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.
Bangladesh-based Rohingya who were taken to Myanmar’s Rakhine state Friday to see preparations for refugee repatriation said they wouldn’t return without citizenship rights, recognition of their Rohingya identity, and a guarantee that they could resettle in their home villages.
Bangladesh is moving full steam ahead with a China-backed project to begin repatriating Rohingya to Myanmar, a plan that Human Rights Watch warned would put the lives of the persecuted refugees at “grave risk.”
Nearly 130 Rohingya Muslims leaving Myanmar for Malaysia by boat were arrested by the junta’s navy in waters off Mon state on Sunday after brokers revealed information about them to local villagers.
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.
Malaysia has deported 114 Muslim Myanmar nationals who will be persecuted by the ruling military when they return, although they are not Rohingya, their lawyer said Thursday.