AP, Myanmar :
International relief organizations forced to flee western Myanmar after being targeted by Buddhist mobs say it will be almost impossible to return without strong diplomatic pressure on the government to depoliticize the distribution of aid: Until then, they say, the lives of more than 140,000 Rohingya Muslims in overcrowded, dirty camps will be at risk.
In the next two weeks food stocks will run out and at least 20,000 people will be without clean water, according to humanitarian aid workers who gathered with colleagues in the country’s main city of Yangon on Monday to discuss the spiraling crisis.
The heath situation is even more dire, they said, with almost no life-saving services such as emergency hospital referrals.
“It’s not that we don’t want to go back, we can’t,” said one of the aid workers, who like others at the small, informal meeting asked not to be identified because he was worried about the safety of the local staff who stayed in Rakhine state.
Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist nation of 60 million people, only recently emerged from a half-century of brutal military rule. Nascent democratic reforms under a nominally civilian government have generated optimism and brought billions of dollars from international donors – but a violent strain of religious extremism is threatening the progress.
In the past two years, Buddhist mobs torched and pillaged Muslim neighborhoods, killing up to 280 people and forcing another 140,000 from their homes, most of them Rohingya on the outskirts of Rakhine’s state capital, Sittwe.
