January 27, 2018
While the world remains focused on the terrible atrocities committed by security forces on the frontier townships of Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathedaung, the remaining population concentrated in the IDP camps and isolated village tracts of Akyab, Pathor Keela (Mrauk U), Kyauktaw, Pauktaw, Pweng Cong, Mamra (Minbyn) and Kyakphu in Northern Arakan are heading towards complete extinction.
According to an UN report, at least one woman in a remote Pauktaw IDP camp has killed herself after she was unable to bear the pains in her abdomen which was left untreated in the absence of medical facilities.
Our sources, spread out among the IDP camps of these townships are saying that all medical facilities, including the vital lifeline provided by MSF has been forcibly stopped, and many, especially children are dying by the dozens. Rohingya activists have long alleged the denial of food and vital life saving drugs is a systematic policy implemented by the government to annihilate the Rohingya population without attracting international attention, a part of the slow burning genocide that has now reached the final stages as the Muslim population is moving towards extinction.
While there is much focus on the armed assault carried out in the frontier townships in 2017, and rightfully so, the government’s blockade of Rohingyas in the southern townships is going unnoticed. But undoubtedly, the blockade is working, and the Rohingyas are dying a slow painful death. One Rohngya youth activist in the Bangladeshi camps told Rohingya Khobor that the situation has become so bad in these southern camps that would be more merciful if the security forces simply gunned down the approximately 200,000 Rohingyas trapped in these Mogh majority areas.
According to Marixie Mercado, a Unicef spokeswomen who spent a month in the country in December, “Parts of the camps are literally cesspools. Shelters teeter on stilts above garbage and excrement. In one camp, the pond where people draw water from is separated by a low mud wall from the sewage. You can easily see how a little bit of rainfall would wash that filth over into the pond. Children walk barefoot through the muck. One camp manager reported four deaths among children ages three to 10 within the first 18 days of December. His only ask was for proper pathways so they wouldn’t have to walk through their own waste.”
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