Displaced Rohingya yearn to return to normal lives but anti-Muslim sentiment runs high in Myanmar’s Rakhine state

Four years after fleeing religious riots that emptied her Muslim Rohingya neighbourhood in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, Myee Shay yearns for the trappings of a normal life: a job, a school for her children and the chance to buy her own food. But the 35-year-old, like tens of thousands of others displaced by the violence, remains stuck in a displacement camp, unable to return home in a region ruptured by conflict between Muslims and a majority-Buddhist population.

“We eat when we get our quota,” said Myee Shay, a mother of four, referring to monthly rations of food, mostly rice, that families receive from aid groups in the camps. “If we do not get it, we cannot eat.”

She spoke while preparing plant stalks collected from the outskirts of the Thet Kae Pyin camp – an attempt to enrich the meagre meals and break the tedium of days spent waiting for change that never seems to come.

Flooded during the monsoon and dust-choked in the hot season, the camps are clustered on the outskirts of the state capital Sittwe. They mostly hold Rohingya, a stateless group that became the target of riots after long-running discrimination against Muslims boiled over in 2012 – although several thousand ethnic Rakhine Buddhists also lost their homes in the violence. That bloodshed left more than 100 people dead and saw thousands of homes torched by mobs.

Anti-Muslim sentiment still runs high in the impoverished region, fanned by hardline Buddhist nationalists who revile the Rohingya and are viscerally opposed to any move to grant them citizenship. They insist the roughly 1 million strong group are intruders from neighbouring Bangladesh, even though many can trace their ancestry in Myanmar back generations.

Today, the state is effectively segregated on religious grounds, with no major moves to see the displaced return home.