Refugees from Myanmar are starving to death in Bangladesh - that's the claim made in a new report from US aid organisation Physicians for Human Rights. It says thousands of people from Myanmar's minority Rohingya ethnic group have fled persecution in their home country, only to face gross mistreatment at the hands of neighbouring Bangladeshi authorities.

Bangladesh officially recognises 28,000 of the Muslim Rohingya as refugees, but the PHR report says the true, unofficial, figure is more likely 200,000. Many of them had been living in communities but gradually began to find themselves marginalised and sought refuge in UN camps. PHR says police are: “systematically rounding up, jailing or summarily expelling those unregistered refugees across the Burmese (Myanmar) border in flagrant violation of the country’s human rights obligations.”

RNW Newsline interview with Richard Sollom of PHR

Locked in
The report describes the camps as “makeshift prisons” where refugees have little access to food and water, and are dying from starvation. More than 18 percent of children living there are suffering from malnutrition. Raw sewage and open sewers are commonplace in the camps. PHR’s Richard Sollom told Radio Netherlands Worldwide: “To put this in perspective, Haiti right now – post earthquake crisis – has a malnutrition rate of six percent, so it is three times the level of what we’re seeing in Haiti, where there is an abundance of aid coming in for these people.”

The international community has pledged aid for Bangladesh and the European Union recently passed a resolution promising to send even more. The problem, says Mr Sollom, is that the government won’t accept it.

But Green MEP Jean Lambert, who recently visited Bangladesh as part of an EU delegation to the country, says the authorities are aware of the plight of the Rohingya:

“I think the Bangladeshis do know it’s a problem. What they’re trying to do is negotiate with the Myanmar government, and indeed they’ve made some sort of progress on at least having these people acknowledged… Nevertheless, what they’ve got in the interim is a problem which is not going to go away very fast.”

Audio: Green MEP Jean Lambert on the situation in Bangladesh

The EU already is already donating funds to Bangladesh for the 28,000 Rohingya officially living in the country. It has now offered extra money to support the UNHCR's work with the other hundreds of thousands living there unofficially.

Both NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) and the Arakan Project (a lobby group for the Rohingya) recently produced similar reports decrying the situation in Bangladesh – but the government has dismissed their findings as “baseless and malicious”.

Expulsion
It says it will continue to remove illegal Rohingya and return them to Myanmar – a measure Mr Sollom says has to stop:

“We must not forget the reason why these refugees had to flee is because of the draconian policies of the military junta in Burma [Myanmar].… Certainly the best solution would be for the repatriation of these refugees back to their home – that is what they want – but what is essential is that such repatriation be voluntary.”

Opinion on this story on South Asia Wired