Knowledge gap: Rohingya refugee children attending a class at a school in Kutupalong refugee camp. — AFP
Every morning in his refugee camp school, Mohammad Yusuf sings the national anthem of Myanmar, the country whose army forced his family to flee and is accused of killing thousands of his people.
Yusuf, now 15, is one of hundreds of thousands of mostly Muslim ethnic Rohingya who escaped into Bangladesh after the Myanmar military launched a brutal offensive five years ago on Thursday.
For nearly half a decade, he and the vast numbers of other refugee children in the network of squalid camps received little or no schooling, with Dhaka fearing that education would represent an acceptance that the Rohingya were not going home anytime soon.
That hope seems more distant than ever since the military coup in Myanmar last year, and last month authorities finally allowed Unicef to scale up its schools programme to cover 130,000 children.
But the host country still wants the refugees to go back: tuition is in Burmese and the schools follow the Myanmar curriculum, also singing the country’s national anthem before classes start each day.
The Rohingya have long been seen as reviled foreigners by some in Myanmar, a largely Buddhist country whose government is being accused in the UN’s top court of trying to wipe out the people, but Yusuf embraces the song, seeing it as a symbol of defiance.
“Myanmar is my homeland,” he said. “The country did no harm to us. Its powerful people did. My young sister died there.
“Still it is my country and I will love it till the end,” Yusuf said.
The denial of education for years is a powerful symbol of Bangladesh’s ambivalence towards the refugee presence, some of whom have been relocated to a remote, flood-prone and previously uninhabited island.
Repatriation could only happen “when safe and sustainable conditions exist in Myanmar”, visiting UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said.
She dismissed the suggestion that the Rohingya camps could become a “new Gaza”, but Dhaka is now increasingly aware of the risks that a large, long-term and deprived refugee population could present.
Around 50% of the almost one million people in the camps are under 18.
Young people with no prospects -- they are not allowed to leave the camps -- also provide rich pickings for human traffickers who promise a boat ride leading to a better life elsewhere.
All the children “could be ticking time bombs”, Rahman said. “Growing up in a camp without education, hope and dreams; what monsters they may turn into, we don’t know.” — AFP
