Myanmar urged to cooperate with int'l organizations for solution to Rohingya problems

BANGKOK, November 21 (TNA) - The UK-based Amnesty International (AI) has proposed that the Myanmar government work together with relevant international organizations for the solution to persistent Rohingya problems. Anna Neistat, AI Senior Director for Research, raised the proposal in Bangkok on Tuesday when AI publicly released its report on the "Cage Without a Roof", after its two-year survey on the life and problems of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar's western Rakhine State, causing the exodus across the border to neighboring Bangladesh of over 600,000 ethnic Rohingya people in the latest violence recently alone. Neistat said the Myanmar government should take joint actions with relevant international organizations to create confidence that measures implemented to assist the ethnic Rohingya Muslims would be practical to effectively resolve the human rights crisis, which has persistently affected the life of the minority Rohingya people in the Rakhine State for decades. The AI senior director also suggested that all judicial actions or measures involving the ethnic Rohingya Muslims be implemented based on international laws and standards to assure the justice for the minority Rohingya Muslims. Laura Haigh, an AI researcher for Myanmar, pointed out that living without any nationality document officially issued by the Myanmar government has caused a string of inconveniences to the Rohingya Muslims in the Rakhine State, including no freedom of travelling as they are not allowed to use roads in some areas and must seek official approvals whenever they want to travel out of their villages, affecting their living and earning for income and causing them to be impoverished with famine. Besides, the access to the standard healthcare and educational systems by the ethnic Rohingya Muslims in the Rakhine State are limited, as they must be specially approved by concerned authorities and must be accompanied by police whenever they seek for the access to hospitals with high standards, forcing several of them to cross the border to receive healthcare services with higher costs in Bangladesh instead, while Rohingya children are not allowed to study with other Myanmar students at government-run schools. The AI report on the "Cage Without a Roof" stated, meanwhile, that the ethnic Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar have been systematically discriminated for several decades, causing them to have limited rights for their basic living in many areas and to be completely isolated from the outside world. (TNA)