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Five years ago, some 750,000 Rohingya, Burma’s stateless and persecuted Muslim minority, fled to Bangladesh to escape abuse by the Burmese army. Several thousand of them demonstrated on Thursday August 25 to commemorate five years of repression.
Thousands of Rohingya refugees in makeshift camps in southeastern Bangladesh demonstrated on Thursday August 25 to mark the fifth anniversary of the massacre of their people in Burma, which they call “genocide”.
With banners and proclamations, the predominantly Muslim community gathered in the maze of Cox’s Bazar, the largest refugee camp in the world.
Many used the opportunity to demand the repeal of a 1982 Burmese law that stripped them of their citizenship in their Buddhist-majority country. Thousands of Rohingya, most of them dressed in the traditional Burmese longyi (sarong) and shirts, peacefully lined up for this “Genocide Remembrance Day”.
a million refugees
Five years after the crackdown in Burma, almost a million Rohingya refugees are still living in these unsanitary camps in Cox’s Bazar and Bahsan Char Island. The floods, the insecurity, the presence of gangs, the living conditions are deplorable, while the return of the Rohingya to Arakan, in Burma, is more than compromised, especially since the Burmese junta’s coup that plunged the country in chaos.
In Bangladesh, “the situation of confinement is really appalling”, reports Alexandra de Mersan, an anthropologist, researcher and professor at INALCO: “People in the camps are prohibited from working. They are subjected to severe restrictions on their freedom. It is important that international organizations are really concerned about the fate of these people in the refugee camps,” he also says, in statements to RFI.
Many Rohingya continue to flee to Malaysia, one of the neighboring countries. “The Rohingya who were in Arakan also experienced a form of lockdown, but it’s a lockdown in their region, while there they live in conditions of promiscuity, precariousness and psychological violence, and violence in general. It’s an extremely hard day to day,” says Alexandra de Mersan.
Deteriorating living conditions in Burma
The estimated 600,000 Rohingya who remain in Myanmar live in similarly difficult conditions. They are staying in camps after being displaced in previous waves of violence or living a precarious existence at the mercy of the military and border guards.
Most are denied citizenship and restricted movement, access to health and education, a treatment that the NGO Human Rights Watch has described as “apartheid”.
The military’s return to power last year has further dampened hopes of a path to citizenship or even an easing of current restrictions.
The junta’s crackdown on dissent has “exacerbated the deteriorating humanitarian situation, particularly for ethnic and religious minority communities, including the Rohingya,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday. This group “remains among the most vulnerable and marginalized populations in the country,” he added.
Junta leader Min Aung Hlaing, who was in charge of the armed forces during the 2017 crackdown, called the identity of the Rohingya “imaginary”. For those in the camps, even going home is unlikely, says Marjan Besuijen of Doctors Without Borders. “Even if they could move, many of the towns and communities they used to live in no longer exist,” he says.
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