Myanmar should end the “apartheid regime” that has left thousands of Muslim ethnic Rohingya families trapped in stifling displacement camps eight years after deadly communal clashes tore through the Buddhist-majority country’s far west, the U.S. advocacy group Human Rights Watch said in a FILE – Rohingya Muslims detained by Myanmar immigration authorities are transferred into vehicles after arriving by boat at Thande village outside Yangon, Myanmar Nov. 16, 2018.Human Rights Watch says strict travel restrictions outside the camps — enforced with arrests and physical abuse — prevent many from finding work or going to school, leaving them largely dependent on deliveries from international aid agencies that increasingly are being blocked by authorities on vague and dubious grounds of health and security.The report describes squalid and overcrowded communities with ramshackle shelters and open sewers, and cites other reports and studies that link those conditions to camp death and disease rates higher than those in surrounding villages.The organization also warns that the government’s nascent moves to “close” the camps since 2017 look less likely to relieve those conditions than perpetuate them.The government claims to have closed three of the estimated 24 camps so far.Human Rights Watch says a group of Buddhist ethnic Rakhine displaced by the 2012 pogroms was resettled to a site agreed on with the government, while a group of Muslim ethnic Kaman was coerced into moving hundreds of kilometers away to Yangon, Myanmar’s commercial hub.However, when authorities “closed” a Rohingya camp, Human Rights Watch says, they merely built new housing on the same site, leaving the same travel restrictions in place.”The government is undertaking this process, which it is calling a process to close the camps, but is in reality just sort of entrenching the Rohingya’s status as permanent detainees,” Bauchner said.”Their ability to work, to study, to get medical care are all severely constrained, and the result is a community that for generations will be cut off from self-reliance, from dignity, from … being able to have opportunities to study in certain fields so that they can actually provide services on their own.”John Quinley, a human rights specialist for the advocacy group FILE- In this handout photo released on April 5, 2020 by the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency, a wooden boat carries suspected Rohingya migrants detained in Malaysian territorial waters off the island of Langkawi.He and Bauchner said the conditions in the camps, and the growing belief among the Rohingya trapped there that they will never improve, is adding to their despair. A few thousand have managed to flee the camps, often risking death to reach Malaysia by boat in hopes of a better life. Some don’t make it.“We know we will die in the sea,” one Rohingya woman in the camps told Human Rights Watch. “If we reach there, we will be lucky; if we die, it is OK because we have no future here.”Win Myat Aye, Myanmar’s minister of social welfare, relief and resettlement, would not speak with VOA about the camps and referred questions to the ministry’s permanent secretary, Ko Ko Naing, who could not be reached. Other government officials and spokesmen did not reply to VOA’s requests for comment. 
…