Human Rights Watch in Myanmar: The Rohingya’s Decade of Detention

The Myanmar authorities have detained over 135,000 Rohingya and Kaman Muslims arbitrarily and indefinitely in Rakhine State for a decade, Human Rights Watch said in a web feature released on 15 of June.

Drawing on interviews with Rohingya and humanitarian workers from 2012 to the present, Human Rights Watch documents how the authorities have capitalized on the ethnic cleansing campaign launched in June 2012 to segregate and confine a population they had long sought to remove from daily life in the predominantly Buddhist country.

Through individual accounts, images, and video, “‘Nothing Called Freedom’: A Decade of Detention for Rohingya in Myanmar’s Rakhine State” illustrates the Myanmar authorities’ crimes against humanity of apartheid, persecution, and imprisonment that have deprived Rohingya of their liberty and threatened their lives and livelihoods.

According to HRW’s research, following the June 2012 violence, township and border guard officials began forcing Rohingya to move to camps that were soon sealed off with barbed wire fencing and military checkpoints. Severe constraints on movement, livelihoods, and access to humanitarian aid and health care have only worsened over the past decade, compounded by inhuman living conditions. The coup in February 2021 has brought new movement restrictions and aid blockages to the Rohingya camps. Rising tensions and fighting in Rakhine State between the Myanmar military and the ethnic-Rakhine Arakan Army have left the Rohingya caught in the middle.