Amnesty accuses Myanmar of imposing apartheid

Yangon: Myanmar’s suffocating control of its Rohingya population amounts to “apartheid”, Amnesty International said in a probe into the root causes of a crisis that has sent 620,000 refugees fleeing to Bangladesh.

Distressing scenes of dispossessed Rohingya in Bangladeshi camps have provoked outrage around the world, as people who have escaped Rakhine state since August recount tales of murder, rape and arson at the hands of Myanmar troops.

Myanmar and Bangladesh have agreed in principle to repatriate some Rohingya but disagree over the details, with Myanmar’s army chief saying last week that it was “not possible” to accept the number of refugees proposed by Dhaka.

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 Rohingya lives, the Amnesty study says, confining them to what amounts to a “ghetto-like” existence in the mainly Buddhist country.

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 widespread hatred towards the Muslim group comes from a 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” has 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 from Bangladesh.

The latest wave of persecution has pushed more than half of the 1.1-million strong minority out of the country, with those left behind sequestered in increasingly isolated and vulnerable villages. — AFP