Both in Myanmar and Bangladesh, Rohinghya
children face steep barriers to education.
But while Mohammed witnessed unimaginable
violence and destruction before fleeing across the border, he is also keenly
aware of other threats to his community’s future – not least a lack of access
to education. Before fleeing into Bangladesh, Mohammed’s opportunities to
attend school had become increasingly limited in Myanmar, as authorities
started segregating Muslim and Buddhist children following violence in 2012. In
the relative safety of Bangladesh, meanwhile, Mohammed has become one of
hundreds of thousands of Rohingya children who are being denied formal
schooling opportunities, to a large extent because of restrictions imposed by
the Bangladeshi government.
By Tun Khin
Mohammed is one of more than 700,000 Rohingya
refugees who fled into Bangladesh after the Myanmar army launched a vicious
“clearance operation” in August 2017. Soldiers raped, killed, and torched their
way through Rakhine state, home to the vast majority of Rohingya, committing
what the UN and many others have called crimes against humanity and possibly
even genocide.
The lack of access to education for Rohingya
on both sides of the Naf – the river separating Myanmar and Bangladesh – is
threatening to create a lost generation of Rohingya children. This month, the
Burmese Rohingya Organization UK launched a new report spotlighting this hidden
crisis, while calling on the world to take action as soon as possible. As
Mohammad himself told us: “If you want to harm a community you don’t need to
kill them. Just don’t let them study.”
Inside Myanmar, Rohingya have faced a
debilitating and state-sponsored system of discrimination for decades. This has
included denying Rohingya citizenship and the rights associated with it, as
well as imposing serious restrictions on their freedom of movement. Across
large parts of Rakhine state, Rohingya need to obtain permission to travel to
towns or even to leave their villages, meaning that access to opportunities to
make a living or gain an education are scarce.
These restrictions are not new, but have been
part of the daily reality for Rohingya for generations. They form the more
subtle part of the genocide the Myanmar authorities are subjecting Rohingya
too. But the discrimination in Rakhine State serves the same purpose as the
military’s violence that grabbed international headlines in 2017 – to make life
for Rohingya so unbearable that we see no option but to leave. I myself, for
example, felt compelled to flee Rakhine state in the mid-1990s when the Myanmar
government prevented me from attending university simply because I was
Rohingya.
This system of segregation, however, has
tightened significantly since 2012, when state-sponsored violence
overwhelmingly targeting Rohingya swept Rakhine state. Since then, authorities
started segregating previously mixed Buddhist-Muslim schools, leaving many
Rohingya in separate education facilities where the quality of teaching and
materials are extremely poor. Many government teachers refuse to work in
Rohingya schools; those that do agree often subject students to humiliation and
neglect. Mohammad himself describes how his own situation changed from 2012:
“After that, the teacher kept us in separate classes. One for Rohingya, one for
Rakhine. They gave them all the attention – all the resources. The teacher
would call us ‘Kalar’ [a pejorative term for Rohingya] and would no longer want
to teach us.”
There are also reports that since 2017,
Myanmar authorities have been targeting teachers and other educated Rohingya —
further aggravating the collective capacity for education. It is no coincidence
that more than 73 percent of Rohingya in Rakhine state self-identify as
illiterate today.
But even in the relative safety of
Bangladesh, the lack of access to education has continued. While the
Bangladeshi government generously opened its borders to Myanmar at the height
of the crisis, the same authorities have since imposed worrying restrictions
inside the refugee camps that house hundreds of thousands of Rohingya. Refugees
are, for example, largely prohibited from leaving the camps, while
international aid groups have been barred from building more sustainable
shelters in order to not imply a sense of permanency.
These restrictions also apply to education.
Rohingya refugee children are not allowed to attend formal education or to be
taught in Bangla languages, apparently because the authorities in Dhaka fear
these could become “pull factors,” convincing more refugees to enter Bangladesh
and settle there permanently. Instead, education in the camps is being provided
by a range of international and Bangladeshi NGOs as well as community-based
organizations. Rohingya are often taught in informal “temporary learning
centers” where the quality of education and curriculum can vary significantly
depending on the NGO involved.
As grateful as the Rohingya community is
toward Dhaka for hosting close to a million refugees, we also urge the
government to rethink its approach to education. Rohingya refugees will remain
in Bangladesh for the foreseeable future – the only way they will be able to
constructively give back to Bangladeshi society is if they are allowed to
better themselves through education and access to livelihoods. We call on the
Bangladeshi authorities to immediately remove all barriers to education for
refugees, and to ensure that Rohingya community leaders are involved in
decision making around aid and development.
The only long-term and viable solution to the
crisis, however, lies inside Myanmar. The Myanmar authorities must immediately
dismantle the system of apartheid, remove all restrictions on the human rights
of Rohingya (including on access to education and freedom of movement), and
grant Rohingya citizenship under national law.
With the Rohingya community’s very existence
threatened by the ongoing genocide in Myanmar, the stakes could not be higher.
There is a real risk that a whole generation of Rohingya children will grow up
without ever having had access to adequate schooling. This is all the more
troubling since we need a generation of educated Rohingya, who can lead and
better our community, now more than ever.
Tun Khin is President of the Burmese Rohingya
Organisation UK (BROUK) and Coordinator of the Free Rohingya Coalition (FRC).
Source: Diplomat
Source: Diplomat