Article D. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people trapped in stateless limbo ς ς By DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS Tuesday, 20 August 2019 ‘ςςTwo years after a campaign of targeted violence in Myanmar, little has changed for those uproote.’ Sitting in a teashop in Kutupalong, the massive refugee megacamp in Bangladesh where hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people have settled after fleeing targeted violence in neighboring Myanmar, Bibi Jan tugs on her sleeve. She’s covering up scars inflicted in August 2017, during the events that forced her to flee her homeland: she was stabbed, her two brothers were killed, and her village was razed to the ground. The Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority from Myanmar’s Rakhine state, have been subject to decades of persecution and state exclusion. Two years ago, starting on August 25, 2017, news of Myanmar’s campaign of targeted violence against the Rohingya dominated the headlines. Since then, little progress has been made to fully address the Rohingya refugee crisis, including issues regarding the lack of legal status for those displaced in the region and the underlying causes of discrimination against the community in Myanmar. To date no meaningful solutions have been offered to Bangladesh 2017 © Pablo Tosco the Rohingya people, who have been pushed to the margins of society in virtually all of the countries to which they have fled. In Bangladesh, more than 912,000 Rohingya still live in the same basic bamboo structures as when they first arrived. They face travel and work restrictions, and remain wholly reliant on humanitarian aid. Many of the illnesses Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams treat at our clinics in Cox’s Bazar are a result of the poor living conditions that the Rohingya endure, with poor access to clean latrines and water. We have provided more than 1.3 million medical consultations from August 2017 to June 2019, and continue to treat tens of thousands of patients a month. With Rohingya children unable to access formal education, future generations are deprived of an opportunity to improve their situation. “I want to send my children to school, but I don’t have enough money and we can’t Bangladesh 2019 © Dalila Mahdawi/MSF leave the camp. It’s difficult to plan a future for our children,” says Bibi Jan. “If we worked, we wouldn’t need rations. We could survive on our own.” The situation facing Rohingya people who are still in Myanmar is similarly bleak. In 1982, a citizenship law rendered the Rohingya effectively stateless, and in recent years they have been stripped of even more of their rights, ranging from civic inclusion to education, marriage, and family planning rights to freedom of movement and access to health care. 82