Two speakers send the Islamic call to prayer sailing across Thet Kal Pyin, a refugee camp less than 100 km from Myanmar\u2019s border with Bangladesh. The call wafts over several neat rows of large, low-slung buildings with blue roofs. Several families live in each structure, and the camp is home to around 5,000 people. Most, if not all, belong to the Rohingya ethnic group, a persecuted Muslim minority.<\/p>\n
In response to the prayer call, bearded men in sandals emerge into the gathering dusk. They file into a thatched pavilion that serves as their makeshift mosque. At its entrance, they wash their hands and remove their shoes. Then, as darkness falls, they crouch on wicker mats to pray.<\/p>\n
Three years ago, the camp was created in the aftermath of deadly riots in the nearby port city of Sittwe. The violence resulted from a flare-up in long-running tensions between the Rohingya and the Rakhine, a Buddhist ethnic group. The Rakhine are an ethnic minority in Myanmar, where the Burmese are by far the dominant ethnic group. Yet they are dominant in Rakhine State, on Myanmar’s western coast, and many of them resent the Rohingya as intruders.<\/p>\n
Human rights groups say that for decades, the Myanmar government has effectively refused to grant citizenship to more than one million Rohingya; it refers to them as \u2018Bengali\u2019 and has proposed citizenship rules that advocacy groups say have forced many Rohingya to leave the country. Rohingya suffered disproportionately in the violence of 2012, and about 140,000 of them were later relocated to the refugee camps (including Thet Kal Pyin) that now ring Sittwe\u2019s rural outskirts.<\/p>\n