Helping Burmese children on the edge

Vulnerable children

Charity Children on the Edge helps thousands of marginalised children across the world. Photo: Children on the Edge

 

Burma is ruled by one of the most brutal military dictatorships in the world, headed by General Than Shwe. The military junta, called the State Peace & Development Council (SPDC), refuse to hand power to the democratically elected National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Tens of thousands have been killed, imprisoned, tortured or forced into slavery by the brutal regime. Hundreds of thousands have fled to neighbouring Thailand, India, and Bangladesh as well as nearby Malaysia and the Gulf and Arabian states.

Bentley says that she went to the border area between Burma and Thailand [where over 100,000 Burmese have settled] in 2006, to simply meet as many groups as she could.

"You get introduced to one, then another. Often they're women's groups, but not always," she says. "It's eastern and western Burma where all the troubles are going on," she goes on to explain. "So it's people groups from western Burma living in exile who set up their own organisations helping their own people within the neighbouring countries like India and Thailand, but also organising cross-border support for their people back in Burma."

"Everywhere I travel I meet vulnerable children," continues the Sussex woman, with a sad smile. "Those who've lost out to war, famine, natural disaster … In Burma, there are thousands upon thousands of them in state institutions. We wanted to operate inside the country, to help those children, but our hands were tied by the dictatorship there. There would be no way we could operate effectively there with the military government."

Her kind-looking eyes flash with anger. "Did you know that the Burmese military has destroyed twice as many villages as in Darfur? Over 100 different minorities are threatened inside Burma – they face forced labour, rape, torture and some can't even legally marry."

"Once they [the refugees] get to places like Bangladesh or other nearby countries, they're regarded as illegal immigrants, unable to work, treated as slave labour, threatened with detention or, like the women we met, often violently expelled."

"And of course it's the children who suffer the most. There's really no life... no life at all," Bentley repeats, with a shake of her head.

Then the flicker of a smile returns as she remembers the children of the unofficial refugee camp in Bangladesh rushing out to meet her last year.

"They are Rohingya," she explains, pointing to the images on her laptop screen. "Burmese Muslims. One of the world's last great stateless nations."

Bentley is one of few western women to visit the Rohingya. Having spent the past three years travelling to Burma's neighbours – supporting basic "apartment schools" run by Chin [Burmese Christian refugees] in Malaysia and refugee schools for the Karen [also a Christian Burmese minority] in Thailand, even risking life and limb to go inside Burma where Children on the Edge brings education materials and provides teachers' stipends to minority groups running several children's nurseries – she was asked by the Rohingya to come and see their lives alongside the heavily-militarised Bangladesh-Burma border.

The conditions in the camps are some of the worst she has ever seen.

"It's become very bad. Squalid. When I spoke to the children and the mothers, I could see the fear in their eyes – they used to live alongside the Bangladeshis in their villages. Now they're being forced to move to these camps and live in terror of being sent back [to Burma]."

Most people have never heard of the Rohingya, she says. Last year boatloads of these refugees were intercepted at sea by the Thai army. After days in outdoor detention they were towed back out, then abandoned with no food or water and no motors to power their boats. Over 500 men, women and children died.

"It was shocking … disgraceful," says Bentley.

Alongside Children on the Edge, several international aid organisations and human rights groups are warning of starvation and beatings facing the Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh.

Conditions in the camp are indeed tough. According to The New York Times, the dirt paths, flimsy shacks and open sewers have grown by 6,000 people to nearly 30,000, with 2,000 arrivals in January alone.

Denied the ability to work or receive aid in Bangladesh, the population has grown as Rohingya seek refuge from a wave of violence that has forced them out of their long-established homes in other Bangladeshi towns and villages.

Researchers from the Arakan Project, a human-rights group documenting the plight of the Rohingya, claimed children from the surrounding makeshift camp were begging for food from the refugees in the one "official" (government-sanctioned) settlement.

MSF reported that: "People are crowding into a crammed and unsanitary patch of ground with no infrastructure to support them. Prevented from working to support themselves, neither are they permitted food aid. As the numbers swell and resources become increasingly scarce, we are extremely concerned about the deepening crisis."

And in an emergency report released in March, "Stateless and Starving: Persecuted Rohingya Flee Burma and Starve in Bangladesh", a doctors' organisation called Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) also argued that there were critical levels of malnutrition and a surging refugee population in Kutupalong, one of the "unofficial" camps, without access to food aid.

"In recent months Bangladeshi authorities have waged an unprecedented campaign of arbitrary arrest, illegal expulsion, and forced internment against Burmese refugees," said the report. Deaths from starvation and disease were likely if the "humanitarian crisis" is not addressed.

PHR researchers observed children with severe protein malnutrition and those with swollen limbs and often distended abdomens. One out of five children with acute malnutrition, if not treated, would die, concluded the medical teams.

A European Union delegation fact-finding in Bangladesh earlier this year issued a resolution in the European Parliament on February 11 calling on the government in Dhaka to recognise the unregistered Rohingya as refugees and to extend humanitarian support.

Visit www.childrenontheedge.org for more information