Nget Chaung, a camp for displaced people on a marginal smudge of low-lying coastland in western Myanmar, is not a place anyone would want to call home.

"No-one should have to live in the conditions that we see in Nget Chaung," said Pierre Peron, spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Myanmar.

Those conditions, said a humanitarian worker familiar with the camp, "are really the worst."

"The location is flooded much of the time. You have to go through the dirty water to reach your own shelter," said the aid worker, who asked not to be named due to local sensitivities around humanitarian teams operating in the state.

The shelters, many of which were built to last six months but have now been occupied for two years, are "in very bad condition," she said. "There's no livelihood, no opportunity at all."

Nonetheless, this desperate patch of coastal plain is home to some 6,000 Rohingya Muslims, thousands of them children. Most have been in the camp, subsisting in wretched conditions, since their villages were destroyed in a frenzy of mob violence two years ago.

Trapped in 'internment camps'

Across Rakhine state, an impoverished region of some 3.2 million in Myanmar's remote west, more than 130,000 other displaced people are trapped in 67 similar camps, the majority of them de facto stateless Muslims, living under apartheid-like conditions. Most have been there since October 2012, following waves of intercommunal violence that left hundreds dead.

With the camps under guard, and inhabitants forbidden to leave of their own volition -- Minister of Information Ye Htut told CNN they were only allowed to leave under police escort, "to prevent further clashes and (ensure) their safety" -- the settlements "have essentially become internment camps" for about 140,000 people, according to a recent report by the International Crisis Group.

Wai Wai Nu, a Rohingya Muslim activist, has no hesitation in labeling them concentration camps. "The people there are stripped of their human rights, left with no physical, mental or food security," she said. "They are depressed, in pain, hopeless."

The U.N.'s Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, has noted "disturbing reports of deaths in camps owing to lack of access to emergency medical assistance and owing to preventable, chronic or pregnancy-related conditions."

When those outside the camps, but confined to their isolated villages by security forces, are counted, the number of Muslims in the state subject to restrictions on movement totals in the hundreds of thousands. It's a situation which "severely compromises their basic rights to food, health, education and livelihoods," said Peron.

"Without freedom of movement, people simply cannot rebuild their lives, and continue to rely on international humanitarian aid."

(CNN)