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’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.
More than 740,000 Rohingya fled to southeastern Bangladesh from Myanmar after government security forces launched a brutal crackdown in August 2017 in the wake of deadly attacks by Rohingya insurgents on police and army posts in Rakhine state
A massive fire broke out early Tuesday in an overcrowded camp that houses nearly 1 million Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar district in southern Bangladesh.
The defendants, who include officer-level servicemen, have been detained at local battalions, he said, but declined to give the exact number of soldiers being tried
Myanmar’s civilian government and powerful military have rejected the findings of U.N. and other independent investigations of the events of August 2017 and have done little to hold anyone accountable for the violent campaign to expel the Rohingya