Thank you.
I've been in contact with Rohingya people and issues since 1992, when the Burmese military mounted a major pogrom against them that drove 300,000 refugees into Bangladesh, but today I want to talk mainly about my visit to Sittwe, capital of Arakan State, just over two months ago.
To clarify, in the Sittwe area almost all Rohingyas were forced from their homes into displacement camps, unlike farther north, in Arakan State, where Rohingyas still live in their home communities, though under heavy restrictions.
When you fly into Sittwe airport, the first thing you encounter is large signs listing areas where foreigners are not allowed to go, including entire townships where Muslims live, and a reference to “Bengali quarters” in and around Sittwe itself. In the town itself, you can't miss the huge new golden Buddhist temples being built. The mosques are harder to find, even the large ones on the main streets, because they're now barricaded with barbed wire and police boxes, overgrown, and slowly crumbling. The clear intent is to impress upon everyone that this is a staunchly, exclusively Buddhist place, even though it never was.
Since 2012, the Rohingyas have been driven out of the neighbourhoods where they lived, except one, Aung Mingalar quarter, where they are penned in by barbed wire and police. The neighbourhoods they were forced to abandon are also surrounded by barbed wire, but are now covered in the makeshift shacks of Arakanese squatters, mostly poor people who have moved into town from the countryside. Authorities ordered that no one should move into these areas, but have done nothing to prevent it.
Tens of thousands of Rohingyas forced out of Sittwe are now in camps eight or 10 kilometres outside of town. Going to this area, past army camps and military and police checkpoints, is difficult. The camps lie in an area of Rohingya villages that were established when the military corralled Rohingyas here in the early 1990s in a previous pogrom. These people eventually managed to set up village-like environments, and the new displacement camps are in rice fields near these villages.
Rohingyas can move around between the camps and villages, but cannot leave this area, not even to go to town. To do so, they need police permission, which is almost impossible to obtain.
In contrast, Arakanese Buddhists are free to enter and move around the Rohingya area without permission, and there are persistent fears that radical mobs could easily attack the unprotected camps.
There are many camps. I visited three. Two of these were “registered camps”. Each houses several thousand people in very rudimentary bamboo longhouses with dirt floors. Keep in mind that these are proud people who, in many cases, had modern houses in town, and their own shops or fishing boats.
Here they can receive a basic monthly rice ration from the World Food Programme. Save the Children has built basic drainage, wells, and latrines, and runs small so-called “temporary learning spaces” that aren't even allowed to be called schools. They get nothing else. There is one small government health clinic, but it only has a doctor for an hour a week, and no medicines. I met two people who are slowly dying for lack of medical care: a man who looked more like a skeleton, and a woman whose entire jaw had been eaten away by infection and who could no longer eat.
Médecins Sans Frontières and other international NGOs are no longer allowed to provide medical assistance in the camps I visited. Those who become very seriously ill can ask permission to travel to Sittwe hospital in town, but there they are segregated in a ward with one nurse and no doctors and essentially left to die. The hospital even created a separate blood bank for this ward after Arakanese Buddhists protested in fear that they might be accidentally given Muslim blood.
If people in the camps need clothing or medicines, they have no choice but to sell their rations to get money. I met a young couple with a one-year-old baby, who had to sell two months of the family's ration to buy medicines when the mother fell ill. All three are now starving, living only on what neighbours can spare from their own rations.
The so-called “unregistered” camps are even worse.
To explain, when the waves of anti-Muslim violence forced people into these camps in 2012, many Rohingyas were trapped in their villages or town neighbourhoods, surrounded by armed mobs and Burmese military. They only reached the camps three or four months later, by which time the government authorities said registration was already closed, so they could not be counted.
As a result, they had to build shelters on the most flood-prone land with no help. Their shelters are regularly flooded or destroyed by storms or cyclones. Worst of all, they're not allowed to receive any rations, which means they have to survive by begging among other Rohingyas, acting as bicycle rickshaw drivers between the camps, or however they can. Conditions in these camps are even more desperate, unsanitary, and prone to malnutrition. People I met there had lost family members to diarrhea or dysentery without treatment.
Can the Burmese government resolve this situation? That will take a lot of pressure, because it's largely the Burmese government that created it.
The most recent Thein Sein government revived anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence as a means of nation-building. The police and the military stood by or actively joined in violence against Muslims. His government facilitated the rise of the 969 and Ma Ba Tha radical anti-Muslim movements by allowing and supporting their rallies while cracking down on all other forms of public demonstration.
The new NLD government is clearly afraid to anger these movements, which is why the NLD party refused to run a single Muslim candidate in the 2015 election and has been reticent on human rights for Rohingyas ever since.
This is a situation where concerted international pressure is necessary to create change.
Thank you.