AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: MYANMAR PRACTISING APARTHEID

Rohingya segregated in dehumanising system, says Amnesty

MYANMAR’S suffocating control of its Rohingya Muslim minority amounts to “apartheid”, Amnesty International said.

The Amnesty report, published yesterday, details how years of persecution have curated the current crisis.

A “state-sponsored” campaign has restricted virtually all aspects of Rohingyas’ lives, the Amnesty study says, confining them to what amounts to a “ghetto-like” existence.

The 100-page report, based on two years of research, says the web of controls meet the legal standard of the “crime against humanity of apartheid”.

“Rakhine State is a crime scene. This was the case long before the vicious campaign of military violence of the last three months,” said Anna Neistat, Amnesty’s Senior Director for Research.

Myanmar’s authorities “are keeping Rohingya women, men and children segregated and cowed in a dehumanising system of apartheid,” she added.

The bedrock for the hatred towards the Rohingya comes from the contentious 1982 Citizenship Law. Enacted by the then junta, the law effectively rendered hundreds of thousands of Rohingya stateless.

Since then, Amnesty says, a “deliberate campaign” had been waged to erase Rohingya rights to live in Myanmar, where they are denigrated as “Bengalis”, or illegal migrants from Bangladesh.

A system of identification cards is central to those bureaucratic controls, and likely to form the basis of the decision on who will be allowed to return.

Although the Rohingya have been victims of discrimination for decades, the report details how repression intensified after the outbreak of violence between Buddhist and Muslim communities in 2012.

In central Rakhine State, Rohingya were driven out of urban areas after the 2012 violence.

They remain segregated from the Buddhist community, confined by barbed wire and police checkpoints to camps that Amnesty calls an “open-air prison”.

The Rohingya are widely denied access to medical care, their children are unable to attend government schools and many mosques have been sealed off.

“Restoring the rights and legal status of Rohingya, and amending the country’s discriminatory citizenship laws is urgently needed,” said Neistat.

“Rohingya who have fled persecution in Myanmar cannot be asked to return to a system of apartheid.”

REUTERS PIC Rohingya Suray Khatun, 70, being carried by her son, Said-A-Lam, 38, as they enter Kutupalong refugee camp near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, recently.