Makeshift homes at a Rohingya refugee camp in Ukhia in Bangladesh’s southeastern Cox’s Bazar district. Image used for representative purpose only.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Gunmen in Bangladesh have killed a teacher and a student in a Rohingya refugee camp for refusing to return to Myanmar to fight, their parents said on May 30.

Hundreds of Rohingya boys and young men have been seized from refugee camps in Bangladesh, where they had sought safety after Myanmar’s military drove about 750,000 members of the persecuted Muslim minority out of the country in 2017.

Now Rohingya militants working with the Myanmar junta are recruiting the refugees, according to camp residents, UN reports and analysts.

The militants say their fellow Rohingya need to ally with Myanmar’s army — the same forces who drove them into exile — to face a common enemy in another Myanmar rebel force, the Arakan Army (AA).

Police said the two men, student Nur Absar, 22, and teacher Nur Faisal, 21, were killed by “unknown assailants” in Kutupalong camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district.

“One died on the spot, another died in hospital,” said Arefin Jewel, a police spokesman in Kutupalong.

“We are investigating whether it is a case of forced recruitment”.

But Faisal’s father blamed the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO).

“The RSO went to my son’s school and wanted to recruit him,” Zakir Ahmed, 45, told AFP. “My son refused.”

Abduction, kidnapping and coercion

Ahmed said his son had also been working as a community guard to stop the gunmen who prowled the camps to press-gang youths.

“He was also working as a night guard to save other young Rohingya from forced recruitment by armed groups,” he said.

“RSO gunmen shot them. RSO killed my son.”

Aman Ullah, 40, the father of student Nur Absar, also blamed the RSO.

“They tried to recruit him,” Ullah said. “They have become the name of terror here”.

Thomas Kean from the International Crisis Group think-tank told AFP the “tragic killings only highlight the growing threat that refugees face from Rohingya armed groups”.

“For years now the groups have largely been allowed to operate with impunity, and refugees are really at breaking point,” he added.

Kean said his research showed that since March “thousands of refugees” had been recruited by Rohingya armed groups and sent to Myanmar.

The Rohingya fighters are battling alongside Myanmar’s regular army in Rakhine State.

They are fighting forces including the AA, which says it wants greater autonomy for the ethnic Rakhine population in the state, which is also home to around 600,000 Rohingya.

This month the AA took control of Buthidaung, a Rohingya-majority town not far from Bangladesh.

Several Rohingya diaspora groups claimed that fighters forced Rohingya to flee, then looted and burned their homes – claims the AA called “propaganda”.

According to a report by the United Nations refugee agency seen by AFP, at least 1,870 refugees — more than a quarter of them children or youths — were recruited into the armed groups during a two-month period between March and May.

More than three-quarters were taken by force, the U.N. report said, including by “abduction, kidnapping and coercion”.

The U.N. children’s fund said it was “appalled” by the attack.

“UNICEF strongly condemns any attack against schools… which must always be a safe space for children, and for the staff delivering this essential service,” country chief Sheldon Yett said.

A powerful armed ethnic group in Myanmar said on Sunday it had won control over a town in the western state of Rakhine after weeks of fighting, denying accusations it had targeted members of the Muslim-minority Rohingya during the offensive.

Khine Thu Kha, a spokesman for the Arakan Army (AA), said its soldiers had taken Buthidaung near Myanmar’s border with Bangladesh, marking another battlefield defeat for the ruling junta that is fighting opposition groups on multiple fronts.

“We have conquered all the bases in Buthidaung and also took over the town yesterday,” Khine Thu Kha told Reuters by telephone.

Some Rohingya activists accuse the AA of targeting the community during the assault on Buthidaung and surrounding areas, forcing many of them to flee for safety.

“AA troops came into downtown, forced the people to leave their homes and started torching houses,” Nay San Lwin, co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition advocacy group told Reuters, based on what he said were eyewitness accounts.

“While the town was burning, I spoke with several people I have known and trusted for years. They all testified that the arson attack was done by the AA.”

Reuters could not independently verify the conflicting accounts. A junta spokesman did not respond to a call seeking comment.

Rohingya have faced persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar for decades. After escaping a military-led crackdown in 2017, nearly a million of them live crammed into refugee camps in Bangladesh’s border district of Cox’s Bazar.

Junta’s Biggest Challenge

Myanmar has been in turmoil since a 2021 military coup, which led to the rise of the resistance fighting alongside long-established ethnic minority rebel groups.

The conflict has escalated since October, when an alliance of ethnic armies including the AA launched a major offensive near the Chinese border, taking swathes of territory from the better-armed junta and presenting its biggest challenge since taking power.

The junta has lost control of around half its 5,280 military positions, including outposts, bases and headquarters, according to one estimate.

The AA’s Khine Thu Kha said junta aircraft and Muslim insurgent groups aligned with the military had set fire to parts of Buthidaung, which had a population of around 55,000 people, according to the most recent government census available, from 2014.

“The burning of Buthidaung is due to the air strikes from the junta’s jet fighter before our troops entered the town,” he said.

Aung Kyaw Moe, a Rohingya civil society activist and a deputy minister in Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government, said Rohingya residents had been asked by the AA to leave Buthidaung but had responded that they had nowhere to go, leaving them trapped when the offensive occurred.

“Since about 10 p.m. last night up to this early morning, Buthidaung town had been burning and now only ashes remain,” he told Reuters.

Rohingya residents fled to the field and there may casualties, he said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

File photo of Myanmar’s Rakhine state showing Rohingya refugees gathering behind a barbed-wire fence in a temporary settlement setup.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Intense fighting in Myanmar’s Rakhine State poses a grave threat to civilians, the United Nations warned on April 19, as it urged international pressure to prevent more “horrendous persecution” of ethnic Rohingya.

U.N. human rights chief Volker Turk said clashes between the military and the Arakan Army, alongside tensions being fuelled between the Rohingya and ethnic Rakhine communities, meant there was a serious risk of a repeat of previous atrocities.

Also read: The Myanmar conflict is a regional problem

“The alarm bells are ringing, and we must not allow there to be a repeat of the past,” Turk said in a statement.

More than one million Rohingya fled Myanmar’s Rakhine state to refugee camps in Bangladesh in 2017 after a military clampdown on the Muslim group in which many were killed.

Thousands still risk their lives each year trying to get away from Myanmar on flimsy boats trying to get to Malaysia or Indonesia.

“Countries with influence on the Myanmar military and armed groups involved must act now to protect all civilians in Rakhine state and prevent another episode of horrendous persecution of the Rohingya,” Turk said.

Clashes have rocked Rakhine state again since the Arakan Army attacked security forces in November, ending a ceasefire that had largely held since the military’s 2021 coup.

The AA is one of several armed ethnic minority groups in Myanmar’s border regions.

Turk’s office said that since the informal ceasefire broke down, 15 of Rakhine’s 17 townships had been affected by fighting, resulting in hundreds of deaths and injuries, and taking the number of displaced to well over 300,000.

“Rakhine state has once again become a battleground involving multiple actors, and civilians are paying a heavy price, with Rohingya at particular risk,” said Turk, the UN high commissioner for human rights.

“What is particularly disturbing is that whereas in 2017, the Rohingya were targeted by one group, they are now trapped between two armed factions who have a track record of killing them. We must not allow the Rohingya to be targeted again.”

Myanmar’s ruling junta came to power in the February 2021 coup that ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government, ending a 10-year experiment with democracy and plunging the Southeast Asian nation into bloody turmoil.

The junta is struggling to crush resistance to its rule by long-established ethnic rebel groups and newer pro-democracy forces.

Rohingya refugees stand on a capsized boat before being rescued, in the waters of West Aceh, Indonesia, March 21, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

An Indonesian search-and-rescue ship located a capsized wooden boat that had been carrying dozens of Rohingya Muslim refugees and began pulling survivors who had been standing on its hull to safety on March 21.

An AP photographer aboard the rescue ship said 10 people had been taken aboard local fishing boats and another 59 were being saved by the Indonesian craft.

Men, women and children, weak and soaked from the night’s rain, wept as the rescue operation got under way and people were taken aboard a rubber dinghy to the rescue boat.

New Delhi:

As a developing country that is also the world’s most populated, India needs to prioritise its own citizens, the Centre has told the Supreme Court, asserting that the illegal migration of and stay and Rohingya refugees have serious ramifications for national security.

The affidavit filed yesterday was in response to a petition seeking a direction to the Centre to release Rohingya refugees put in detention for alleged violation of the Foreigners Act.

The Rohingya refugees, most of them Muslims, have fled ethnic violence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar and entered India, Bangladesh and other countries illegally.

The Rohingya refugees are now at the centre of a fresh political row over the Centre’s implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) to offer citizenship to non-Muslim migrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, who fled religious persecution in these countries and entered India before 2015. Hitting back at the Opposition for raising the question of national security in connection with the implementation of CAA, Union Home Minister Amit Shah has questioned why Opposition leaders are not opposing Rohingya’s entry.

In its affidavit, the Centre has said India is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and to the protocol relating to the Status of Refugees, 1967. Therefore, whether or not any class of persons are to be recognised as refugees is a “pure policy decision”, it has said.

“Effectively, the prayers therein are seeking to provide illegal Rohingya migrants with the right to reside within the territory of India, which is expressly against Article 19 (freedom of speech and expression). It is submitted that Article 19 is limited in its application only to citizens and cannot be extended to apply to foreigners,” it said.

The Centre has also said no community can be granted refugee status outside the legislative framework and such a declaration cannot be made by a judicial order.

“As a developing country with the largest population in the world and with limited resources, priority is required to be given to the country’s own citizens. Therefore, there cannot be any blanket acceptance of foreigners as refugees especially where the vast majority of such foreigners have entered the country illegally,” it said.

The Centre has cited a 2005 verdict of the Supreme Court to stress the dangers of unchecked immigration. “It is submitted that continuance of Rohingyas’ illegal migration into India and their continued stay in India, apart from being absolutely illegal, is found to be having serious national security ramifications and has serious security threats,” it said.

The Centre’s affidavit also pointed out that India has unfenced borders with Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar etc. and an easily navigable sea route with Pakistan as well as Sri Lanka, making it vulnerable to a continuous threat of an influx of illegal migration and resultant problems arising therefrom.

“The grant of any status qua immigration to persons or a class of persons coming from a particular country is not just a national issue but essentially an outcome of political decisions of the State in respect of maintaining its foreign relations with the State in question or with any other foreign nations. Such a decision is often a product of complex interplay of diverse factors such as social, economic, cultural and often extra-legal or extra judicial considerations. In light of the above, prayers in the nature of the present which seek to alter the existing regime are not maintainable,” it said.

“Once it is accepted that Rohingyas are illegal migrants, the provisions of the Foreigners Act, 1946 would apply to them in full force,” it said, adding that the prayer in the petition would essentially amount to putting the Foreigners Act itself in abeyance.

“The prayer of the petitioner amounts to re-writing of the statute or directing the Parliament to frame a law in a particular manner which is wholly beyond the powers of judicial review. It is trite law that the courts cannot direct Parliament to make a law or to legislate in a particular way,” the affidavit said.

The UN’s International Organisation for Migration said the biggest increase in deaths was on the Mediterranean Sea. File
| Photo Credit: AP

A total of 8,565 migrants died on land and sea routes worldwide last year, the U.N. migration agency said March 6, a record high since it began tallying deaths a decade ago.

The International Organisation for Migration said the biggest increase in deaths last year was on the treacherous Mediterranean Sea crossing, to 3,129 from 2,411 in 2022. However, that was well below the record 5,136 deaths recorded in the Mediterranean in 2016 as huge numbers of Syrians, Afghans and others fled conflicts toward Europe.

IOM said the total number of deaths among migrants in 2023 was nearly 20% more than in 2022. It said most of the deaths last year, about 3,700, came from drowning.

The Geneva-based migration agency cautioned that the figures likely underestimate the real toll, and factors such as improved data collection methods play a part in its calculations.

“Every single one of them is a terrible human tragedy that reverberates through families and communities for years to come,” IOM Deputy Director General Ugochi Daniels said in a statement.

Rise in deaths in Asia, Africa

Overall, the biggest jump in deaths in recent years was in Asia, where more than 2,000 migrants died compared to an annual average of under 1,000 since 2014. IOM said 2,138 migrants died in Asia last year, 68 more than in 2022.

The rise in Asia last year was primarily because of increased deaths among Afghans fleeing to places like neighbouring Iran and among Rohingya refugees on maritime routes, IOM spokesperson Jorge Galindo said in an email.

IOM said a record number of deaths also occurred in Africa last year — 1,866 — mostly in the Sahara Desert and along the sea route to the Canary Islands.

The agency cited difficulties in data collection in remote areas, such as in the dangerous “Darien Gap” in Panama, where many migrants pass from South America on their way north.

IOM’s “Missing Migrants” project, which tallies the figures, was set up in 2014 after a surge in deaths in the Mediterranean and an influx of migrants on the Italian island of Lampedusa off Tunisia.