Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh: UN to provide aid for up to 700,000 refugees!
The United Nations has drawn up a contingency plan to feed up to 700,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar after some 480,000 fled to Bangladesh over the past month and arrivals continue.
The hunger situation in camps in Bangladesh has improved as food aid from WFP and other agencies is now reaching the refugees. The plan also covers some 300,000 Rohingya who were already sheltering in southeast Bangladesh before the latest influx began, meaning it could cater for a million people in total. "No one would be left out from any humanitarian assistance. The WFP would need about $80 million for the massive aid.
Earlier, the UN made an emergency appeal for $78 million on 9 September, but UN resident coordinator in Bangladesh Robert Watkins said much more would be needed as the exodus grows.
Impoverished Bangladesh, which earned praise for opening up its border, has eased restrictions on aid groups working in refugee camps and sought $250 million from the World Bank to fund emergency relief.
The Rohingyas were placed in internment camps and today there are still more than 120,000 still housed there. For years the Rohingyas have faced discrimination and persecution, today they are still facing this problem and have started to flee to other countries for safe haven. In 2015 “more than 40 Rohingya were massacred in the village of Du Chee Yar Tan by local men, the U.N. confirmed. Among the findings were 10 severed heads in a water tank, including those of children” The Rohingya people have been facing persecution for their religion and as of today still have no rights or citizenship in their homeland.
A United Nations official last week said it would need $200 million over the next six months to handle the Rohingya crisis. Rohingya have been fleeing Rakhine state in north east Myanmar for decades. The new influx began on 25 August when deadly attacks by Rohingya militants on Myanmar police posts prompted a huge crackdown by the military.
Bangladesh is already host to hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who have fled previous outbreaks of violence in Rakhine. Existing refugee camps are full and the new arrivals are sleeping rough in whatever space they can find, reports say.
The 2015 Rohingya refugee crisis refers to the mass migration of thousands of Rohingya people from Myanmar (also known as Burma) and Bangladesh in 2015, collectively dubbed "boat people" by international media. Nearly all who fled traveled to Southeast Asian countries including Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand by rickety boats via the waters of the Strait of Malacca and the Andaman Sea.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 25,000 people have been taken to boats from January to March in 2015 by human traffickers. There are claims that, while on their journey, around 100 people died in Indonesia, 200 in Malaysia, and 10 in Thailand, after the traffickers abandoned them at sea.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi visited the overflowing camps last week and said Bangladesh needs "massive international assistance" to feed and shelter the Rohingya. Grandi said there had been an "incredible outpouring of local generosity" but that now needed to be "beefed up by massive international assistance, financial and material".
The Rohingya, a stateless mostly Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Rakhine, have long experienced persecution in Myanmar, which says they are illegal immigrants. The violence began on 25 August when the Rohingya militants attacked police posts in northern Rakhine, killing 12 security personnel. Rohingyas who have fled Myanmar since then say the military responded with a brutal campaign, burning villages and attacking civilians in a bid to drive them out. Zeid, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said the current operation in Rakhine was "clearly disproportionate".
A senior official from the UN's World Food Program (WFP) said they were now prepared to provide massive food and other emergency aid if the influx continues in coming weeks. "All the UN agencies together have now set a plan for a new influx of 700,000. We can cover if the new influx reaches 700, 000," said the WFP's deputy chief in Bangladesh, Dipayan Bhattacharyya.
The Muslim Rohingya has been fleeing from Myanmar (Burma) by the thousands. The Rohingya are a minority ethnic group located in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state and are considered to be a variation of the Sunni religion. Since the Rohingya are considered to be illegal Bengali immigrants and were denied recognition as a religion by the government of Myanmar, the dominant group, the Rakhine, rejects the label “Rohingya” and have started to persecute the Rohingya.
The people in Myanmar are also facing wide spread poverty, with more than 78 percent of the families living below the poverty line. With most of the families living below the poverty line, tensions between the Rohingya and the other religious groups have exploded into conflict. The violence and turmoil began in 2012, the first incident was when a group of Rohingya men were accused of raping and killing a Buddhist woman The Buddhist nationalists retaliated by killing and burning the Rohingya homes. People from all over the world started calling this crisis and bloodshed “campaign of ethnic cleansing.”
More than 300,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh since violence erupted there late last month. The UN human rights chief says the security operation targeting Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing. Zeid Raad Al Hussein urged Myanmar to end the "cruel military operation" in Rakhine state. The military says it is responding to attacks by Rohingya ‘militants’ and denies it is targeting civilians. He noted that the situation could not be fully assessed because Myanmar had refused access to human rights investigators, but said the UN had received "multiple reports and satellite imagery of security forces and local militia burning Rohingya villages, and consistent accounts of extrajudicial killings, including shooting fleeing civilians".
The 1982 Citizenship Law denies the Rohingya Muslims citizenship despite the people living there for generations. The Rohingya are fleeing Myanmar because of the restrictions and policies placed by the government. The restrictions include: “marriage, family planning, employment, education, religious choice, and freedom of movement” and they are facing discrimination because of their ethnic heritage.
The Bangladeshi authorities have started to register the new arrivals. Previously only those in two official camps were being documented, but government teams are now collecting fingerprints and details from all newcomers, including those in makeshift shelters. BBC analysts say that, until now, the government has refused to register those outside camps for fear of legitimizing them. But the current move may help the government as it engages in a diplomatic battle about the Rohingyas' future.
The emergence of Rohingya militant group was due to oppressive tactics of Burmese military and police. The defending was implicated being behind the 25 August attacks, declared a one-month unilateral ceasefire to allow aid agencies in, but the Myanmar government rejected it, saying it would not negotiate with "terrorists".
Myanmar military and regime say that it is the militants who are burning Rohingya villages and targeting civilians, but a BBC correspondent on an official visit to Rakhine came across a Muslim village apparently burned by Rakhine Buddhists led by monks, contradicting the official narrative.
Obviously, the Rohingya are extremely unpopular among Buddhists inside Myanmar. On last Sunday, police fired rubber bullets to break up a mob attacking the home of a Muslim meat seller in Magway region in central Myanmar. One protester was quoted by AFP news agency saying it was a response to events in Rakhine. Myanmar is influenced heavily by Hindutva politics in India where Muslims are targeted by the ruling regime.
In October 2015, researchers from the International State Crime Initiative at Queen Mary University of London released a report drawing on leaked government documents that reveals an increasing "ghettoisation, sporadic massacres, and restrictions on movement" on Rohingya peoples. The researchers suggest that the Myanmar government are in the final stages of an organised process of genocide against the Rohingya and have called upon the international community to redress the situation as such.
The Rohingya people are a Muslim minority group residing in the Rakhine state, formerly known as Arakan. The Rohingya people are considered “stateless entities”, as the Myanmar government has been refusing to recognize them as one of the ethnic groups of the country. For this reason, the Rohingya people lack legal protection from the Government of Myanmar, are regarded as mere refugees from Bangladesh, and face strong hostility in the country—often described as one of the most persecuted people on earth. To escape the dire situation in Myanmar, the Rohingya try to illegally enter Southeast Asian states, begging for humanitarian support from potential host countries.
On 1 May 2015, about 32 shallow graves were discovered on a remote and rugged mountain in Thailand, at a so-called "waiting area" for the illegal migrants before they were sneaked through the border into Malaysia. A Bangladeshi migrant was found alive in the grave and was later treated at a local hospital as told to Thai news agencies. On 22 May 2015, however, the Myanmar navy rescued 208 migrants at sea, and upon inspection, confirmed themselves as having come from Bangladesh.[20] Protests by nationalists erupted in the capital, calling for the international community to stop blaming Myanmar for the Rohingya crisis.
On 24 May 2015, Malaysian police discovered 139 suspected graves in a series of abandoned camps used by human traffickers on the border with Thailand where Rohingya Muslims fleeing Burma were believed to have been held.
The violence erupted in late August when the army retaliated against co-ordinated attacks by Rohingya militants. Since then just under half of Rakhine's Rohingya population has poured into Bangladesh, where they now languish in one of the world's largest refugee camps.
A further 30,000 ethnic Rakhine Buddhists as well as Hindus have also been displaced -- apparent targets of the 25 August attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salavation Army (ARSA) militant group.
While desperate scenes of weary and hungry Rohingya civilians streaming into Bangladesh have dominated global headlines, there is little sympathy for the Muslim group among Myanmar's Buddhist majority.
Many reject the existence of a Rohingya ethnicity and insist they are 'Bengalis' — illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. On Monday several hundred people gathered in downtown Yangon to rail against the UN, international NGOs and foreign media, as a siege mentality grows inside Myanmar. "I want Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to stand for the ethnic people of Myanmar and to remove the pressure from the international community by giving the speech tomorrow," demonstrator Khin Khin Myint said.
Tensions over the status of the Rohingya have been brewing for years in Myanmar, with bouts of anti-Muslim violence erupting around the country as Buddhist hardliners fan fears of an Islamic takeover.
The knotty a military still looms large in the fragile democracy. Although the army stepped down from junta rule in 2011, it kept control of security policy and key levers of government. In fact, the military rules Myanmar on behalf of the elected Aung San Suu Kyi. Any overt break from the army's policy in Rakhine could enrage the generals and derail Suu Kyi's efforts to prevent a rollback on recent democratic gains.
Nobel laureate Suu Kyi has been decried overseas for failing to condemn the generals, with whom she is in a delicate power-sharing arrangement.
Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar's de facto leader and defender of genocides of Muslims in Myanmar, is facing mounting criticism for failing to protect the Rohingya, but the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader the Dalai Lama cannot tolerate crimes against the humanity in Myanmar and added his voice, urging her "to reach out to all sections of society to try to restore friendly relations".
Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi is poised to break her near-silence on communal violence scorching through Rakhine state, in a televised speech on Rohingya refugee crisis that has shocked the world and prompted the UN to accuse the country's army of ethnic cleansing.
Suu Kyi's refusal so far to defend the Rohingya over nearly a month of violence has baffled and enraged an international community that once feted her as the champion of Myanmar's democracy struggle. But inside Myanmar, supporters say the 72-year-old lacks authority to reign in the army, which stands accused of waging a campaign of murder and arson that has driven more than 410,000 Rohingya from their homes.
With global pressure cranked high, Suu Kyi skipped the UN General Assembly in New York to manage the crisis at home and deliver her televised address — the biggest yet of her time in office. "She is going to tell the world the real truth," her spokesman Zaw Htay told reporters ahead of the speech. Analysts say she faces the treacherous task of walking the line between global outrage and Islamophobic anti-Rohingya views at home, where there is broad support for the army's campaign.
As such, there is almost no possibility, given the political climate in Myanmar, for balancing the expectations of most of the country and the expectations of the international community.
UN aid to the insulted and injured Rohingya is a welcome step but it must quickly act to protect the remaining Rohingya community in Myanmar against state criminal gangs in uniform. . .
It is high time the UNSC stepped in to punish the regime and military in Myanmar for its planned crimes against humanity by targeting the helpless Rohingya community.
US-NATO silence over genocides and oppressive policies of Myanmar is comprehensible but the silence being maintained by UNSC is itself a very serious crime.
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