YANGON: Myanmar’s suffocating controls over its Rohingya population amount to “apartheid”, Amnesty International said on Tuesday in a probe into the root causes of a crisis that has sent 620,000 refugees fleeing to Bangladesh.

Scenes of dispossessed Rohingya in Bangladeshi camps have provoked outrage around the world, as people who have escaped Rakhine state since August recount tales of murder, rape and arson at the hands of Myanmar troops.

Myanmar and Bangla­desh have agreed in principle to repatriate some Rohingya but disagree over the details, with Myanmar’s army chief saying last week it was impossible to accept the number of refugees proposed by Dhaka.

The Amnesty report deta­ils how years of persecution have led to the current crisis.

A years-long “state-sponsored” campaign has rest­ric­ted virtually all aspects of Rohingyas’ lives, the Amnes­­ty study says, confining the Muslim minority to a “ghetto-like” existence in the mainly Buddhist country.

The 100-page report, based on two years of research, says the web of controls meet the legal standard of the “crime against humanity of apartheid”.

Published in Dawn, November 22nd, 2017