WASHINGTON, Oct 9 2012 (IPS) - Following sectarian violence in the
western Myanmar state of Rakhine in June, human rights researchers are
now warning that the government appears to be attempting to permanently
house parts of the stateless Muslim-minority Rohingya in “temporary”
refugee camps, segregating them from the rest of the population.
“There
has been no acknowledgement that people have to go home eventually –
the solution appears to be that the Rohingya can simply live where they
have come to be,” John Sifton, with Human Rights Watch (which released a
related
report in August), said in Washington on Tuesday. “Segregation has become the status quo.”
Myanmar,
also known as Burma, is in the midst of a series of contested
anti-authoritarian reforms following on decades of repression by the
military government. Yet even as the country opens up bit by bit,
socially ingrained ethnic and racial tensions are proving real
impediments to the reforms process, with the Rohingya seen by many as an
important test case.
Myanmar is dominated by state-backed
Buddhism, which has traditionally allowed little room for other
religions. This has been especially true of the long-persecuted Muslims
of Rakhine, known as Rohingya, who had their citizenship revoked in the
early 1980s on the suggestion that the community was made up of migrants
from Bangladesh.
Muslim-majority Bangladesh, meanwhile, has
allowed in tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees since that time. But
in recent years the Dhaka government has moved to shut down its border
to new asylum seekers from Myanmar, reportedly running afoul of
international law in the process.
Although drawing on
longstanding tensions, the immediate situation in Myanmar goes back to
June, when a Rakhine woman was allegedly raped by three Rohingya youths.
This incident led to two weeks of arson and communal violence that
resulted in thousands of Rohingya homes being burned and close to
100,000 people, Rohingya and other Rakhine (also known as Arakan)
communities, being forced to flee their communities.
In response,
the government sent in troops to quell the violence – a highly charged
move given the half-century of military oppression these communities
have experienced. In the event, however, several reports have suggested
that the soldiers acted relatively well, and since then many Rohingya
have stated that they now feel safer in the presence of the military
than with no protection at all.
The government has also created
an investigative commission to look into what took place in Rakhine in
June, which will soon be offering policy recommendations that could
potentially include a path to citizenship for the Rohingya. While
observers have praised the move, it is hard to overlook the fact that
the commission includes no Rohingya members.
Re-integration and reconciliation
Following the June violence, the most significant move by the government has been to impose its writ on the situation.
First,
it created separate refugee camps of dramatically differing quality,
set up for Rohingya and for other Rakhine communities that have been
rendered homeless. Second, it decisively took control over the northern
section of Rakhine, refusing even to allow humanitarian access.
“For
the Rohingya camps, there’s really no discussion about what’s next –
everyone says it’s temporary, but no one’s talking about how to end it,”
Sarnata Reynolds, a researcher with Refugees International who recently
completed a month-long investigation in Rakhine, said Tuesday in a talk
at the Washington office of the Open Society Foundations.
“Neither
the absolute closure of northern Rakhine state nor the segregation of
the Rohingya population in Sittwe (the capital of Rakhine) supports
re-integration or reconciliation. So any good-faith effort needs to
renew access to northern Rakhine state and offer a timeline that
measures efforts towards integration and reconciliation.”
Meanwhile,
the conditions in the Rohingya camps are “profoundly” different from
those housing the Rakhine, Reynolds reports. First, there are
infrastructural differences, with the Rohingya camps, estimated to be
housing some 75,000, lacking adequate sanitation, humanitarian
assistance and education facilities, unlike the Rakhine camps.
Second,
while the government has situated the camps such that the Rakhine can
continue to live in town while their homes are being rebuilt, the
Rohingya have been moved outside of the city. Their homes are not being
rebuilt, and the government has completely revoked their freedom of
movement.
“That means they can’t work. The kids aren’t going to
school; indeed, there’s almost no talk of school,” Reynolds says. “So
there’s this strange situation where you have shelters that are looking
more and more like permanent situations, but there’s a reluctance to
build infrastructure – education or health care – for the Rohingya
because there is the fear that will make it more permanent.”
Indeed,
over and above the constraints that the Myanmar government has placed
on humanitarian assistance in Rakhine, the major international donors
have been notably hesitant to commit funds to the Rohingya refugee
situation for fear that doing so will give the government’s
“segregation” strategy a stamp of legitimacy.
This includes the United States, often one of the most significant funders in humanitarian emergencies.
“Right
now there’s a policy of segregation in order to quell the tension and
violence,” Kelly Clements, a deputy assistant secretary in the U.S.
State Department who participated in a major U.S. investigation into the
Rakhine situation earlier this year, said on Tuesday.
“We (have)
said that, for security reasons, one has to do what’s necessary.
However, that should not be the medium- to longer-term solution to this
particular problem.”
Some are worried that there doesn’t appear
to be much planning taking place to help the Rohingya situation in the
medium term either, and several groups are now calling on the United
States to step up pressure on the Myanmar government to ensure that the
focus will eventually move on to re-integration and reconciliation.
Perhaps
most egregiously, recent events suggest that even the government’s
draconian “segregation” measures have failed to stem the sectarian
violence. On Sunday, the main mosque in Sittwe was attacked and torched,
with an official investigation pending.
The tension has also
spread across the border to Bangladesh, in what some analysts have
suggested are retaliatory actions that indicate a new regional component
to the ethnic strife. At least four Buddhist temples, including one
Rakhine monastery, have been attacked over the past two weeks,
reportedly as a result of anger over the recent months of anti-Rohingya
violence in Myanmar.
This file picture taken on June 15, 2012 shows a Myanmar Muslim
Rohingya standing between tents at a temporary relief camp for people
displaced by days of sectarian violence on the outskirts of Sittwe,
capital of Myanmar's western state of Rakhine. - AFP
