Rohingya Muslims barred from voting in Myanmar elections

Rohingya Muslims will be deprived of a vote in Myanmar’s second democratic election – leading the United Nations to warn that the polls will not be free or fair.

Mohammad Yusuf voted in almost every Myanmar election from 1974 until 2010 – the last time ethnic Rohingya were allowed to vote in the country he still calls home after fleeing three years ago in the wake of a brutal military offensive.

“Not being able to vote makes me feel really sad. It feels as though we are dead and we don’t matter,” Yusuf, 65, who lives in the world’s largest refugee settlement in Bangladesh, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

Myanmar does not recognise the Rohingya as an Indigenous ethnic group, deriding them as illegal “Bengalis” from Bangladesh, although the community trace their history in Myanmar back for centuries, AlJazeera reported.