Word: rohingyas
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...recent months, Kutu Palong has become a refuge from a brutal crackdown on the Rohingya, according to a report issued Thursday by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). More than 6000 people have arrived in the camp since October as police and border authorities have launched an unprecedented crackdown in Bangladesh, pushing over 2,000 Rohingya back across the border into Burma. More than 500 were arrested around the country in January alone. MSF doctors working in Kutu Palong say they have been treating Rohingya who have been beaten and raped. "[Border guards] broke my fingers and then...
...These kids are all Rohingya, a religious and linguistic ethnic minority from Burma's northern Rakhine State, who have been fleeing state-sponsored persecution in their homeland since 1978. In 1991, when the population experienced widespread repression and abuse from security forces posted in Rakhine, a quarter of a million crossed the border to Bangladesh seeking asylum. Most of them still live there today. Some 28,000 have been officially recognized as refugees and are living in a U.N.-run camp, waiting to be relocated to a third nation. Hundreds of thousands of others live outside these grounds...
...About 30,000 Rohingya now live in the makeshift camp, in crude huts thrown together with bin liners, sticks and mud. Sanitation is minimal. Sewage facilities, hugely inadequate in the monsoon season, run alongside the housing. An earlier March 2009 MSF survey found that 40% of those who died in this unregistered camp in the first part of that year died from diarrhea. The government, however, has forbidden further development of the camps' infrastructure, so as not to attract any people more to the improvised settlement. "There is just one toilet between every 10 families," says Ziaul Haque...
...Though half of the Rohingya who make their way to Bangladesh are taken in by local families until they find their feet, it's been a fragile relationship. Many are competing for jobs with the Rohingya, who are often willing to work for less than Bangladeshis. Others worry that armed extremist gangs are radicalizing the youth of this marginalised, leaderless community, and suspicions of drug smuggling and an increase in petty crime in the camps have been recorded in the local press. With a new round of elections slated for later this year in Burma, locals are increasingly concerned that...
...official channels of moving refugees to new homes has been slow. Since 2006, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has resettled 749 Rohingya from the registered camp. Five hundred were relocated in 2009 and another 190 are pending departure for the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the U.S. It's a rate of departure that barely covers the population growth of 2.9% within the registered camp; right now, the system is simply paying off the human interest...