Alwaght- At least 340,000 Rohingya Muslim children are living in squalid conditions in Bangladesh camps where they lack enough food, clean water and health care, the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) said on Friday.
Up to 12,000 more children join them every week, fleeing ethnic cleansing or hunger in their native Myanmar, still traumatized by atrocities they witnessed, Unicef said in a report “Outcast and Desperate”.
In all, almost 600,000 Rohingya refugees have left northern Rakhine state since 25 August when the UN says the Myanmar army began a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” following insurgent attacks.
“This isn’t going to be a short-term, it isn’t going to end anytime soon,” Simon Ingram, the report’s author and a Unicef official, told a news briefing.
“So it is absolutely critical that the borders remain open and that protection for children is given and equally that children born in Bangladesh have their birth registered.”
Most Rohingyas are stateless in Myanmar and many fled without papers, he said, adding there are many newborns in Bangladesh. “Without an identity they have no chance of ever assimilating into any society effectively,” he said.
Safe drinking water and toilets are in “desperately short supply” in the chaotic, teeming camps and settlements, Ingram said after spending two weeks in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.
“In a sense it’s no surprise that they must truly see this place as a hell on earth,” he said.
An estimated 600,000 Rohingya’s have fled their homes following a military-led ethnic cleansing campaign in Rakhine State and crossed into Bangladesh. There have been shocking reports of Myanmar troops and Buddhist mobs murdering and raping civilians and torching their villages.
The current crisis erupted on 25 August, when Myanmar’s army backed by gangs of Buddhist extremists brutally attacked Muslims in Rakhine state on the pretext of responding to the killing of security forces. In the ensuing operation, nearly 7,000 Rohingya Muslims have been killed in what is clearly an organized campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Myanmar has refused to recognize the Rohingya as an ethnic group, instead claims they are Bengali migrants from Bangladesh living illegally in the country. Myanmar has come under international criticism for failing to stop the ethnic cleansing in its Rakhine state and in turn an exodus that has become the largest refugee crisis to hit Asia in decades.
