Young Rohingya may be ‘lost generation’

PHNOM PENH/NEW DELHI: Rohingya refugee children who lack proper education in camps in Bangladesh could become a ‘‘lost generation’’, the United Nations said yesterday, a year after Myanmar’s army began a crackdown that has forced more than 700,000 people to flee the country.

The lives and futures of more than 380,000 children in refugee camps in Bangladesh are in peril, while hundreds of thousands of Rohingya children still in Myanmar are cut off from aid, said a report by the UN children’s agency (Unicef).

Bangladesh prohibits refugees from receiving formal education, because the Government is concerned the predominantly Muslim Rohingya may become a ‘‘permanent fixture’’, according to Unicef spokesman Alastair LawsonTancred.

At the outset of the refugee crisis, aid agencies set up informal learning centres for children aged 3 to 14, but older teenagers felt alienated and hopeless, LawsonTancred said.

‘‘Unquestionably, there is a danger that we might be facing a lost generation.

‘‘Sooner or later, you’re going to have large groups of disaffected youth on your hands.’’ One in two Rohingya children who fled to Bangladesh without their parents were orphaned by violence, while more than 6000 children living in Cox’s Bazar are had to fend for themselves, a study by charity Save the Children said this week.

Hundreds of sexual violence cases are reported each week in Cox’s Bazar, Oxfam said in a statement this week.

SarahJane Saltmarsh, a spokeswoman for Bangladeshbased aid agency Brac, said more lighting in the camps, where there was no roundtheclock grid electricity, was key for the safety of women and girls.