Twenty-six members of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya minority drowned when their boat capsized as they were trying to flee to Bangladesh, witnesses said, an accident likely to compound fears that the largely Muslim minority is facing a new round of genocide.
Approximately 5,000 minority Rohingya Muslims attempting to flee from this week’s fighting in western Myanmar have been waiting for several days near the Naf River for an opportunity to cross into Bangladesh, residents said.
A court in Indonesia’s Aceh province sentenced three Rohingya to years in prison Wednesday for smuggling more than 100 Rohingya refugees in December, although one of the defendants argued that he and the others were victims seeking shelter.
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.
At least 25 ethnic Rohingya civilians were killed and thousands forced to flee their homes amid junta airstrikes and heavy artillery over the weekend in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, according to residents.
Although three-quarters of migrants surveyed in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand said they suffered some type of abuse while leaving their homelands via people-smuggling networks, nearly half said they would do it again, the United Nations said in a report released Tuesday.
Indonesian search-and-rescue officials said Monday they had recovered the bodies of 11 Rohingya refugees, mostly women, who were on a boat that capsized off the coast of Aceh province last week.
Videos have emerged on social media in recent days that appear to show junta personnel providing military training to ethnic Muslim Rohingyas at a site in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, amid reports of forced recruitment around the country.
More than a million Rohingya Muslims are thought to have fled Myanmar in successive waves, according to U.N. estimates. While most made their way to neighboring Bangladesh,some have taken boats to Indonesia, where authorities are now considering to resettle them on a former refugee island.
Myanmar’s junta has pledged to build 20 villages as part of a plan to repatriate thousands of Muslim Rohingya who fled a crackdown to neighboring Bangladesh, but members of the ethnic group say they don’t trust the regime and won’t accept the offer.