A top American diplomat who recent visited the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh on Tuesday described their situation as dire.
“I visited several of the refugee camps in Bangladesh about a month ago. The situation is dire. We must do more to help them as they continue to be targeted for their faith,” Sam Brownback, Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom told reporters during a news conference here.
Brownback, in an interaction with reporters after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo released the annual report of the State Department on International Religious Freedom, said that he could not get permission to travel to Burma and meet people who wanted to as part of his on-the-ground assessment of the situation.
“I have asked for access into Myanmar and to meet with Aung San Suu Kyi and to go into northern Rakhine State, where the problems have been most acute, although there are plenty of problems in various places in Myanmar. And I was denied those accesses. So they might have let me in, but they weren't allowing me to have the meetings or access to the places I need to go,” he said.
“I don't think you've seen progress taking place there in the country. If anything, the administration there is doubling, now, its effort and going after the Kachin in the northern part of the country. And the refugee numbers are increasing in the northern part, now, of Burma,” Brownback said in response to a question.
Brownback said the continued situation of the Rohingya is desperate. “The rainy season is now on us. When I was there, you had 38 kids that had been died of diphtheria,” he said.
Referring to his interaction with Rohingya children when he was in Bangladesh, he said four of those 20 kids in a meeting told him that they had close family member killed, and the fifth had seen a brother wounded. “This is in a random grouping. It's a terrible situation that requires the world's attention. There is a lot of world attention on it, but I think there needs to be more action from the world,” the American diplomat said.
According to the annual Congressional-mandated report, in Bangladesh, religious minority communities such as Hindus and Christians, which are sometimes ethnic minorities, reported the government failed to effectively prevent forced evictions and land seizures stemming from land disputes.
Despite government orders, village community leaders, often working together with local religious leaders, used extrajudicial fatwas to punish women and other groups for perceived “moral transgressions,” it said.
According to local organizations and media reports, the Ministry of Education (MOE) made significant changes to traditionally secular Bengali language textbooks, such as removing non-Muslim authors’ content and adding Islamic content to nonreligious subject matter. The government continued to provide law enforcement personnel at religious sites, festivals, and events considered to be possible targets for violence, the State Department said.
Noting that there were attacks on religious minorities, particularly Buddhists and Hindus, during the year, the report said in meetings with government officials and in public statements, the US Ambassador and other embassy representatives continued to speak out against acts of violence in the name of religion and encouraged the government to uphold the rights of minority religious groups and to foster a climate of tolerance.