DHAKA: Amnesty International on Tuesday (November 21) said the Rohingya people in Myanmar are victim of a heinous system in their country resulted from state-sponsored and institutionalized discrimination that is tantamount to ‘apartheid’.
Amnesty observes that the root of the crackdown campaign and violence upon Rohingyas in Myanmar lies in the racial-hatred.
As a consequence, the security forces killed Rohingya people, torched whole villages to the ground, and drove more than 600,000 to flee across the border into Bangladesh, said a report published by Amnesty.
Amnesty’s two-year investigation reveals how the Myanmar authorities have severely restricted virtually all aspects of Rohingyas’ lives in Rakhine State, confining them to what amounts to a ghetto-like existence where they struggle to access healthcare, education or in some areas even to leave their villages.
Amnesty has concluded that the Myanmar authorities’ treatment of the Rohingya amounts to apartheid, defined as a crime against humanity under the Convention against Apartheid and the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court.
Rohingya in Rakhine are essentially sealed off from the outside world and face severe restrictions on their freedom of movement, confining them to their villages and townships. These restrictions operate through an intricate web of national laws, ‘local orders’ and policies implemented by state officials displaying openly racist behavior.
In central Rakhine, Rohingya are kept locked down in their villages and displacement camps. In some areas they are not allowed to use roads and can only travel by waterways, and only to other Muslim villages.
For Rohingya who do manage to obtain permission to travel in northern Rakhine State, frequent checkpoints mostly staffed by Border Guard Police are a constant menace, where they are regularly harassed, forced to pay bribes, physically assaulted or arrested.
During the violence in 2012, tens of thousands of Rohingya were driven out of urban areas in Rakhine, in particular the state capital Sittwe. Today some 4,000 people remain in the town where they live in a ghetto-like area sealed off with barbed wire barricades and police checkpoints. They are at risk of arrest or violence from the surrounding community if they try to leave.
Rohingya are denied access to Sittwe hospital, the highest-quality medical facility in Rakhine, except for in extremely acute cases. Even then they require authorization from the Rakhine authorities and have to travel under police escort. In northern Rakhine, many see no choice but to travel to Bangladesh to access the healthcare they need, but this can often be prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest families.
Outside of northern Rakhine, only a few medical facilities are accessible for Rohingyas. There they are kept in separate “Muslim wards” which are guarded by police. One aid worker compared one such ward to a “prison hospital”.
Since 2012, the Myanmar authorities have tightened restrictions on Rohingyas’ access to education. In large parts of Rakhine, Rohingya children are no longer allowed into previously mixed government schools at all, while government teachers often refuse to travel to Muslim areas. With higher education largely off-limits for Rohingya, many people Amnesty spoke to expressed a sense of despair and hopelessness about the future.
A ban on gatherings of more than four people, applying specifically to Muslim-majority areas, also means that Rohingya – the overwhelming majority of whom are Muslim – are effectively banned from worshipping together. The authorities in Myanmar have also sealed off mosques, leaving Muslim places of worship to decay.
Amnesty’s research also reveals how the Myanmar authorities have engaged in a deliberate campaign to strip Rohingya of even the limited forms of identification they do possess. Since 2016, the government has made it extremely difficult for Rohingya to register newborn babies on “household lists” – often Rohingya families’ only proof of residence in Myanmar. Meanwhile, in northern Rakhine, those who are not home for annual “population checks” risk being deleted from official records altogether.
One consequence of this campaign is that it has become virtually impossible for Rohingya who have fled the country to return to their homes. This is particularly concerning since the military operations in 2016 and 2017 have driven close to 700,000 Rohingya to flee into Bangladesh, where they are living in refugee camps in desperate conditions.
“Restoring the rights and legal status of Rohingya, and amending the country’s discriminatory citizenship laws is urgently needed – both for those who remain in the country and those who wish to return. Rohingya who have fled persecution in Myanmar cannot be asked to return to a system of apartheid”, said the report.
However, under the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, apartheid is defined as a crime against humanity covering a range of acts, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups, and with the intention of maintaining that regime.
BDST: 1321 HRS, NOV 21, 2017
SI/SMS
