Rohingya Times

[Written in collaboration with Dr. Nora Rowley]

When a widely circulated newspaper like the New York Times picks up the matter of ill-treatment of the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, it is no small matter. It is a matter of grievous concern and shame to tens of thousands of Bangladeshi-Americans who live in and around the Big Apple state. In its February 20 publication the headline read, “Burmese Refugees Persecuted in Bangladesh.” It said, “Stateless refugees from Myanmar are suffering beatings and deportation in Bangladesh, according to aid workers and rights groups who say thousands are crowding into a squalid camp where they face starvation and disease.” It described the situation as a humanitarian crisis.

The NY Times report should come as no surprise to many of us who have been following the inhuman condition of the Rohingyas around the world for a number of years. In its Special Report, dated February 18, “Bangladesh: Violent Crackdown Fuels Humanitarian Crisis for Unrecognized Rohingya Refugees,” the Doctors Without Borders (MSF) criticized the Bangladesh government for violent crackdown against the stateless Rohingyas in Bangladesh. It was a chastising report in which the MSF called for an immediate end to the violence, along with urgent measures by the Government of Bangladesh and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to increase protection to Rohingya refugees seeking asylum in the country.

Last month the Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) issued an emergency report, “Stateless and Starving: Persecuted Rohingya Flee Burma and Starve in Bangladesh”. This report reveals a PHR emergency assessment of 18.3% acute malnutrition in children. This level of child malnutrition is “considered “critical” by the World Health Organization (WHO), which recommends in such crises that adequate food aid be delivered to the entire population to avoid high numbers of preventable deaths.” The extreme food insecurity causing this critical level of malnutrition is the direct consequence of Bangladesh government authorities’ restricting movement and, therefore, income generation of the Rohingya, and actively obstructing the amount of international humanitarian aid to this population.

COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh — It’s there in their faces, in the dark night of their eyes and in the sag and slump of their shoulders. It’s unmistakable, the despair of the Rohingya, the fear for departed husbands and fathers, the daily abrasions of poverty, sadness and the world’s indifference.

More than a quarter-million Rohingya – an ethnic Muslim minority from western Myanmar – have come here to southern Bangladesh to escape the hunger, humiliation and official brutalities in their homeland. Many have landed in a place called the Kutupalong Makeshift Camp.

It is an obscenity, this camp, a festering hell of lost hope and inhuman squalor. No water, power, schools or medicine. Occasional stoop-labor jobs carrying bricks or making salt. Huts made of leaves and branches.

There is no music.“The worst conditions you could imagine anywhere on earth,” says a well-traveled international aid worker. “Total despair,” says another.

These are the luxuries in the camp: a packet of cookies, a crayon, a new battery for an old radio, a small breeze on a sweltering night.

IN Chittagong lives a very desperate community -- the Rohingya -- a religious and linguistic ethnic minority from Myanmar's northern Rakhine State, who have been fleeing state-sponsored persecution in their homeland since the late seventies. In 1991, when the population experienced widespread repression and abuse from security forces posted in Rakhine, a quarter of a million crossed the border to Bangladesh seeking asylum. Many of them still live here today.

Some 28,000 have been officially recognised as refugees and are living in a UN-run camp, waiting to be relocated to a third nation. Hundreds of thousands of others live outside these grounds, in the district of Chittagong or in unofficial camps such as Kutu Palong or Leda. Stateless and hopeless, these people carry on in dire conditions, often without food, sanitation and basic health care.

A European Parliament resolution passed only last month called on the Bangladesh government to "recognise that the unregistered Rohingyas are stateless asylum seekers who have fled persecution in Myanmar and are in need of international protection." However, in spite of such calls, the government still continues with its forced repatriation drive. In recent months, border authorities have launched an unprecedented crackdown in Bangladesh, pushing over 2,000 Rohingyas back across the border into Myanmar where they are likely to face arrest for leaving their villages without a travel permit.

Many here in Bangladesh though are beginning to wonder if forced repatriation really works. Bangladesh already witnessed two mass exoduses in 1978 and again in 1991, which were also followed by forced repatriation, but since then the refugees trickling in from Myanmar have never stopped and the numbers today living in the Chittagong Division are still in the hundreds of thousands.

The following statement was issued by France base Rohingya exile party, National Democratic Party for Human Rights.

Ref:: NDPHR (IE) 05-2010
Date:: 31st March 2010

'No' to Re-Registeration of the party and 'No' to the unlawful Election

National Democratic Party for Human Rights (NDPHR) still lawfully exists with its 4 elected MPs, though the party was dissolved unlawfully by the junta after the 1990 - election.

Here  - below is the Unified Stand of the Central Committee members of NDPHR and the elected MPs outside and inside, on the Junta's election law and 2010 election.