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.
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.
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.
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