Myanmar Muslim insurgents have pressed about 500 Rohingya refugees in camps in Bangladesh to join the war in their homeland where fighting between rival factions has intensified sharply in recent weeks, refugees told Radio Free Asia.
Nearly two-thirds of Rohingya respondents have reported that moving around in Bangladesh refugee camps is more difficult than what they encountered in Myanmar, the country they were forced to flee, a youth advocacy group said in a study released Friday.
Bangladesh is not doing enough to protect Rohingya from increasing violence by armed groups and criminal gangs operating in the refugee camps near the country’s border with Myanmar, Human Rights Watch said on Thursday.
At least five members of rival Rohingya militant groups were killed in a gunfight Friday at a refugee camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district, police and other sources said.
Bangladesh has seen a spike in dengue cases and deaths in less than a month, according to government health figures released on Monday that did not include infections in Rohingya refugee camps, where cases of the mosquito-borne disease have been climbing as well.
Myanmar’s junta is planning 15 new villages with 750 plots of farmable land in Rakhine state as part of a pilot program that would see 1,500 ethnic Rohingyas repatriated from refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh next month.
The United Nations refugee agency on Wednesday said conditions in Myanmar’s Rakhine state were not favorable for the safe return of 1,000 Rohingya from Bangladesh whom Myanmar wants to repatriate under a China-mediated program.
Bangladesh inspectors are investigating the cause of a massive fire at a Cox’s Bazar camp that destroyed about 2,000 makeshift homes and left 12,000 homeless over the weekend, an official said Monday.
The United Nations World Food Program announced on Friday that it will cut food aid to Bangladesh’s Rohingya starting in March because of funding shortfalls and despite warnings from its own experts that malnutrition is pervasive in the refugee camps.
Starting in 2023, UNICEF plans to extend a pilot program to educate Rohingya children at upper grade levels who are living at refugee camps in Bangladesh and have been deprived of schooling for years, officials said.