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Thousands of Rohingya Children at High

Risk of Multiple Disabilities and
Enslavement??1st Situation Report on
?Rohingya Children? by SAIRI Post-doc
Multiversity of The United Nations MDGs.
"The world is aghast at the fact that members of the Rohingya people of Myanmar have
ended up adrift in leaky overcrowded boats having to fight for food and being forced to drink
their own urine...."??The Global Community, UNICEF, and WHO Urged to Take Prompt
Action?SAIRI
Myanmar, Asia, July 18, 2015 /PressReleasePing/ - As a consequence of the dreadful,
harrowing outrages committed by riot groups in Rakhine state of Burma, the Rohingyas,
have become an oppressed ethnic minority belonging to the Rakhine state. Rohingya
constitutes some 1.3 million of the populace. and it is estimated that nearly 1,78,000 children
belong to this oppressed minority.

Being held in an ongoing condition of multi-faceted oppressions and state-backed

persecutions, a reasonable segment of these children is at high risks of mental and physical
abnormalities as well as potentially prone to enslavement , according to SAIRIs situation
report on the Rohingya crisis.

A three-fringed state of detention has been constituted by: 1) the state-managed detention in
so-called custodial campsites; 2) the trafficker-run hostage camps; and 3) prison sites
accumulated by smugglers. Tens of thousands of citizens have been restrained in this
cramped, three-fringed state of confinement where, besides women and the elderly, it is the
children who are especially vulnerable to enslavement, with undescribed numbers already
having been sold on, notifies the report, which focuses on the children trapped in this
emergency situation. SAIRI now calls on the UN, interregional hierarchies and the global
community to mount an urgent response at the most vulnerable hour of this humanitarian
emergency.

It is estimated that between 13,000 and 20,000 children are crowded within these isolated,

squalid camps where they are sub-humanely dealt with like farm animals. Not only are
people being denied access to public services from inside the camps but they are prevented
from leaving the area to seek emergency medical aid, even in the case of women in labour,
and children.

Some 15,000 to 18,000 older as well as younger children have resorted to fleeing off the Bay
of Bengal, often on rickety boats that end up adrift and stranded in the Andaman Sea. There
are many recorded incidents of enslavement, with new research revealing the likelihood that
tens of hundreds more children will be or have already been sold as slaves, after having been
held hostage and torturedin jungle precincts and at other hostage sites. The boys are sold for
forced labour and the girls into prostitution.

Background to the Crisis

In the wake of dreadful inter-ethnic violence, sparked by decades-long communal hatred that
was left to simmer, eventually re-igniting in 2012, mass atrocities spread and engulfed the
western Rakhine state of Burma, where the majority of the 1.3 million Rohingya are situated.
A wave of hate-speech incited riot groups to set fire not only to homes, shops and yards but to
complete towns and, in certain instances, entire villages of Rohingya people were reportedly
burned to the ground.

The contempt for basic human rights across the state has reached such a level that sexual
assaults, systematic use of rape, street riots, urban brawling, arbitrary arrests probably
culminating in unlawful killings, domestic violence, looting of shops as well as homes,
sequential kidnappings, forced labour and mind-numbing street barbarism are now welldocumented in UN data-records and the annals of other rights groups and dependable
sources including Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, Simon-Skjodt Center
for the Prevention of Genocide, Mdecins Sans Frontires, U.S. Refugees International, and
the BROUK.

Unsurprisingly, the people of this long-suffering oppressed minority have begun to flee in
haphazard way. Finding themselves caught in a cant-live-cant-leave situation, many feel
they are left with no option other than to risk their lives in perilous exodus, ignorant of whether
they will end up asan object of prey for the traffickers or collateral damage for the naval
security forces.

More often than not, the haphazard nature of their fleeing leaves many children separated
from their parents, and desperately alienated from everything that is familiar to them.

Among this long-suffering minority and destitute populace there are disabled children, those
who have lost their parents or been detached from their siblings or relatives, notes the SAIRI
report.

Its strangely worth noting here that many of the media correspondents and journalists, along
with the rights groups reporters, are forbidden from entering the victims site. In some
incidents, numerous media correspondents and investigators have been forced to hand over
their cameras and memory cards with a cautionary note that they would not try to go to these
sites again.

Irelands eminent analyst, researcher and human-rights defender, Mary Lawlor, marks in her
report on Rohingyas ongoing persecution issue:

The world is aghast at the fact that up to 8000 members of the Rohingya people of Myanmar
have ended up adrift in leaky overcrowded boats having to fight for food and being forced to
drink their own urine.

They have been shipped from port to port while the governments of Thailand, Malaysia and
Bangladesh argue over who is responsible for them and the government of Myanmar acts as
if the problem is nothing to do with it.

The real scandal is that almost 1 million people can be denied their right to citizenship in
Myanmar and held in what are effectively prison camps under armed guard.The roads in
and out of the camps are blocked by armed guards and the Rohingya cannot leave the area
even to seek medical help for women going into labour, asserts Lawlor.

Concluding Plea:

SAIRI, by means of its report-testimony, hereby supplicates to the collective conscience of

the world that:
These effectively stateless and restless entitiesthe Rohingya children - are on their
knees before the collective conscience of the international community. These glimmering
flowers are being reduced to dusky coffins, floating on the Andaman Sea. The world is a
global village; we are inhabitants of the same planet to which they belong and upon which

they are being persecuted, thrashed and beleaguered. And if we fail, therefore, to respond at
this vulnerable hour, or if the global community continues to shy away from taking a moral
stand, there can be no more justifiable reason for the pursuit of a humane society pleads the
SAIRI reports principal investigator, Professor Dr. Qadhi Aurangzeb Al Hafi.

We have to see the resolution of the Rohingya childrens crisis as a Moral Imperativeif not
a legal requisite, urges Prof Qadhi A.Z. Al Hafi.

Professor Dr. Qadhi Aurangzeb Al Hafi has long been working for children in disastrous
emergencies and cataclysmic situations. Dr. Aurangzeb Hafi was the prime investigatory head
of the projects concerning the disabled population of refugee camps in Sri Lanka, following
the Asian Tsunami of 2004. He also maintained technical liaisons with the UN and other
concerned quarters thereof.

References:

www.un.org/tgenocide/adviser/pdf/osapg_analysis...
http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/01/06/thailand-protect-rohingya-boat-children
www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20150505-Burma-Report.pdf
https://prachatai.org/english/node/5086
http://refugeesinternational.org/policy/field-report/myanmar-tipping-point-rohingya-rights
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/myanmar-muslim-migrants-abandoned-at-seadrinking-their-own-urine-to-survive-after-thailand-refuses-boat-entry-10249854.html
http://news.yahoo.com/desperate-rohingya-kids-flee-alone-boat-155932904.html
http://www.ushmm.org/confront-genocide/about/initiatives/bearing-witness-trips/burma

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