than a flotilla of ships." -- Leonard Doyle, director of media and communications for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM)
This ship and its desperate human cargo – hundreds of migrants from the Rohingya Muslim community in Myanmar and Bangladesh – now symbolizes the plight of a persecuted people, and the harsh migration policies of a handful of Southeast Asian countries that have resulted in a game of ‘maritime Ping-Pong’ played out with human lives.

According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), smugglers abandoned the ship and its passengers after failing to dock in Thailand as a result of that country’s harsh crackdown on what it calls “illegal” maritime arrivals, but what rights activists say are beleaguered citizens fleeing ethnic persecution and economic hardship in their native lands.

Earlier, the boat made a failed attempt to land in Malaysia, and on Friday Thai authorities moved the vessel further out to sea, claiming that its passengers wanted to carry on with their journey – an unlikely scenario given that the emaciated group of refugees have been out at sea for three months, and have little to no food or water left onboard.

A regional crisis

And they are not the only ones – the IOM estimates that some 6,000 people out of roughly 8,000 who have been out at sea since early March remain marooned off the coasts of Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.

These countries, all members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), have taken an uneven approach to the refugee crisis: the IOM says some 1,500 people have managed to disembark in Malaysia and Indonesia, while thousands of others have been turned away, with the navies of each respective country going so far as to tow some of the boats further out to see.

A statement issued through the spokesperson of the United Nations Secretary-General Thursday called on governments in the region to respond to the crisis by upholding international obligations, including the prohibition on ‘refoulement’ – the forcible return of persecuted individuals to their country of origin.

The U.N. chief also asked governments to “facilitate timely disembarkation and keep their borders and ports open in order to help the vulnerable people who are in need.”

However, these requests have so far gone unheeded.

Alarmed by the plight of those stranded out at sea, the IOM on Friday released one million dollars from its Migration Emergency Funding Mechanism, with the aim of expanding relief to refugees on shore and assisting those still on the water.

While the fund will provide potentially life-saving emergency aid to hundreds of people, “it’s really up to countries nearby to respond,” IOM Director of Media and Communications Leonard Doyle told IPS.

He said the emergency funds will be used to provide desperate migrants with whatever they might need, but they have to be brought ashore first.

“We don’t have a flotilla to go out and help them, but there are plenty of countries in the region that do, and plenty of reasons for them to do it – if they don’t, they’ll be dealing with a floating graveyard soon, rather than a flotilla of ships,” he stressed.

At the very least, he said, powerful emerging countries within range of the crisis should use their naval capacity to bring those needing medical attention ashore – it is believed that pregnant women are among the migrants still drifting well within reach of land – but no government has so far demonstrated a willingness to do so.

Risking death to flee their homes

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) believes that about 25,000 people “departed irregularly by sea” from the Bay of Bengal in the first quarter of 2015 – double the departure rate for the two preceding years.

The U.N. agency also says an estimated 300 people have died out at sea since October 2014, from starvation, dehydration or after being beaten severely by boat crews.

Hailing largely from Bangladesh and Myanmar, passengers pay between 90 and 370 dollars to board these ships, in addition to the thousands of dollars they might pay moneylenders in interest rates, or to immigration officials for their freedom once they land on safer shores.

The sudden spike in departures could be driven by a number of factors, not least of which the harsh conditions in IDP camps in Myanmar where over 140,000 refugees, the majority of whom identify as Rohingya Muslims, have been interned since inter-communal violence in the country’s western Rakhine State displaced them from their homes nearly three years ago.

Other reasons for the exodus include economic hardships, or ethnic persecution, the U.N. says.

That so many are willing to risk death by drowning for a mere chance of a better life speaks volumes of their plight in their home countries.

An IOM statement released Friday explained, “In the past three years, an estimated 160,000 migrants from the coasts of Myanmar and Bangladesh were smuggled by boat to Thailand before being brought overland to Malaysia.”

But the discovery in early May of mass graves in smuggling camps drove a major crackdown on migrants in both countries, resulting in the current regional stalemate.

These and other issues are expected to be the focus of a regional summit scheduled to take place later this month, which U.N. Chief Ban Ki-moon called an opportunity “for all leaders of Southeast Asia to intensify individual and collective efforts to address this worrying situation and tackle the root causes, of which the push factors are often human rights violations.”

Others believe that such a settlement, if it comes at all, will come too late.

“These people are not going to last that long,” IOM’s Doyle told IPS. “They need to be rescued now and that’s what we’ve been calling for. As you can imagine, one day out on a boat is enough, but these people have been out there for [months]… This is shocking, really shocking treatment of human beings.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Noor Jahan spends her days drying out and grinding chillies to help support her three children, mother-in-law, and out of work husband who used to be a labourer downtown where they are no longer allowed to travel. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

By Rob Jarvis and Kim Jolliffe
SITTWE, Myanmar, May 12 2015 (IPS)

In Myanmar’s Western Rakhine State, over a hundred thousand people displaced by inter communal violence that broke out nearly three years ago remain interned in camps on torrid plains and coastal marshes, struggling to survive.

In the face of unimaginable hardship, many have found ways to cope and maintain their dignity, through innovation and hard work.

Behind sensational and at times gory headlines peddled by the mainstream media, a far more simple story is unfolding: the story of scores of victims of violence in camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) outside the Rakhine State capital, Sittwe, gaining sustenance, acquiring fuel for fires, re-establishing businesses, and developing community-led social services.

Inter communal violence erupted in 2012 between the region’s majority Rakhine Buddhists and minority Muslims who mostly self-identify as Rohingya, an ethnic label that remains heavily contested and at the heart of a decades-old conflict.

Three years later, over 140,000 IDPs, predominantly Rohingya Muslims, remain effectively interned and segregated in camps from which the government has not allowed them to return home.

Aid is administered through United Nations agencies and other mainstream bodies that are bound to work primarily with the government, leading to top-down interventions that do little to build the capacity of beneficiaries themselves, at worst stifling their ability to take their lives back into their own hands.

Up against the odds, these communities are nevertheless demonstrating the sheer strength of the human spirit, and the remarkable resilience that often presents itself only in the darkest, most hopeless situations. Through small acts of determination, courage and kindness, they are assuring their own survival and slowly regaining their dignity.

Arafa lives in this tent with her six children and three grandchildren. When she fled her burning home she had nothing but her longyi (traditional skirt) and one shirt so has begun growing gourds on the tent for extra sustenance. Her grandchildren photographed here all wear beads that were blessed by the local mullah. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

Chu Mar Win, a Rakhine Buddhist IDP in her early twenties whose house was burned down by Rohingya Muslims in July 2012, volunteers as a teacher in her camp. To ensure the young children can stay in school, the community all donate some rice and small amounts of money so she can afford to keep teaching. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

Zadi Begum, a 25-year-old single mother of five, runs a small noodle shop out of the front of her hut. As she fled her village in July 2012 with her mother and children, her husband, 30-year-old Ibrahim, stayed behind to collect some things but was killed by Rakhine Buddhists with a machete. She struggled to raise the roughly 27 dollars needed to buy the basic tools and materials to start her noodle shop. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

Three years ago, in July 2012, Noor Ahmed had his boat stolen by Rakhine Buddhists in his village of Myo Thu Gyi. Now, he and his 13-year-old son, both IDPs, work tirelessly on other people’s boats for daily wages. He stands before one such boat that the pair has been working on for 20 days. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

Mohammed Hussain, aged eight, spends his weekends in the mud with friends looking for buried pieces of wood that can be salvaged for fuel. Here, he has been at work with his three brothers and two friends for four hours, and they have found a single piece that he is excited to take home to his mother. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

La La May is making a blouse, catching the last minutes of sunlight through her doorway. She provides training to other girls here and makes between fifty cents and one dollar per day by tailoring clothes. She currently has four female students who she teaches for free using this single sewing machine, which they bought from the ‘host community’, locals from the neighbouring village. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

Farida, aged 18, works in her family’s betel nut processing business. The nuts belong to Rakhine business owners, who pay the family less than 0.09 dollars per nut. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

Abul Kasim, aged 53, a father of seven, finds it hard to explain what is wrong with him. He spends most of his days at the local clinic in Say Tha Ma Gee IDP camp, having not been able to eat properly, with severe bowel problems and internal bleeding for eight months. The clinic has referred him to Sittwe General Hospital but he says dares not go, and could not afford to in any case. Relying on traditional medicine, he has bouts of pain every day that leave him shaking uncontrollably. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

Da Naing clinic demonstrates the abject level of neglect faced by the IDP communities, as a result of aid mismanagement and the government’s lack of care. The clinic was built by an international NGO in 2012 and has lain dormant for much of the time since. Though the government promised doctors and medicine, such provisions have been discontinued. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

Noor Jahan spends her days drying out and grinding chillies to help support her three children, mother-in-law, and out of work husband who used to be a labourer downtown where they are no longer allowed to travel. She buys the chillies fresh from the local market and then sells small affordable packets of 1-2 teaspoons worth, and is able to make just about two dollars in three or four days. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

Mi Ni Ra, 16, is from Nasi village, which was burned to the ground during the violence in 2012. Her baby, just 16 days old here, was born in a small hut in Bu May IDP camp, outside Sittwe. Her baby was delivered traditionally in a small hut nearby, with the help of a local traditional birth attendant, without modern medical support. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

This boy spends his days selling betel nut in the traditional form, wrapped in a leaf with a bit of lime powder and tobacco. A salvaged halved buoy serves as his basket. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

This elderly Rakhine woman has lived through independence and suffered as a member of a repressed minority under authoritarian rule by successive military regimes in Burma. After Rohingya Muslims burned her village in 2012, she has lived in an IDP camp outside Sittwe, where she struggled to save enough money to open this shop. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

In the face of adversity, many of the displaced Muslims have turned to God, as instructed by their mullahs. These handmade bamboo mosques have been built in each IDP camp, with pump well washing facilities outside. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

Angu Mia plucks and boils chickens for a female Rakhine business owner, who pays him 0.4 dollars per bird and then sells the meat at a local market. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

This man has installed solar panels to the top of his hut to provide a phone charging service to the minority of IDPs who have phones, as their huts have no power. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

These pufferfish are dried and turned inside out to be sold to traders who take them to China. This man lost stocks of the product worth hundreds of dollars when his house was burned down in June 2012. He now leases fish from local fishermen, promising to pay them in full once he has made a sale. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

These women spend hours crouched in the sun on the seashore, drying out fish caught in previous days. Drying the fish preserves it for longer, making it more attractive locally, where a single fish will be eaten over days with small portions of rice. Large numbers of Rohingya Muslims from fishing communities in other parts of Rakhine State fled by boat when the violence began and came straight to this part of the coast, where the Rohingya Muslim communities have long run their fishing businesses. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Photos by Rob Jarvis: info@robjarvisphotography.com.

Text by Kim Jolliffe: spcm88@gmail.com

Border guards in Bangladesh refuse entry to Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in November 2012. Credit: Anurup Titu/IPS

By AJ Correspondents
DOHA, Aug 15 2013 (Al Jazeera)

An activist has been arrested in Myanmar after posting photos on Facebook from violent clashes between displaced Muslims and security forces in the country’s restive state of Rakhine, police and an activist have said.

It was not immediately clear what charges Than Shwe, a 29-year-old Rohingya Muslim, would face.

A police officer who refused to give his name because he was not authorised to speak to the media said on Wednesday that the man was trying to cause trouble during a visit by U.N. special rapporteur on human rights Tomas Ojea Quintana.

Quintana, who was touring the region after the deadly clashes, has urged the state government to release the activist, Thailand-based The Irrawaddy newsmagazine reported.

Aung Win, a well-known Rohingya activist, said that Than Shwe’s wife called Quintana on Tuesday and told him that her husband had been detained.

“He [Quintana] told our community leaders that he had already told the government to release all people who have been detained, included Than Shwe,” said Aung Win, according to the newsmagazine.

At least one person was killed and around 10 were injured after the clash in a camp for dispossessed Rohingya Muslims Friday Aug. 9, in the latest violence in Rakhine state, the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR said.

Police torture

The most recent unrest occurred after the body of a fisherman was found in a creek near Ohn Taw Gyi camp, said Rakhine state spokesman Win Myaing, who called it a drowning.

But rumours quickly spread that the man had been beaten to death by police.

“He was bleeding from both ears. It looked like he had been smashed in the face by a rifle butt, all his teeth were gone,” said Aung Win, who saw the body before burial.

“This wasn’t a drowning. He was pretty clearly beaten and tortured.”

A dispute over the death and custody of the body sparked several riots, which were broken up by police who fired first into the air and then into the crowd, Win Myaing said.

Than Shwe, who works for an organisation that delivers food and supplies to camps for Rohingya Muslims, was accused of posting images of the dead and injured online, Aung Win said.

Twenty officers went to his home on Monday Aug. 12 and brought him to the police station, Aung Win said.

The United Nations has called for dialogue following the latest unrest.

“UNHCR is reiterating its call for peaceful dialogue and confidence-building between the [internally displaced persons] and government,” spokesman Adrian Edwards said in Geneva.

Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist nation that only recently emerged from decades of isolation and military rule, has been wracked by sectarian violence in the last year, with more than 250 people killed and 140,000 others displaced.

Published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

Border guards in Bangladesh refuse entry to Rohingya refugees from Myanmar in November 2012. Credit: Anurup Titu/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, May 1 2013 (IPS)

A long-awaited official report on last year’s sectarian violence in western Myanmar is being heavily disparaged by human rights and advocacy groups here, who say a government-backed commission has placed undue emphasis on strengthening security while almost completely ignoring issues of discrimination and accountability.

The commission was created in August, in the aftermath of violence between Buddhists and Muslims that spiked in June and October in the western state of Rakhine (also known as Arakan). Yet the 27-member body included no representation from the Muslim Rohingya community, a heavily marginalised group that has suffered by far the greatest losses of life and home during the continuing violence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar (also known as Burma)."There were some very offensive parts of this report, but none of those should detract from the realisation that this was first and foremost a failure as a government investigation." -- HRW's John Sifton

Indeed, the report throughout refers to the community as “Bengalis”, a reference to the perception that the Rohingya are illegal migrants from Bangladesh, while also making derogatory comments about the community’s “high population growth rates”. Such officially held views have been used for decades to rationalise exclusionary policies that have denied the Rohingya the option of Myanmarese citizenship.

According to newly released government figures, the 2012 violence resulted in nearly 200 deaths, the destruction of more than 8,600 homes and around 100,000 displaced people, mostly Rohingya and other Muslims.

The report was released Monday but came months overdue, reportedly due to sharp disagreements among the commission members. Non-official English-language translations are available for the report’s recommendations and executive summary.

Yet despite the findings being eagerly anticipated as a key indicator of the quasi-civilian government’s ability to enforce human and civil rights following decades of repressive military rule, the commission’s recommendations are overwhelmingly focused on boosting security. This includes a full doubling of security forces in Rakhine.

“We’re dismayed that this effort took so long to reach a conclusion and made so many recommendations that are either off base or outright counter-productive,” John Sifton, a Washington-based researcher with Human Rights Watch (HRW), an advocacy group, told IPS.

“The recommendation to double the local security force size in [Rakhine], for instance, completely overlooks the fact that these forces were complicit in the violence that led to the commission being appointed in the first place. That raises strong questions about the objectivity and intentions of the report authors.”

Ethnic cleansing

Sifton says such recommendations are of little surprise when viewed alongside the report’s broader absolving of government entities of any responsibility for the violence.

“This is in direct opposition to findings by the United Nations, HRW and other human rights groups on the ground,” he says.

“There is simply no doubt that local security forces were complicit in the violence, in some cases taking part in the violence directly or else standing by as Buddhist mobs attacked Rohingya people. If you don’t offer any criticism of the fact that no one has been arrested or held accountable for this violence, there is clearly something wrong with your report.”

According to a study released last week by HRW, the 2012 violence amounted to crimes against humanity. That document is one of the most thorough public compilations currently available of what happened last year, and includes reference to government authorities destroying mosques and refusing to allow humanitarian aid to reach displaced Rohingya communities.

“The Burmese government engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya that continues today through the denial of aid and restrictions on movement,” Phil Robertson, HRW’s deputy Asia director, said last week. “The government needs to put an immediate stop to the abuses and hold the perpetrators accountable or it will be responsible for further violence against ethnic and religious minorities in the country.”

Meanwhile, an estimated 125,000 people remain displaced, with Rohingya Muslims living in camps that rights groups have criticised as ghettoes. The new commission report does little to chart a clear path forward on how to do deal with this issue, however, though it does note that the official response to the situation has had “many gaps”, including a current 90 percent unmet need in the provision of shelter.

Yet on Monday the commission’s secretary was quoted in the media stating that the current “segregation” of Muslims and Buddhists will need to continue. “We cannot recommend swift resettlement to people’s original places because that would trigger more riots,” the secretary, Kyaw Yin Hlaing, said.

Government failure

The report does offer some strong language on issues of citizenship and discrimination. For instance, the commission notes that the government “needs to urgently initiate a process for examining the citizenship status of people in RakhineState” and calls for a ban on “hate language against any religion”.

It also urges the creation of a “truth-finding committee”, “to determine the root causes of sectarian violence between the Buddhist and Islamic communities”.

While potentially positive, critics are seeing such calls as either too weak in comparison to the rest of the recommendations, or as potentially laying groundwork for further entrenching discrimination in the future.

“A Truth-Finding Committee is a positive step, as long as it is part of an independent investigation to determine responsibility for the violence and its findings are released to the public,” Isabelle Arradon, deputy Asia director for Amnesty International, a rights watchdog, said Monday.

“But such a commission should not bar or replace criminal justice, or reparation for crimes under international law.”

According to HRW’s Sifton, the new commission report ultimately highlights that the Myanmarese government “is simply not ready to take care of its own affairs without international assistance.”

He points to a promise made by President Thein Sein during President Barack Obama’s landmark visit to Yangon in November that Myanmar would allow the United Nations to open an office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights – something that has yet to happen.

“There were some very offensive parts of this report, but none of those should detract from the realisation that this was first and foremost a failure as a government investigation,” Sifton says.

“The government was given an opportunity to investigate this violence and it failed. So now it falls on the international community – in the form of the United Nations – to facilitate an independent investigation.”

Border guards in Bangladesh are refusing entry to Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. Credit: Anurup Titu/IPS

By Naimul Haq
COX'S BAZAR, Bangladesh, Nov 20 2012 (IPS)

In late August, Mohammad Saifuddin (not his real name), together with his wife, three daughters and son, fled the carnage of communal violence in western Myanmar’s Rakhine province and headed for the border of neighbouring Bangladesh.

Horrified by attacks on the minority Rohingya Muslims by the majority Buddhist community this past summer, the Saifuddin family embarked on what they described as a “horrific” five-day-long journey to reach the nearest border town of Teknaf in the Cox’s Bazar district of southeast Bangladesh, some 200 kilometres away.

Six other families accompanied the Saifuddins on a perilous journey that involved crossing the Mayu River and meandering across hilly forests.

“We moved during the night to evade detection. The journey seemed endless with the children unable to continue walking. At times we had no food or water, and were sometimes completely lost,” Ejaz Ahmed, who brought his wife and family across the border, told IPS.

But instead of arriving on safe soil, as they had hoped, the refugees have met strict border control and a hostile local government, highlighting the precariousness of life for this stateless Muslim population in Southeast Asia.

No rest for refugees

Refugees embark on long, perilous journeys by land and sea, only to be turned away. Credit: Anurup Titu/IPS

Sparked by reports in late May that three Rohingya Muslim men had allegedly raped a Buddhist Rakhine woman, the violence left thousands of families from the farming and fishing villages of Maungdaw, Buthidaung, Kyauktaw, Rathedaung, Minbya and Mrauk U homeless, with no access to food, water, medical supplies or shelter.

Within a month 83,000 out of a population of about 800,000 Rohingyas had fled their ancestral homes in Rakhine. By June, 95 people had been killed.

Some of the survivors now living around the camps in Bangladesh told IPS they had no choice but to flee.

“I saw my neighbours being dragged out of their homes and beaten to death. We fled to escape being killed,” Rehana Begum told IPS.

Mujibor Rahman, a vegetable shop owner in Kyauktaw village, said “On a dark night in June a dozen men attacked our local market where they picked up young Muslim men and (stabbed them) with rapiers. Many died on the spot while others were left moaning on the ground.”

But stories of these “genocide-like” conditions have failed to sway the Bangladeshi government, which has tightened border security at all points of entry.

Authorities have given Border Guards Bangladesh (BGB) strict instructions to deny entry to any “intruder” from Myanmar, whether travelling by boat or on foot.

As a result, scores of Rohingyas are said to be languishing on the other side of the roughly 270-kilometre land border in makeshift camps.

BGB Commander for Cox’s Bazaar, lieutenant colonel Mohammad Khalequzzaman, told IPS that since August over 1,300 Rohingyas were sent back through the Tumbru and Ghundum border points.

In total, some 2,600 Rohingyas have been sent back since the first wave of refugees arrived about four months ago. The Home Ministry in Dhaka estimates that number could rise to nearly 10,000 by early next year.

“We have intensified our patrols around the Naf River”, which forms one of the borders between the two countries, Coast Guard Station Officer Commander Badrudduza told IPS.

Armed BGB members and coast guards in speedboats are patrolling the Naf, searching for refugees. But the vast Bay of Bengal, which lies to the south of Bangladesh and southwest of Myanmar, still facilitates several points of entry for those who arrive in dilapidated wooden boats, mostly at night.

“It’s very dangerous to take such a coastal route. Coast guard troops from both countries often shoot at us,” Mohammad Kalam Hossain, who recently arrived in Teknaf with a group of 26 men, women and children from Ponnagyun, a coastal fishing village in south Rakhine, told IPS.

“In the last two weeks more people fled, fearing fresh attacks. The only safe place for us is Bangladesh,” Mohammad Jahangir Alam, a fisherman from Myebon village, told IPS.

Those who do manage to enter Bangladesh are in perpetual fear of being caught by the intelligence or being reported to the police.

Since they speak the local dialect and bear a strong resemblance to Bangladeshi people, many refugees are able to slip into village and town life undetected.

But once caught, refugees receive “no mercy”. “The authorities will force you to disclose the whereabouts of others, and send (everyone) back. That’s why we try to avoid exposure during the daytime,” Julekha Banu, who escaped to Bangladesh in September, told IPS.

Legal quagmire

Though the issue is only now receiving front-page coverage in international media, the plight of Rohingya Muslims dates back several decades, ever since the ruling military junta in Myanmar stripped them of their citizenship.

During a 1978 military assault known as the King Dragon Operation, 200,000 Rohingyas were driven from Rakhine State to Bangladesh, where they lived in squalid refugee camps for decades.

A similar purge in 1991-92 sent another 250,000 Myanmar nationals of Rohingya ethnicity streaming across the border.

Though Burmese officials at the time identified those refugees as their own citizens, political leader Aung San Suu Kyi is now referring to the refugees as “illegal immigrants from Bangladesh”, a fact the Foreign Ministry here has vehemently denied.

A Foreign Ministry spokesperson in Dhaka, speaking under condition of anonymity, told IPS that Bangladesh is already stretched to its limit, with two refugee camps, Ukhiya and Kutupalong, housing over 30,000 displaced Rohingyas. An additional 200,000 Rohingyas are estimated to be living in Bangladesh as undocumented immigrants.

This legal quagmire has effectively rendered the Rohingya people ‘stateless’, with limited access to employment, education, healthcare and public services in either country.

Speaking to IPS on the phone from Geneva, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, Tomás Ojea Quintana, said, “The situation… is very critical. I am concerned about the Rohingyas who have no homes, food, water or medical care… They require immediate humanitarian aid.”

He added, “Bangladesh should fulfill its obligations under international law by respecting and protecting the human rights of all people within (its) borders, regardless of whether they are recognised as citizens.”

In August Quintana was refused entry into Bangladesh to see the situation here.

Meanwhile, refugees continue to live in limbo, unsure whether they will be allowed to stay or forced to return to a nightmare, which took place “under the nose of the Yangon regime”, according to survivors.

“This is our new home,” a refugee woman in Cox’s Bazar told IPS. “Please let us stay here.”

(END)

Following sectarian violence in the western Myanmar state of Rakhine in June, human rights researchers are now warning that the government appears to be attempting to permanently house parts of the stateless Muslim-minority Rohingya in “temporary” refugee camps, segregating them from the rest of the population.

“There has been no acknowledgement that people have to go home eventually – the solution appears to be that the Rohingya can simply live where they have come to be,” John Sifton, with Human Rights Watch (which released a related report in August), said in Washington on Tuesday. “Segregation has become the status quo.”

Myanmar, also known as Burma, is in the midst of a series of contested anti-authoritarian reforms following on decades of repression by the military government. Yet even as the country opens up bit by bit, socially ingrained ethnic and racial tensions are proving real impediments to the reforms process, with the Rohingya seen by many as an important test case.

Myanmar is dominated by state-backed Buddhism, which has traditionally allowed little room for other religions. This has been especially true of the long-persecuted Muslims of Rakhine, known as Rohingya, who had their citizenship revoked in the early 1980s on the suggestion that the community was made up of migrants from Bangladesh.

Muslim-majority Bangladesh, meanwhile, has allowed in tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees since that time. But in recent years the Dhaka government has moved to shut down its border to new asylum seekers from Myanmar, reportedly running afoul of international law in the process.

Although drawing on longstanding tensions, the immediate situation in Myanmar goes back to June, when a Rakhine woman was allegedly raped by three Rohingya youths. This incident led to two weeks of arson and communal violence that resulted in thousands of Rohingya homes being burned and close to 100,000 people, Rohingya and other Rakhine (also known as Arakan) communities, being forced to flee their communities.

In response, the government sent in troops to quell the violence – a highly charged move given the half-century of military oppression these communities have experienced. In the event, however, several reports have suggested that the soldiers acted relatively well, and since then many Rohingya have stated that they now feel safer in the presence of the military than with no protection at all.

The government has also created an investigative commission to look into what took place in Rakhine in June, which will soon be offering policy recommendations that could potentially include a path to citizenship for the Rohingya. While observers have praised the move, it is hard to overlook the fact that the commission includes no Rohingya members.

Re-integration and reconciliation

Following the June violence, the most significant move by the government has been to impose its writ on the situation.

First, it created separate refugee camps of dramatically differing quality, set up for Rohingya and for other Rakhine communities that have been rendered homeless. Second, it decisively took control over the northern section of Rakhine, refusing even to allow humanitarian access.

“For the Rohingya camps, there’s really no discussion about what’s next – everyone says it’s temporary, but no one’s talking about how to end it,” Sarnata Reynolds, a researcher with Refugees International who recently completed a month-long investigation in Rakhine, said Tuesday in a talk at the Washington office of the Open Society Foundations.

“Neither the absolute closure of northern Rakhine state nor the segregation of the Rohingya population in Sittwe (the capital of Rakhine) supports re-integration or reconciliation. So any good-faith effort needs to renew access to northern Rakhine state and offer a timeline that measures efforts towards integration and reconciliation.”

Meanwhile, the conditions in the Rohingya camps are “profoundly” different from those housing the Rakhine, Reynolds reports. First, there are infrastructural differences, with the Rohingya camps, estimated to be housing some 75,000, lacking adequate sanitation, humanitarian assistance and education facilities, unlike the Rakhine camps.

Second, while the government has situated the camps such that the Rakhine can continue to live in town while their homes are being rebuilt, the Rohingya have been moved outside of the city. Their homes are not being rebuilt, and the government has completely revoked their freedom of movement.

“That means they can’t work. The kids aren’t going to school; indeed, there’s almost no talk of school,” Reynolds says. “So there’s this strange situation where you have shelters that are looking more and more like permanent situations, but there’s a reluctance to build infrastructure – education or health care – for the Rohingya because there is the fear that will make it more permanent.”

Indeed, over and above the constraints that the Myanmar government has placed on humanitarian assistance in Rakhine, the major international donors have been notably hesitant to commit funds to the Rohingya refugee situation for fear that doing so will give the government’s “segregation” strategy a stamp of legitimacy.

This includes the United States, often one of the most significant funders in humanitarian emergencies.

“Right now there’s a policy of segregation in order to quell the tension and violence,” Kelly Clements, a deputy assistant secretary in the U.S. State Department who participated in a major U.S. investigation into the Rakhine situation earlier this year, said on Tuesday.

“We (have) said that, for security reasons, one has to do what’s necessary. However, that should not be the medium- to longer-term solution to this particular problem.”

Some are worried that there doesn’t appear to be much planning taking place to help the Rohingya situation in the medium term either, and several groups are now calling on the United States to step up pressure on the Myanmar government to ensure that the focus will eventually move on to re-integration and reconciliation.

Perhaps most egregiously, recent events suggest that even the government’s draconian “segregation” measures have failed to stem the sectarian violence. On Sunday, the main mosque in Sittwe was attacked and torched, with an official investigation pending.

The tension has also spread across the border to Bangladesh, in what some analysts have suggested are retaliatory actions that indicate a new regional component to the ethnic strife. At least 20 Buddhist temples, including one Rakhine monastery, have been attacked over the past two weeks, reportedly as a result of anger over the recent months of anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar.

Myanmar, also known as Burma, has taken important steps towards democracy and greater respect for human rights during the last months with one exception, activists say – the situation for the Rohingya minority, which has faced an outburst of violent attacks this summer.

A Rohingya woman in a refugee camp. Credit: Rohingyarefugeebangladesh/cc by 2.0

Activists are now hoping that opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi will raise awareness of the issue when she visits the U.S. this week.

“I think she has a real opportunity to influence the debate,” Elaine Pearson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch‘s Asia division, told IPS after speaking at an event about Myanmar held at Columbia University in New York City on Friday.

“She has not been raising the question enough. She has been quite vague. She is a politician now, and these issues are highly divisive. I think she has concerns about taking a stand. But it is important to speak out,” Pearson continued.

Myanmar, a former British colony, was shaken by a military coup in 1962. Since then the country has been controlled by oppressive military governments.

But after decades of military rule a new, quasi-civilian government took office in early 2011. In April this year, another step towards democracy was taken when relatively free parliamentary by-elections were held. The famous opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi won a seat in the Parliament, along with several dozen other members of her National League for Democracy (NLD).

Aung San Suu Kyi has been a uniting force of the democratic opposition in Myanmar since the late 1980s. Due to her popularity, she has spent most of the two past decades detained under house arrest. She was unable to go Norway to collect the Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded in 1991. In 2010 she was released. And now she is a member of Parliament.

Pearson recently visited Myanmar on the behalf of Human Rights Watch, and says there have been positive developments in the country, such as land reform, the release of political prisoners, and newspapers reporting relatively freely on topics that were not being covered before.

“I saw progress that would have been unthinkable just 12 months ago,” Pearson said. “But progress is mainly restricted to Rangoon. For the majority of the population in Burma, the situation remains the same. And in Arakan it has gone from bad to worse.”

As IPS reported in June, clashes between the Muslim Rohingya minority and ethnic Buddhist Burmese broke out in the Arakan region in Myanmar after a story spread about a Buddhist woman being raped by three Muslim men. The violence is still going on.

“We see beheadings and stabbings between neighbours, parts of cities burnt to the ground,” Pearson said.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, also invited to the event at Columbia University, expressed his deep concerns about the situation.

“There are many things to celebrate in Burma right now. But there are also difficulties,” he said, calling the persecution of the Rohingya “an enormous problem”.

Sen said mobs of ethnic Burmese are attacking the Rohingya with the help of the military. “The security forces do not secure. Instead they commit violence,” he said.

Wakar Uddin, director general of the Arakan Rohingya Union, an umbrella of 25 different associations representing the Rohingya minority around the world, agreed.

“Massive ethnic cleansing is taking place as we speak today,” he said. “It amounts to genocide.”

Uddin called for an immediate stop of the violence, but also for more long-term solutions, such as giving the Rohingya the right to citizenship in Myanmar, and an improvement of their living conditions. Uddin brought up extreme poverty, forced labour, arbitrary arrests, land confiscations, mass rape and torture as some of the most burning problems.

He said some 1.5 million Rohingyas out of a total three million are living under abysmal conditions in Myanmar. Another 1.5 million externally displaced live under very hard circumstances in neighbouring countries. Uddin urged the Burmese government to give the refugees the right of return.

T. Kumar, director of Amnesty International USA, said he was “appalled about what is happening”. Kumar was especially concerned about curfews for the Rohingya in the Arakan province. “They are locked up in villages. It is a new form of detention,” he said. “Even if they are sick, thay can not go to see the doctor… There are people dying because of the restrictions. And imagine the impact on the kids, they can not go to school.”

According to Elaine Pearson, the Burmese government is doing very little to solve the alarming situation. They have initiated a report on the sectarian violence, but Pearson deems the commission being charged with writing the report insufficient. ”There has been no accountability of the abuses committed by the state security forces. The government is not looking into the citizenship law. And I see partiality and bias of members of the commission.”

“The government has clearly failed in addressing these issues… I think there will be a long, rocky road before we see peace,” Pearson said.

Pearson was also sceptical about some peace agreements being signed between the government and ethnic guerillas in Myanmar. She expressed concerns about what she called “cease-fire capitalism”, referring to a phenomenon of the government and guerilla leaders dividing natural resources between them.“I have a concern that the ethnic minorities will loose out in all this,” Pearson said.

A stream of hope is the news that Aung San Suu Kyi will be arriving in the U.S. this week. From September 18 until October 2 she will hold a number of speeches and take part of several meetings about the situation in Myanmar.

“Aung San Suu Kyi is the person who has the moral authority to ask for a respect for basic human rights. I hope she will take a more active stance on these issues”, Pearson concluded.