She has been taken in by a fisherman and his wife who already have four sons and two daughters. “You treat the children who are sick, and then they fall ill again because they are not getting the right food.”įor now at least, tiny Fatima is safe. “It’s a hopeless situation,” said the aid worker. In the makeshift camps, malnutrition rates are even higher. Yet the plight of those already here gets little attention.Ī report by U.S.-based rights group Refugees International last year described a “silent crisis” of abuse, starvation and detention faced by stateless Rohingyas in Bangladesh.Īccording to UNHCR, a 2011 survey in the two official camps found that 17 percent of children between six months and six years were suffering from acute malnutrition, higher than the emergency threshold set by the World Health Organisation. The populations share the same ethnicity, religion and dialect, and they are so close that if you call a Rohingya on a mobile phone in Myanmar it is likely to be a Bangladesh number. There has been some dismay in this part of Bangladesh at the hard line taken by the government on the new arrivals. He escaped to Bangladesh in 2006 after his brother and others were jailed in a crackdown on Muslim clerics. The baby, named Fatima by the family that has taken her in, is out of the danger that she and her family faced in Myanmar, but she joins a throng of stateless people in southeast Bangladesh who - for the most part - lead desperate lives of squalor, deprivation and discrimination.Īmong them is Mohammad Kamal, a young religious leader from Rakhine’s Maungdaw district, where ferocious violence erupted on June 9 between Rohingyas and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and spread across the state. Bangladesh has ordered its border guards to push the boats back, determined that - with at least quarter of a million “illegal migrants” already here - there must be no more. The cleft-lipped infant, just weeks old, is among hundreds of Rohingya Muslims who fled this month’s sectarian violence in Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine, packing themselves into rough wooden boats and heading for the shores of neighboring Bangladesh.
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