Rohingya children at a camp in Rakhine state
Credit: Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP
The indefinite de facto detention of some 130,000 Rohingya Muslims in squalid camps in Myanmar amounts to apartheid, Human Rights Watch alleged on Thursday, urging Aung San Suu Kyi’s government to end the abusive treatment of the minority.
The human rights group made the charge while launching a new report on the horrific conditions endured by the largely forgotten Rohingya population who remain in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, the location of a brutal ethnic cleansing campaign in 2017 that drove more than 700,000 into Bangladesh.
The report – “An Open Prison without End” – offers new details on the inhuman conditions in the 24 strictly controlled camps and closed off communities in central Rakhine, based on interviews with over 60 Rohingya and Kaman Muslim internally displaced persons, and humanitarian workers.
“Severe limitations on livelihoods, movement, education, health care, and adequate food and shelter have been compounded by widening constraints on humanitarian aid, which Rohingya depend on for survival,” the report said.
“Camp detainees face higher rates of malnutrition, waterborne illnesses, and child and maternal mortality than their ethnic Rakhine neighbors. Accounts of preventable deaths were common," it added.
“The camp is not a livable place for us,” a Rohingya man told Human Rights Watch.
Conditions in the Rakhine camps are described as grim
Credit: Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP
The conclusion that the conditions constitute the international human rights crime against humanity of apartheid and persecution is the first such finding by HRW in the Asian region.
The camps emerged from a long history of discrimination against the Muslim Rohingya minority in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar and were the immediate consequence of communal violence that began in 2012 between the Rohingya and the Buddhist Rakhine ethnic group.
The authorities used the 2012 violence against Rohingya communities as a pretext to segregate and confine a population it had long sought to remove from the country, HRW said.
“The Myanmar government has interned 130,000 Rohingya in inhuman conditions for 8 years, cut off from their homes, land, and livelihoods, with little hope that things will improve,” said Shayna Bauchner, HRW’s Asia researcher and author of the report.
“The government’s claims that it’s not committing the gravest international crimes will ring hollow until it cuts the barbed wire and allows Rohingya to return to their homes, with full legal protections.”
Tomorrow, Oct 8 in #Bangkok: new @hrw report on forgotten 130,000 #Rohingya IDPs locked down in open-air detention camps in #Myanmar. New findings that #Burma committed int'l rights crimes — apartheid & persecution. Launch at @FCCThai starting at 10:30 am, free open to public. pic.twitter.com/XH2yjyVLTs
— Phil Robertson (@Reaproy) October 7, 2020
Rohingya interviewees told researchers that life in the camps was like living under house arrest every day. Residents are denied freedom of movement through formal policies and local orders, checkpoints and barbed-wire fencing, and widespread extortion. Those found outside the camp are subject to torture and other abuse by security forces.
“Life in the camps is so painful,” said one Rohingya man. “There is no chance to move freely.… We have nothing called freedom.”
Myanmar’s government has not responded to the report, although it has frequently denied accusations of abuse against the Rohingya population.
Phil Robertson, HRW’s deputy Asia director said the treatment of Rohingya in the camps was seen as a “bellweather” by Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh about whether they could safely return.
In the run-up to Myanmar’s elections on November 8, he renewed the rights’ group’s call for “an assessment of who is responsible for these apartheid persecution policies and who should be held accountable. That should be based on an international investigation,” he said.
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