With certain death staring at them and hardly any chance of survival, 1,25,000 Rohingya Muslims had to flee from Myanmar during the 2012 Rakhine state riots. Nearly 3,000 of them have been living under plastic tents in Hyderabad
The plight of Rohingya Muslims, nearly 3,000 of them, who started making Hyderabad their temporary home since 2009 is no bed of roses. In each camp as they would like to call their colony, there are close to 60 families living in small plastic tents which are held together with bamboo.
Md Younus, the only one who speaks English, teaches children on and off. “We want to live with dignity and want the Myanmar Government to give us citizenship or any other country. We have an identity and we no longer want to live like this,” he said.
“Aung San Suu Kyi herself spent 15 years under house arrest but now she isn’t willing to give us freedom and our rightful place,” he added. In a recent interview to the US Ambassador Scot Marciel, Suu Kyi suggested to him to not use the term Rohingya.
Rohingya Muslims are treated as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and for this reason, Myanmar denies them citizenship. According to United Nations, 1,20,000 of them have been forced to flee Myanmar in the last few years.
Most of them had to take special permission even to visit Yangon and none of the refugees ever seen the place. With the government in Myanmar not too keen to receive them, they have been living in penury not only in Hyderabad but in several other states in India. The UNHCR regards that the Rohingya are among the most persecuted minorities in the world but no one seems to embrace the ‘nowhere people’ as of now.
source : Shafaqna
