10K Rohingya at border as exodus swells again
Sharif re-elected party chief
YANGON, Oct 3, (Agencies): More than 10,000 Rohingya have massed near a crossing point with Bangladesh, Myanmar media said Tuesday, as an exodus continues to swell with food supplies low and hostility towards them surging.
The ongoing flight, that has already seen over 500,000 Rohingya enter Bangladesh since last month, casts doubt on the practicality of a Myanmar proposal aired Monday to begin repatriation of the Muslim minority.
Rakhine state has been emptied of half of its Rohingya population in weeks, and more are on the move as insecurity presses them to leave villages which have so far been spared the worst of the communal violence to rip through the state. Over “10,000 Muslims are arriving at the western grove between Letphwekya and Kwunthpin village to emigrate to the neighbouring country,” the state-backed Global new Light of Myanmar reported Tuesday.
Myanmar’s government refuses to recognise the Rohingya as a distinct ethnic group, instead calling them “Muslims” or “Bengalis” — code for illegal migrants.
Authorities have tried to reassure fleeing Rohingya that they are now safe in Rakhine, the report added, but they want to leave “of their own accord.”
Villagers are running short on food, while fear in ethnic Rakhine-majority areas has been kindled by the violence and reports of death threats by their Buddhist neighbours.
On occasions when the Rohingya village chief decides to leave, the whole hamlet will follow, emptying a village “in just a few hours.”
On Monday, Myanmar’s Minister of the Office of State Counselor, Kyaw Tint Swe, told Bangladesh his country was ready to return refugees subject to a verification process agreed in the early 1990s by the neighbours.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh has deployed secret police in the burgeoning refugee camps near its border with Myanmar, where Rohingya claiming to be members of a militant group say they have found fertile ground for recruitment.
Authorities in Bangladesh, which was already grappling with its own Islamist militancy problem before the latest mass influx of Rohingya refugees, have repeatedly said there are no extremists among the new arrivals.
But inside the camps are a number of self-proclaimed members of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), the group behind the August 25 attacks on police posts in Myanmar that sparked a military crackdown that the UN has likened to ethnic cleansing. Capitalising on anger over the unrest that has forced half a million Rohingya Muslims to flee to squalid camps in Bangladesh, recruiters claim to have enlisted hundreds willing to fight back in Myanmar, where the minority faced decades of persecution.
Those allegations are hard to verify. But authorities in Bangladesh have stepped up surveillance of the border area in recent weeks.