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Rights Group Calls for End to Rohingya 'Prison' Camps in Myanmar

Zsombor Peter

   KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA - Myanmar should end the "apartheid regime" that
   has left thousands of Muslim ethnic Rohingya families trapped in
   stifling displacement camps eight years after deadly communal clashes
   tore through the Buddhist-majority country's far west, the U.S.
   advocacy group Human Rights Watch said in a [1]report released
   Thursday.

   International attention on the Rohingya has focused mostly on the
   sprawling refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh since a 2017
   crackdown by Myanmar's police and military in Rakhine state sent
   700,000 of them fleeing across the border. The United Nations called
   the widely alleged campaign of arson, rape and murder "a textbook
   example of ethnic cleansing." Rights groups have called it genocide.
   The government denies the claims.

   Largely ignored are more than 130,000 Rohingya who have been confined
   to fenced-off and guarded camps in Rakhine state itself since 2012,
   according to U.N. figures, when a wave of communal violence between
   local Muslims and Buddhists drove them from their homes. About half the
   camps' denizens are children.

   Human Rights Watch says conditions in those camps are getting worse and
   that the government's recent efforts to "close" them risk cementing the
   Rohingya's status as a segregated underclass. The group interviewed
   more than 30 Rohingya who live in the camps or fled them and nearly as
   many aid workers and advocates for its report, An Open Prison Without
   End: Myanmar's Mass Detention of Rohingya in Rakhine State.

   Myanmar's government rejects the Rohingya's claim to a distinct ethnic
   identity -- dismissing them instead as illegal migrants from Bangladesh
   -- despite their roots in Rakhine going back generations, and it denies
   them citizenship unless they give up the claim.

   "It has within that setup these camps that are effectively sites of
   detention," Human Rights Watch researcher Shayna Bauchner, who wrote
   the report, told VOA.

   "It is a complete violation of all of their basic rights," she said.
   "They have been for eight years now been denied the ability to return
   to their homes, which is really all that they've been asking to do --
   to be able to return to their homes, to reintegrate into the community.
   They are instead being denied the ability to live lives with dignity,
   to achieve self-reliance."

References

   1. https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/10/08/myanmar-mass-detention-rohingya-squalid-camps

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