BANGLADESH: After Ajib Bahar’s six-month-old son fell sick last year in Myanmar’s war-torn Rakhine state, the 38-year-old Rohingya mother said she had no medicine or food to give him. The boy died in her arms.
“My children cried all night from hunger. I boiled grass and gave it to them just to keep them quiet,” Bahar said from a refugee camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, where she and her family sought safety after fleeing violence and starvation in Myanmar.
Rakhine state, a western coastal region that has suffered years of conflict and ethnic violence mostly targeting the Rohingya Muslim minority, is now facing an “alarming” hunger crisis due to a “deadly combination of conflict, blockades, and funding cuts,” according to the United Nations’ World Food Programme.
At a high-level UN conference in New York on Myanmar’s minority groups on Tuesday, the United States and Britain announced that they would provide $96 million in further assistance to support the Bangladesh refugee camps that house over a million Rohingya who fled Rakhine.
Myanmar has been in crisis since the military seized power in 2021 and brutally cracked down on protests, prompting a nationwide armed uprising and re-igniting a simmering conflict in Rakhine between the junta and a powerful armed group, the Arakan Army.
