Myanmar can keep Rohingya from starving. But will it?
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| Photo - CNN |
Special to CNN
December 7, 2012
Editor’s note: Sarnata Reynolds
is the Statelessness Program Manager at Refugees International. Her most
recent report is entitled ‘Rohingya in Burma: Spotlight on Current
Crisis Offers Opportunity for Progress.’ The views expressed are her
own.
Last week, CNN’s Dan Rivers reported
that he “wasn't prepared to see children starving to death” when he
went to camps for internally-displaced Rohingya in Myanmar’s Rakhine
State. Though no one can (or should) ever get used to such horrors, the
prevalence of starvation in this region should not come as a surprise.
In early July, a United Nations “joint rapid nutrition assessment”
found that 2,000 children in these camps were at a high risk of
mortality. A further 9,000 children needed supplementary feeding of some
kind, and 2,500 were at risk of acute malnourishment if their nutrition
needs were not met. Three months later, 2,900 children were estimated
to be at a high risk of death, and 14,000 children aged 6 months to 59
months needed supplementary feeding.
In his heartbreaking piece, Rivers said
that perhaps he was “naïve or idealistic” to think that this tragedy
could have been easily avoided. But there is nothing naïve about
assuming that the Rohingya communities along the Bay of Bengal should
have enough food to eat. This region is not experiencing a famine: there
are fish aplenty in the seas off Myanmar’s western shore, and there are
rice paddies and coconut plantations. The problem is that the Myanmar
government is not allowing the Rohingya to access any of those
resources. Since the outbreak of violence in Rakhine State in June, the
government has not permitted the Rohingya to move freely at all.
Confined to their camps, tens of thousands of Rohingya – among them
thousands of children – are going hungry.
In most other food crises, humanitarian aid workers would be able to
move in quickly with lifesaving interventions. But not in Myanmar.
Extreme restrictions have been placed on humanitarian agencies – either
directly by the government, or indirectly by members of the Rakhine
community, who threaten anyone seen to be working with the Rohingya. As a
result, thousands of Rohingya children are going hungry. The central
government’s refusal to intervene on behalf of the Rohingya community is
a disgrace and, whether intentionally or not, it is resulting in the
starvation of children.
I traveled to Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State, in September as part of a team from Refugees International.
During that time, I visited almost every nearby Rohingya IDP camp. In
these squalid settlements, there were babies and toddlers so weakened by
hunger that they sat limply on their parents’ arms. In one camp, a
crowd of people formed around us, and a man in the back raised his baby
in the air so that I would see how emaciated and malnourished he was. I
can’t imagine the pain and desperation that father must have felt as he
raised his child above the crowd, showing us the devastation this crisis
has wrought.
The sad fact is that once a child reaches a certain level of
malnutrition, he may die even if he is fed. Right now, roughly 2,900
babies and toddlers in the Rohingya camps may be beyond help. But there
is no reason that even one more child should be added to that awful
tally. If experienced medical staff were given immediate access, nearly
all of the 14,000 Rohingya children in need of supplementary feeding
could be brought back from the brink. Skilled practitioners could be
called in at a moment’s notice, but that would require a change in the
government’s position. Unless the Burmese authorities commit to broad
access and assistance to the Rohingya in these camps, more children will
wither away. And right now, there is not the political will in
Naypyidaw for such a commitment.
At the same time that President Thein Sein and the rest of the
Myanmar government are being applauded for their movement toward
democracy, marginalized and stateless Rohingya children are starving. No
doubt this crisis muddies the narrative of positive change in Myanmar,
but that is no reason to dismiss it. If anything, this human tragedy
clarifies that all is not well in Myanmar, and it demands that the
international community call Myanmar’s authorities to account for
continuing atrocities.
