The Rohingya community is facing a deteriorating situation in Myanmar and across South and Southeast Asia, according to a new new report by the Women’s Peace Network (WPN): “We are targeted for being Rohingya in Myanmar and everywhere.”
The report’s launch marked the one-year anniversary of the US government’s official recognition of the Rohingya genocide. It also followed the recent issuance of the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar’s report to the Human Rights Council, to which WPN contributed a submission on the situation of Rohingya refugees and internally displaced persons.
WPN dedicated about 11 months to this 42-page report through its research, as well as consultations with Rohingya members of its network. The members participated in a six-month-long series of discussions that were conducted by the organisation’s research team in the Burmese and Rohingya languages.
“The past years, particularly since the attempted coup, have been tragic for Rohingya. The report reveals this sense of despair that has long tormented my community,” WPN founder and executive director Wai Wai Nu said.
“We are risking everything to survive in our homeland, Arakan, and in the refugee camps, slums, detention centers, lands and seas beyond Burma. Over five years since the 2017 genocidal attacks, the world”s actions – not words – following the report’s recommendations, are urgently needed to end this exacerbating, unbearable tragedy.”
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In Myanmar the situation of the over 600,000 Rohingya remaining in the country has rapidly exacerbated following the Burmese military’s attempted coup on 1 February 2021.
The military, which is intensifying a human rights and humanitarian catastrophe across the country, is now targeting Rohingya with laws and policies that criminalise the exercise of fundamental freedoms, as well as arbitrary arrest and detention, torture, sexual violence, and murder.
In over two years, the Myanmar junta has arbitrarily arrested and detained at least 2,754 Rohingya, including over 863 women. A growing risk of attacks of genocide by the Burmese military is endangering the community across the country, many of whom are victims and survivors of the 2017 “clearance operations” in Rakhine state.
“Issuing national verification cards and naturalised citizenship means that the genocide is ongoing. Their main purpose from the beginning was to create us as second or third-class citizens and continue to persecute us so that we no longer exist in Arakan,” said a member of one of the WPN’s focus groups in Rakhine state.
Forced to flee the decades-long genocide in Myanmar, the roughly one million Rohingya refugees in other South and Southeast Asian countries too face extremely dire conditions.
Tightening access to basic needs, essential services, safety and protection is leaving the refugees more vulnerable to human trafficking, arrest and detention, forced repatriation to Myanmar, and many other grave, life-threatening abuses.
The report draws particular attention to the Rohingya’s deteriorating situation in Bangladesh, Malaysia and India, where the majority of them seek refuge.
From the squalid camps to deadly sea crossings, the above conditions continue to pose uniquely devastating effects to Rohingya women and girls. They include a growing risk of rape, gang rape, sexual exploitation, sexual slavery, domestic violence and many other forms of sexual and gender-based violence.
The report issues recommendations to the governments of Bangladesh, Malaysia and India, as well as the international community and the Burmese civilian government and leadership, in addressing its findings.
In this regard, the WPN calls for immediate international and regional actions to help bring the Rohingya community safety and protection, justice and accountability, reparations, and recovery and rehabilitation as a people. – WPN
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