Arakan News Agency
Already widely reduced to statelessness and in many cases forced into camps for displaced people, an 800,000-strong population of Muslims in western Myanmar now faces increasing efforts to eradicate the very word they use to identify themselves as a group. Under pressure from Myanmar’s nominally-civilian government, the international community sometimes appears complicit in the airbrushing of “Rohingya” from official discourse.
Approximately 800,000 Rohingyas live in Myanmar. Tens of thousands have fled in recent decades to Malaysia, up to half a million to neighboring Bangladesh, and an unknown number are scattered from Thailand, to India, to Saudi Arabia.
For years, Rohingyas have had their rights – from movement to reproduction to citizenship – restricted by what a Bangkok-based human rights organization called deliberate state-designed “policies of persecution”.
In July and October 2012, violence erupted between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingyas. The outbursts and ensuing round-ups by security forces resulted in 140,000 people, mostly Rohingyas, being held in government-built camps.
Meanwhile, government officials openly promised to tighten regulations on Rohingya movement and other rights.
Nearly two years later, the outgoing UN special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar said: “The pattern of widespread and systematic human rights violations in Rakhine State may constitute crimes against humanity.”
Source: IRIN
