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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two dozen Rohingya departed for the United States on Thursday where they will be allowed to live, officials with Bangladesh’s foreign ministry and repatriation office announced,
The Bangladesh and Myanmar border police forces have agreed to work jointly to prevent illegal crossings by militants along the countries’ common frontier, the chief of the Bangladeshi border guard said Tuesday.
U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet advised Rohingya to wait for repatriation because the present situation in Myanmar’s Rakhine state is not stable, according to refugees who met with her at camps in southeastern Bangladesh on Tuesday