Rights group: Myanmar's Rohingya face starvation in Bangladesh

Mar 9, 2010, 6:56 GMT

Washington - Stateless refugees from Myanmar's Rohingya minority face starvation and disease in camps in Bangladesh because the government is refusing them access to aid, a US rights group said Tuesday.

Physicians for Human Rights said a recent visit by researchers to one camp had revealed that 18 per cent of children below the age of 5 were suffering from acute malnutrition. It added that many refugees reported that they had not eaten for two days.

'It is unconscionable to leave this vulnerable population stateless and starving,' said Richard Sollom, the group's director of research and investigations. 'Immediate steps are needed to prevent further malnutrition, disease and death.'

More than half of the children had had diarrhoea in the previous 30 days, a figure that Physicians for Human Rights said illustrated the unsanitary conditions in the camps.

The group said hundreds of thousands of Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority, have crossed into Bangladesh since 1991 to escape persecution in Myanmar, where they have been subjected to summary executions, torture, state-sanctioned rape, arbitrary arrest and forced labour.

In a report published Tuesday, the group called on the Bangladeshi government to stop arresting refugees and forcing them back across the border.

Bangladesh's government has registered 28,000 Rohingya, who receive protection, humanitarian assistance and food rations from UN agencies and international non-governmental organizations.

But the Bangladeshi government has denied 200,000 Rohingya arrivals official refugee status since 1993, making them ineligible for UN aid and protection.

Physicians for Human Rights also called for a regional response to the Bangladesh government's failure to protect and care for the refugees as well as to the human rights violations in Myanmar that have caused 300,000 Rohingya to flee that country.

The rights group carried out its assessment at the makeshift Kutupalong camp in south-eastern Bangladesh, just across the border from Myanmar, in mid-February.

The group said that in recent months, Bangladesh had stepped up its persecution of the Rohingya, possibly to discourage an influx of new arrivals in the run-up to elections in Myanmar planned this year.

Physicians for Human Rights was the latest rights group to raise alarm bells about the Rohingya in Bangladesh. In February, Medecins Sans Frontieres called on Bangladesh to halt a violent persecution campaign against Rohingyas that has forced thousands to flee their temporary shelters in the eastern part of the country. The crackdown had left up to 29,000 homeless, threating a health and humanitarian crisis, it warned.