Last week, the U.N. refugee agency said that while details remained unclear, it had collected reports from family members and others about two separate boat tragedies on May 9 and May 10 in which 427 people may have died. It said both boats left from Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where about 1 million Rohingya shelter in camps.

Twenty-six Rohingya diaspora groups, including the U.K.-based Burmese Rohingya Organization, co-signed Thursday’s statement that said just 87 people had survived the two incidents. It added authorities had intercepted a third vessel with 188 people aboard as it attempted to leave Myanmar on May 18.

“These back-to-back disasters are the worst loss of Rohingya lives at sea this year, and they expose the deadly consequences of regional inaction and global neglect,” the statement said, adding that most of those on board were Rohingya who had already been displaced from their homes in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State.

“They were fleeing a growing campaign of widespread violence by the Arakan Army, amounting to a continuation of the ethnic cleansing first started by the Burmese military,” the statement said, referring to a rebel group that has seized control of most of Rakhine state from the Myanmar military.

“Those confined to displacement camps in Burmese military-controlled zones are starving, children are suffering from acute malnutrition, and many families are completely without food,” the statement said.

Most Rohingya are from Rakhine state and most are stateless, regarded as migrants from South Asia and not one of the ethnic groups classified as indigenous in Buddhist-majority Myanmar’s constitution.

(Zahlul Akbar/AFP)

About 750,000 Rohingya fled a violent Myanmar military clearance campaign in Rakhine in 2017 and crossed into Bangladesh. The U.S. government determined the killings and rapes by the military amounted to genocide.

Now each year, thousands of Rohingya attempt to leave Bangladesh and Myanmar aboard rickety vessels for other destinations in Southeast Asia. Reports of boats sinking and mass fatalities are common.

The Arakan Army, consisting Buddhist ethnic Rakhine people, has also been implicated in serious rights abuses against Rohingya, human rights groups say, although the AA denies it.

In recent years, the AA’s position on the persecuted Muslim minority has vacillated. After the 2021 coup in Myanmar when the military seized power from a civilian government, the AA evinced a moderate and inclusive position on the Rohingya. But it has since been accused of mass killings after a campaign by the Myanmar junta to recruit Rohingya men, sometimes forcibly, into militias to fight the AA.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.

DHAKA, Bangladesh — The United Nations food agency said it managed to avoid drastic food aid cuts to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh in the face of concerns that their monthly rations would be reduced by more than half.

Earlier this month, the U.N.’s World Food Program, or WFP, said it might be forced to reduce the monthly rations for the over 1 million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, from US$12.50 per person to $6, beginning in April.

Instead, the ration for Rohingya living in camps in and around Cox’s Bazar is to be set at $12, while the ration for those living in Bhashan Char, an island in the Bay of Bengal, would be adjusted to $13, a WFP official told BenarNews on Thursday.

The Bangladesh government has encouraged Rohingya to relocate to Bhashan Char, in a bid to alleviate overcrowded conditions at the 33 camps in the Cox’ s Bazar region. Since 2021, about 35,000 refugees have relocated to the island, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

On Thursday, the United States announced it would give millions in fresh funding through the WFP.

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“The United States is providing $73 million in new assistance for Rohingya refugees,” U.S. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce said in a post on X. “This food and nutrition support through @WFP will provide critically needed food and nutrition assistance for more than 1 million people.

“It is important that our international partners engage with sharing the burden with life-saving assistance such as this.”

Since 2017, Washington has been the biggest aid donor to the Rohingya refugees, contributing nearly $2.4 billion, according to the State Department.

The administration of interim Bangladesh leader Muhammad Yunus thanked the American government for the influx of funds.

More is needed

The latest plight of the Rohingya came to light two weeks ago when the head of the United Nations appealed to the international community for help after the WFP had announced the planned food rations cuts.

“I can promise that we’ll do everything to avoid it [a humanitarian crisis], and I will be talking to all the countries in the world that can support us in order to make sure that funds are made available,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said during his first trip to the refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh in nearly seven years.

A WFP official welcomed the news on Friday while warning that more was needed.

“While April ration cuts are averted, given the immense needs, we still need continued funding support or we will soon run out of funds again,” said Kun Li, WFP’s head of communication and advocacy in Asia and the Pacific.

Human rights advocates also expressed concerns about the ongoing plight of the Rohingya, a stateless Muslim minority group, many of whom were forced from their homes in Myanmar’s Rakhine state following the August 2017 crackdown by government forces.

(Abdur Rahman/BenarNews)

Last-minute support from donors had prevented “a worst-case scenario,” said Daniel Sullivan, the director for Africa, Asia and the Middle East at Refugees International.

“Renewed donor funds, including $73 million for WFP announced by the United States, will maintain rations at near the same levels,” he said in a statement. “However, broader aid cuts are already negatively affecting refugees and we remain deeply concerned that failure to renew more than minimal aid will lead to increased hunger, disease and avoidable deaths.”

A human rights advocate who lived in a Rohingya camp for six years spoke out about the plight of the refugees.

“I appreciate and thank the United States for stepping in to respond to the food reduction crisis and request other donor countries to continue funding the much-needed lifesaving assistance programs in the camps,” Refugees International Fellow Lucky Karim said in a statement.

“As past smaller cuts have shown, the drastic cut in rations would have accelerated malnutrition, disease, and negative coping mechanisms, including child marriage and human smuggling,” she said.

Back in Cox’s Bazar, a Rohingya expressed relief.

“We were worried, but now relieved,” Mohammad Nur, a leader of the Jadimura camp in the Teknaf sub-district, told BenarNews. “How can a person live with only $6?”

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Kamran Reza Chowdhury for BenarNews.

Ataullah Abu Jununi, leader of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA, was arrested on Tuesday at an apartment near Dhaka where he had been staying for four months.

The Rapid Action Battalion, an elite security force, said it took him into custody on suspicion of terrorism and illegal entry. Nine suspected accomplices were also arrested that day from northern Mymensingh district, RAB said.

Mohammad Shahinur Alom, the officer-in-charge of Siddhirganj police station, said Ataullah and his accomplices were being interrogated for 10 days under a court order.

“He is behaving in a very modest way. He has yet to give any significant information. Let us see what happens in the next several days,” Shahinur Alom told RFA affiliate BenarNews on Friday.

Ataullah’s arrest occurred the same day that Southeast Asian NGO Fortify Rights released a 76-page report alleging that ARSA and another group had committed potential war crimes through killing, abducting and torturing Rohingya who were sheltering at refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh.

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The report also alleges that ARSA under Ataullah’s leadership carried out coordinated attacks on government security outposts in Myanmar in August 2017, prompting the Myanmar military and Buddhist vigilante groups to launch a brutal offensive against the entire Rohingya population in Rakhine state.

The crackdown forced about 740,000 to flee to the Bangladesh camps, which are home to about 1 million refugees.

“As the commander-in-chief of ARSA, Ataullah is responsible for ordering and overseeing egregious violations of international law, including targeted killings, abductions, and the torture of Rohingya civilians,” Fortify Rights CEO Matthew Smith said in a news release on Thursday, after Ataullah was arrested.

“This is a critical moment. Bangladesh has taken the important step of arresting Ataullah and others, and we encourage the ICC prosecutor to seek an arrest warrant for Ataullah to prosecute him in The Hague,” Smith said, referring to the International Criminal Court.

(ARSA)

Who is Ataullah?

Born in a refugee camp in Pakistan’s port city of Karachi in 1977, Attaulah and his parents moved to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, where he was enrolled in an Islamic religious school, according to the International Crisis Group (ICG).

As a young boy, he worked at a mosque in Saudi Arabia and attended the Rohingya community meetings where his speeches impressed Saudis, who backed his efforts to gain rights for Rohingya Muslims.

ICG said Ataullah became leader of ARSA in 2016. In 2017, he posted a video vowing to fight for the rights of the persecuted Rohingya in Rakhine, Myanmar.

In the Aug. 28 video statement, Ataullah stated that ARSA was established in response to Burmese government and paramilitary abuses against the stateless Rohingya community.

“Our primary objective under ARSA is to liberate our people from dehumanized oppression perpetrated by all successive Burmese regimes,” he said.

What is ARSA?

ARSA, a Rohingya insurgent group formerly known as Al-Yaaqin, gained international notoriety after it launched coordinated attacks on government security outposts in Rakhine state in August 2017, leading to the bloody crackdown against the Rohingya people.

In September 2021, popular Rohingya leader Muhib Ullah, who had visited the White House in Washington as part of his advocacy for Rohingya to be repatriated to Myanmar, was assassinated at his office in a refugee camp.

After years of denying an ARSA presence in the camps, Bangladesh authorities in June 2022 said Ataullah had ordered ARSA members to kill Muhib.

In 2023, ARSA joined forces with the Myanmar government, according to the ICG.

“Despite the Myanmar military junta being responsible for genocide and crimes against humanity against Rohingya, ARSA and the junta have joined forces to fight the Arakan Army, one of Myanmar’s most powerful ethnic armed organizations based in Rakhine state,” the ICG said.

How are Rohingya reacting?

After hearing the news of the ARSA leader’s arrest, refugee camp resident Mohmmad Amin said he had paid a 300,000 taka (U.S. $2,467) ransom to be released after members of the Rohingya militant group abducted him.

“Ataullah sold the Rohingya people for his personal gain. We are happy for his arrest. We hope Bangladesh will give him tough punishment,” Amin told BenarNews, adding, “Ataullah was involved in the murder of Muhib Ullah.”

In the same camp, a group of Rohingya circulated a video asking Bangladesh’s interim government to release Ataullah, terming him a leader fighting for the rights of the Rohingya.

(Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters)

Meanwhile, Imtiaz Ahmed, a professor of international relations at Dhaka University, questioned the report that Ataullah lived in an apartment near Bangladesh’s capital for months without being arrested, saying it was not believable. Still, the arrest is a significant development in relations with Myanmar, he said.

“Ataullah Jununi’s arrest is a significant signal from Bangladesh to the Arakan Army and the central government that ARSA is under control,” Ahmed told BenarNews.

Across the Bangladesh-Myanmar border in Rakhine state, the anti-junta Arakan Army rebels have made significant gains in battles with junta troops to gain control of the region.

“The U.N. secretary-general has stressed that Bangladesh should talk to the Arakan Army. Ataullah’s arrest could create a congenital atmosphere for probable repatriation of the Rohingya refugees, provided that Arakan Army and the central government agree,” he said.

Abdur Rahman in Teknaf, Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, contributed to this report.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Kamran Reza Chowdhury for BenarNews.

Three days later, suspected militants from his own community abducted him under the cover of darkness and shot him dead for doing so, Southeast Asian NGO Fortify Rights said in a report released Tuesday.

“Rohingya rebel members in Bangladesh are killing, abducting, torturing, and threatening Rohingya refugees arriving from Myanmar, which may amount to war crimes,” Fortify Rights said in a press statement accompanying the report.

Its 78-page report, “I May Be Killed Any Moment,” noted that three key elements must be present to establish a war crime – an armed conflict, a prohibited act committed against a protected person and a nexus between the conflict and the act committed.

“[F]ortify Rights has reasonable grounds to believe that all such elements are satisfied.”

The new report documents killings, abductions, torture, and other violations against Rohingya refugees committed, Fortify Rights says, by mainly two rival militant groups, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA, and Rohingya Solidarity Organization, or RSO.

The report draws on interviews with 116 people, including Rohingya survivors and eyewitnesses, Rohingya militants, U.N. officials, humanitarian aid workers, and others, about the ongoing violence in the camps.

It said that killings of Rohingya refugees by Rohingya militant groups in Bangladesh’s refugee camps had doubled year-on-year since 2021, with a total of at least 219 from then until last year.

However, the more than 90 people killed in 2023 included dozens of reported members of the two rival militant groups killed in clashes between them, Fortify Rights said.

(MOHAMMAD PONIR HOSSAIN/Reuters)

Why would Rohingya militants strike fear among their own community of refugees who fled decades of persecution and terror in their homeland in Myanmar?

“[The] militant groups intimidate, threaten, and harass Rohingya refugees to forcibly recruit new members, prevent them from reporting abuses to the authorities, and gain political control of the camps,” the report said.

“Militants have also abducted Rohingya refugees for refusing to join or collaborate with them and for opposing militant groups in the camps,” Fortify Rights said, noting that the militants use abductions and torture to extort money for their activities.

In 2022, refugees told Radio Free Asia affiliate BenarNews that ARSA was also against the repatriation of the Rohingya to Myanmar, but they did not elaborate on the reason.

ARSA and RSO both have said they are fighting to liberate the Rohingya people in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State from junta-aligned military forces and the Arakan Army, an armed separatist group.

Rakhine is where most of the Rohingya Muslim ethnic minority community lives.

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However, Fortify Rights said, RSO had been collaborating since last year with the Burmese junta against the Arakan Army rebels.

The junta comprises the same security forces whose brutal 2017 crackdown led to some 740,000 Rohingya fleeing across the border to Bangladesh and now staying in camps in Cox’s Bazar in the southeastern part of the country. The junta launched the offensive in response to coordinated attacks by ARSA rebels in Rakhine.

“While barely mentioning the Myanmar military junta,” ARSA’s leader, in a May 2024 video, focused on combatting the Arakan Army, which wants to “liberate” the state of Rakhine from the army, Fortify Rights said.

Comprising mainly Rakhine Buddhists, the Arakan Army claimed it respects the rights of Rohingya, but experts say they carried out mass arson attacks on Rohingya villages last year.

After the military toppled an elected government in Myanmar in 2021, the country descended into a civil war with junta security forces battling a variety of armed ethnic groups.

ARSA chief arrested

ARSA and RSO, though, continue to publicly deny responsibility for any wrongdoing, said the report.

Attaullah Abu Ammar Jununi, then commander-in-chief of ARSA, said in 2017 that “atrocity, violence, and injustice against any innocent civilians is not in [our] principles or policy,” the NGO said.

ARSA had also denied responsibility for specific incidents of violence in the Bangladesh refugee camps, including the killings of camp leaders and a prominent community leader, Muhib Ullah, whose assassination in September 2021 caused outrage outside Bangladesh as well.

But Bangladesh authorities, who after years of denying ARSA’s presence in the camps finally admitted in June 2022 that Muhib Ullah’s killing had been ordered by ARSA’s Ataullah.

And Bangladesh police on Tuesday said that he and other accomplices had been arrested the previous evening in a town near Dhaka. They had been conducting secret meetings to plan “sabotage and criminal activities,” police said.

The arrested were found in possession of around US$175,000 and some steel weapons.

Of 29 people accused of links to Muhib Ullah’s killing, 18 accused have been arrested so far, while 11 others are absconding, police told BenarNews on Tuesday.

(Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters)

Murder and a slew of other criminal activities were common occurrences in the camps where nearly 1 million refugees are sheltering, some Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar told BenarNews.

Muhammed Jubair, acting president of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, said several armed groups were involved in the crimes.

“Various crimes, including murder, are being committed in the camps,” he said.

“It is difficult to say whether the crimes that occur are war crimes or not.”

A former ARSA member told Fortify Rights in November 2023 that the group didn’t work “according to humanitarian principles” for the community.

One especially brutal incident is detailed in the report.

A 23-year-old Rohingya man was abducted, tortured, dismembered, and left to die in the refugee camps – but he survived. He spoke to Fortify Rights about what happened to him.

“[T]hey cut off my leg first. I was able to hear the sound that they were cutting off the bones of my leg with a big knife,” he told Fortify Rights.

[‘They] took half an hour to cut me. My arm was cut just above my elbows.”

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Shailaja Neelakantan and Zia Chowdhury for BenarNews.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres addressed the concerns of the Rohingya, who a week ago saw their monthly aid for food rations cut by over half to US$6 per month.

“I can promise that we’ll do everything to avoid it [a humanitarian crisis], and I will be talking to all the countries in the world that can support us in order to make sure that funds are made available,” the U.N. chief said during his first trip to the refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh in nearly seven years.

(Press Wing of the Chief Adviser)

Guterres also called for global efforts to assist the Rohingya.

“In this holy month of Ramadan, I appeal to the international community to show solidarity through action and concrete support for the Rohingya people and their Bangladeshi host communities,” he said.

The U.N. leader praised the 1 million Rohingya living in the camps located along Bangladesh’s border with Myanmar.

“They are resilient. And they need the world’s support,” Guterres said.

(Press Wing of the Chief Adviser)

Muhammad Yunus, leader of the Bangladesh interim government, pledged to work with the U.N. to allow the Rohingya to return to their homes in Myanmar’s Rakhine state before next year’s Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan.

About 800,000 Rohingya crossed the border into Cox’s Bazar, starting in August 2017, as they fled a brutal offensive launched by Burmese military forces against Rohingya insurgents.

(Press Wing of the Chief Adviser)

Rohingya Mohammad Ilyas, 42, a resident of the Leda camp in Teknaf, said he was fortunate to participate in the iftar.

“The government’s assurance to ensure the safety of the Rohingya and facilitate their swift return to their homeland has inspired us. I hope this visit will lead to a solution to our crisis,” he told BenarNews.

Friday’s event was not without tragedy as one man died and two Rohingya were injured in a stampede, according to a police official.

“The incident occurred as people attempted to join the gathering and fell from a hill, triggering a stampede. Medical officials later confirmed the death of one victim after being transported to the hospital,” Muhammad Arif Hossain, officer-in-charge of the Ukhia police station, told BenarNews.

BenarNews is an online news outlet affiliated to Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Jesmin Papri for BenarNews.

Last month, we saw the Argentinian federal court issue arrest warrants against 25 Myanmar officials, including the seniormost military leaders, for genocide and crimes against humanity committed against the Rohingya community between 2012 and 2018. Our thoughts immediately went to the brave Rohingya women who helped make this significant legal action possible.

For years, the Shanti Mohila (Peace Women), a group of over 400 Rohingya women living in the refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, have defied societal expectations and conservative gender norms.

They are leaders in their community fighting for recognition and justice for the harms endured at the hands of the Myanmar military. They play a vital role as leaders, educators, and advocates for justice.

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The 2017 “clearance operations” by the Myanmar military against the historically persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority living in the Rakhine state were a series of widespread and systematic attacks involving mass killings, torture, and destruction of houses that led to the largest forced displacement of the Rohingya community from Myanmar into neighboring Bangladesh.

Sexual violence was a hallmark of these “clearance operations,” with young women and girls disproportionately affected by brutal and inhuman acts of sexual and gender-based violence. Yet, despite efforts to destroy them through long-term serious physical and mental harm, Rohingya women fought back.

(Ayesha Nawshin/Legal Action Worldwide)

Shanti Mohila members have mobilized to raise awareness of the large-scale sexual and gender-based violence endured by Rohingya women between 2016 and 2017. They have spoken about their experiences before international justice proceedings and catalyzed change by breaking down the stigma associated with victimhood and inspiring next generations of Rohingya women through action.

In 2023, their remarkable achievements were recognized as they were honored as Raphael Lemkin Champions of Prevention by the U.N. Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide.

Contributing evidence to justice mechanisms

The testimonies Shanti Mohila members have provided and encouraged other survivors to step forward to provide over the past years have given the opportunity to investigative mechanisms, NGOs, and lawyers to present evidence before all ongoing international justice proceedings.

Specifically, Shanti Mohila members are among the survivors who provided key witness statements in The Gambia v. Myanmar case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

In 2019, two representatives were in The Hague as part of The Gambia delegation to observe provisional measures hearings at the ICJ.

In 2023, they were among the group of seven witnesses in Buenos Aires to testify in the investigative hearings under the universal jurisdiction principle before the federal criminal court – leading to the recent court order of the first-ever arrest warrants for crimes of genocide against key state officials and members of the Myanmar military.

“I could not believe I could tell an international court about my sufferings. I could not believe it until I stepped into the courtroom,” said “Salma” (not her real name), a Rohingya female witness who requested anonymity for privacy and safety concerns.

“It was difficult for me to speak about the death of my family and their names, but I did it for justice, for my grandchildren, for a future where we can return home with dignity,” she said. “They [perpetrators] targeted women first to break our community, our morale.”

“Who would have thought that we, the Rohingya women, would one day be taking the Myanmar military to the court?”

It is worth highlighting here why exactly the evidence from survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is so critical to successfully prosecute and hold the Myanmar military accountable, particularly for genocide.

The “intent to destroy a group in whole or in part” is a necessary element to prove the crime of genocide, which can be notoriously difficult to evidence.

In the Rohingya context, the scale and brutality of SGBV during the 2017 “clearance operations” was identified by the U.N. Independent Fact-Finding Mission as one of the key factors that “inferred” the Myanmar military’s genocidal intent to destroy the Rohingya people.

(Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters)

Sexual violence against Rohingya women and young mothers in front of their families, and the accompanying sexual mutilations and forced pregnancies, are some of the most significant reflections of the perpetrators’ desire to inflict severe social and reproductive harm on the community.

The SGBV was not only a part of the campaign of mass killings, torture and destruction of property in 2017 but also committed in the context of decades-long propagated narrative that uncontrolled Rohingya birth rate is a threat to the survival of the nation, and state policies that placed significant legal restraint on Rohingya reproductive rights.

In a 2023 study on long-term impact of sexual and gender-based violence against the Rohingya men, women, and hijra conducted by the Legal Action Worldwide (LAW), clinical analysis by psychologists and medical doctors revealed that the SGBV against Rohingya had resulted in: permanent damage to survivors’ genitalia impacting their ability to procreate; severe psychological injuries that have left them in a state of extreme emotional distress; damaged the survivors’ family relations including with their spouse and children; severe ostracization of the women and children born of rape; and forced reorganization of the Rohingya households.

The evidence of SGBV is critical in that its commission and its enduring and foreseeable impact on survivors clearly shows that the Myanmar military inflicted serious mental and bodily harm and imposed measures intending to prevent births within the community. It also reflects a deliberate incremental step in causing the biological or physical destruction of the group while inflicting acute suffering on its members in the process.

Leaders within the Shanti Mohila network have been instrumental in supporting the conceptualization and implementation of studies such as the 2023 report – making them truly the grassroots advocates for the community.

Towards holistic justice and healing

Alongside these important contributions, the Shanti Mohila members continuously work within the camps in Cox’s Bazar to ensure awareness of the ongoing justice processes and provide peer support to one another and the wider community.

Last year, LAW and Shanti Mohila engaged with Rohingya activists around the globe through LAW’s Rohingya Diaspora Dialogue initiative to foster wider recognition and advocacy for the significant work being done by the Rohingya women in Cox’s Bazar on gender equality and to hold the perpetrators of serious crimes responsible.

These actions embody Shanti Mohila’s commitment and openness to learning.

They are dedicated to remaining bold and effective advocates for their community and being against the illegitimate military regime that continues to commit atrocities against civilians across Myanmar.

(Ayesha Nawshin/Legal Action Worldwide)

The challenges remain plenty since the renewed conflict between Arakan Army and Myanmar military in late 2023 has led to upward of 60,000 Rohingya arriving in Cox’s Bazar in a new wave of forced displacement, joining over 1 million Rohingya refugees already living in the camps.

The evolving conflict dynamics in the Rakhine state and its impact on the Rohingya there add to the tensions in the camps. The risk of another surge in the forced recruitment of the Rohingya in the camps by organized groups pressuring youths to join the civil war in Myanmar persists.

Amid this, the work and growth of Shanti Mohila can prove to be a stabilizing force, beyond their contributions to women empowerment and the justice process. They can provide an avenue to offset the negative impacts of the deteriorating regional security situation through promoting efforts toward reconciliation and encouraging people to keep the rule of law and justice at the center of their struggle.

On this International Women’s Day, we celebrate the groundbreaking work of Shanti Mohila and the power and legacy they are creating for generations of Rohingya women, their community as a whole, and women across fragile and conflict-affected contexts worldwide.

Ishita Kumar, based in Cox’s Bazar, is the legal and program adviser on the Rohingya crisis for Legal Action Worldwide (LAW), an independent, non-profit organization of human rights lawyers and jurists working in fragile and conflict-affected areas. LAW has been supporting Shanti Mohila leaders and representing over 300 Rohingya in the ongoing international justice processes about their treatment in Myanmar, including at the International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court and supporting universal jurisdiction cases in foreign domestic courts such as in Argentina. The views expressed here are hers, not those of Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by guest commentator Ishita Kumar.

The 40-year-old had a leg amputated after a Burmese soldier shot him during the Myanmar military’s deadly crackdown against the stateless Rohingya Muslim minority in 2017. Hasan’s other leg was paralyzed after the shooting.

Like hundreds of thousands of his fellow Rohingya, he fled that year from his home in Rakhine state to neighboring Bangladesh. There, a nongovernmental organization helped him with medical treatment, including physiotherapy.

But all that is gone now.

“Physiotherapy and other treatments at Handicap International revived my hope for being able to stand up again. But Handicap International ceased their operations, blowing my hopes,” Hasan told BenarNews this month.

More than a dozen healthcare facilities that help Rohingya refugees have suspended operations in the past few weeks, leaving thousands without essential health services and exacerbating already dire conditions at sprawling camps in Cox’s Bazar district near the Myanmar border.

Some Bangladeshi officials have attributed the closures to a decision last month by the new U.S. administration to freeze foreign aid for 90 days, pending a review of foreign assistance programs.

Bangladeshi officials say the decision by the United States – the world’s largest single aid donor, according to the United Nations – has affected various services helping the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, including health, water and sanitation, education, and livelihood.

In a filing with the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia on Feb. 18, the Trump administration said it would not release its foreign aid funds despite a federal judge’s order last week to lift its freeze, according to a copy of the court document seen by BenarNews.

Three facilities run by the global nonprofit International Rescue Committee (IRC) have completely shut down while two others could stop operations by the end of March, an official of a Bangladeshi government agency overseeing the needs of refugees told BenarNews last week.

“Apart from that, around 14 [Centre for Disability in Development, or CDD facilities] across the camps ceased their operations following the U.S. fund freeze that also laid off many healthcare staff,” Refugee, Relief and Repatriation (RRR) Commissioner Mohammed Mizanur Rahman said.

BenarNews visited five CDD facilities in Cox’s Bazar and found they had stopped their operations at present.

(Abdur Rahman/BenarNews)

A medical officer working at a government hospital also told BenarNews that the health aid group Handicap International – which used to provide medical care for refugees such as Mohammed Hasan – had stopped its operations.

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More than a million refugees

Another health research group, the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR, B), had also suspended its operations to help the refugees, said Enamul Haque, a medical officer at the government-owned Teknaf Upzila Health Complex.

“With these two centers shut down, patients are facing extreme difficulties. There is no other hospital except for the government hospital,” Enamul told BenarNews on Feb. 11.

“In reality, there is nowhere for these patients to go … [P]oor patients are suffering the most,” he said.

BenarNews tried to contact five organizations that had allegedly suspended their operations following the freeze on foreign aid implemented by the Trump administration, which took office on Jan. 20.

Among the groups, IRC and ICDDR, B did not respond to multiple requests from BenarNews. Local officials with Handicap International, CDD, and the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR declined comment.

(Abdur Rahman/BenarNews)

More than 1 million Rohingya refugees are staying in camps in and around Cox’s Bazar – some of the largest and most densely populated refugee shelters in the world.

There are 120 healthcare centers across 34 camps that often provide medical care for at least 70,000 Rohingya refugees, Mizanur, the RRR commissioner, said.

“As the U.S. is the biggest funder [of foreign aid in Bangladesh], the fallout of the aid freeze could impact other medical facilities too in the [camps],” he said.

An official involved with healthcare services in the camps said on Feb. 11 that the existing healthcare facilities for the refugees had scaled down their services by as much as 25% since the U.S. funding was paused.

“We have observed service disruptions in the Rohingya refugee camps as well as in the host communities, including in life-saving interventions,” Syed Md Tafhim, a communications officer at the Inter Sector Coordination Group (ISCG), said in a statement.

The ISCG serves as the international central coordination body for humanitarian agencies that serve Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar.

(Abdur Rahman/BenarNews)

Affected services range across different sectors, such as health (including treatment for persons with disabilities), water and sanitation, education, and livelihood, the group said.

“As a result of this global pause, preliminary information suggests that several important projects benefitting Rohingya refugees and Bangladeshi host communities have had to be suspended, interrupting some essential and life-saving services,” the ISCG said.

“While some exceptions and waivers are gradually being communicated by the U.S. Government, we do not yet have a detailed understanding of how this may affect specific programmes in the Rohingya response in the short and medium term,” it also said.

According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the pause in funding would “invariably affect” its Rohingya refugee response.

“The United States has been among our steady partners to the Rohingya response, and we remain both grateful and hopeful that funding support will soon resume to ensure refugee women and girls and those from the host community continue to receive critical assistance to uphold their health, safety, and dignity in Bangladesh,” UNFPA Bangladesh Representative Masaki Watabe said in a statement.

Anxious parent

Back in the refugee camps, a Rohingya father waits.

In their small hut made of bamboo and tarpaulin at Camp 16, Kabir Hossen lives with his son, Md Hasan, who has a paralyzed leg and struggles with a form of palsy.

(Abdur Rahman/BenarNews)

Every 10 days, they used to visit a CDD facility for his treatment and medicine. But on Feb. 1, the center’s staff turned them away, saying they already stopped providing services.

“I don’t know where to avail the treatment for my son,” Hossen, 47, told BenarNews.

“Uncertainty is gripping me.”

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Mostafa Yousuf and Abdur Rahman for BenarNews.

The junta has not announced the release and there has been no explanation as to why they were set free but it comes days after a court in Argentina called for arrest warrants for the junta chief and 22 other military officials for crimes committed against the Rohingya in a 2017 crackdown.

“It is clear that the junta wants to cover up the crimes that they’ve committed against Rohingya,” said a senior member of group Political Prisoners Network Myanmar, Thike Htun Oo.

“They immediately released the Rohingya from detention as soon as a court in Argentina issued international arrest warrants for them. We must be aware of this,” he told Radio Free Asia on Monday.

Most of the 936 people being released on Sunday from prison in the main city of Yangon, including 267 women and 67 children, were arrested after the military overthrew an elected government in 2021, Thike Htun Oo said.

They were due to be sent by boat from Yangon, to the Rakhine state capital of Sittwe in western Myanmar, he said.

On Saturday, officials from the military’s Immigration Department entered Insein Prison in Yangon to issue the Rohingya with identity documents, Thike Htun Oo said, though adding he could not confirm exactly what type of documents they were given.

Details of what those being released had done to be locked up in the first place were not available but most were believed to have been imprisoned for violating restrictions on their movements.

RFA tried to telephone the Prison Department spokesperson and the office of the department’s deputy director general for information about the release but they did not answer.

Most Rohingya are from Rakhine state and most are stateless, regarded as migrants from South Asia and not one of the ethnic groups classified as indigenous in Buddhist-majority Myanmar’s constitution.

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Forced to fight?

Myanmar government troops led a bloody crackdown in Rakhine state in 2017 in response to Rohingya militant attacks on the security forces and more than 700,000 members of the persecuted Rohingya community fled to neighboring Bangladesh, where most remain.

U.N. experts later said the military carried out mass killings and gang rapes with “genocidal intent.” The United States in 2022 determined that the violence committed against the Rohingya amounted to genocide and crimes against humanity.

The Myanmar military said it was engaged in legitimate security operations.

A court in Argentina ruled last week that international arrest warrants should be issued for the self-appointed president and junta chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, and 22 other military officials for crimes committed against the Rohingya.

Argentina became the first country to open an investigation into serious crimes against the Rohingya under the principle of universal jurisdiction, a legal principle allowing for the prosecution of serious crimes no matter where they were committed.

Political analyst Than Soe Naing also said the junta was trying to improve its image in light of the Argentinian court ruling.

“They’re releasing the Rohingya in order to try to restore justice from their side but they’re not going to succeed in trying to cover up their criminal mistakes,” he said.

The leader of a Rohingya welfare organization said there was a danger those being released would be pressed to fight for the military in Rakhine state where an ethnic minority insurgent group battling for control of the state, the Arakan Army, or AA, has forced junta forces into a few small pockets of territory, including Sittwe.

The co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition, Nay San Lwin, said the military was already pressing Rohingya men in camps for displaced people in Sittwe to join junta forces.

“They are really worried about being forcibly recruited,” he said of those who had been released.

Last year, embattled junta forces recruited Rohingya into militias to help fight the AA, which draws its support from the state’s Buddhist, ethnic Rakhine majority.

The recruitment by the military of Rohingya led to attacks by the AA in which international human rights organizations said Rohingya civilians were killed. The AA denied that.

Translated by Kianan Duncan. Edited by RFA Staff.

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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.

The woman, who asked to remain anonymous over safety concerns and is not pictured in this report, said she had grown used to the sounds of bombs falling and gunshots, but did not expect to be a victim of violence.

“One morning in August, I woke up to constant pounding at the door. The moment I opened it, a group from the Arakan Army kicked me to the ground, groped and physically assaulted me in front my family members before slaughtering my father-in-law and two brothers-in-law and dragging them out of our home,” she told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated online news service.

She added that her husband was able to flee from the attackers.

“Though sometimes my village is caught between the Arakan Army and Myanmar military clashes, I never thought this conflict one day would knock on my door.”

The woman was among at least 60,000 Rohingya who have crossed the border into southeastern Bangladesh since late 2023 to seek refuge from fighting between the Arakan Army (AA) rebels and Burmese junta-affiliated military forces.

Incidents of sexual violence and other abuses against Rohingya came to light in a report published this week by the Burma Task Force, a coalition of 38 U.S. and Canadian Muslim Organizations led by Justice for All.

The report alleged that both military troops and AA insurgents had targeted Rohingya, with the rebels in some cases killing Rohingya while sparing non-Rohingya in the same village. In addition, the AA used Rohingya as human shields in battles with the military.

“The Arakan Army specifically targets girls for sexual abuse. Some women knew of rape victims; most have heard of such incidents,” the report said of interviews in the Bangladesh camps.

(Abdur Rahman/BenarNews)

The Rohingya woman spoke to a BenarNews reporter at the Jadimora camp in Teknaf, a sub-district of Cox’s Bazar, about the ordeal that brought her to Bangladesh.

“I lost consciousness during the assault. When I regained it, I saw the village completely razed and fires smoldering everywhere,” she said on Wednesday. “The villagers who were alive and injured set out on an uncertain journey toward the Bangladesh border. They took me with them.

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“I trudged along with the caravan for three days through the rugged hills, muddy plains and forest and along the way saw hundreds of bodies scattered in the forest or floating in the water.”

On a positive note, the woman reunited with her husband at the camp on the Bangladeshi side of the border.

Arakan Army

Another Rohingya woman who requested anonymity said she and her family were forced out of their homes in Myanmar and moved into a school building.

“One day in August the Arakan Army showed up at the school compound, separated the young girls and took them away, leaving their families in the dark about their whereabouts,” the woman (also not pictured) told BenarNews.

“My family fled the school as my husband feared something worse could happen to me,” she said, adding they arrived at Camp 26 in Cox’s Bazar three months ago.

A BenarNews reporter talked to a dozen women who had arrived as part of the recent influx triggered by the fighting between AA and junta troops. The Burmese military has led Myanmar since launching a coup against the government headed by Aung San Suu Kyi in February 2021.

(Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters)

The AA, an insurgent group that has been fighting with the military, is supported by Rakhine state’s Buddhist majority and has been accused of committing rights abuses against Rohingya people.

Aflatun Khatun, a Rohingya woman in her 60s who took shelter recently at the Balupara camp in Ukhia, recalled how she lost her livestock.

“Thirteen of my buffalos were killed in a drone attack in September,” she told Benar News, adding, “Many villagers died in that attack. They used the drones to target Muslim villages.”

Md Yunus, 40, who lived in Maungdaw in Myanmar’s Rakhine state before crossing the border into Bangladesh in November 2024, said AA members arrived at the beginning of that month, threatened the villagers and told them to never return.

“A few days later, they again came back, set fire to the village and fatally shot those who dared to stay back,” he told BenarNews.

“That was the moment I felt a desperate need to leave my home with my wife and children. I moved to the woods, stayed there for three days before we managed to cross the border to take shelter here.”

No food

The Justice for All report said the Rohingya woes did not end after crossing into Bangladesh, as many of the new arrivals had no food or shelter.

Nearly 1 million Rohingya live in refugee camps in and around Cox’s Bazar, including 740,000 who fled a military offensive in Rakhine state, starting in August 2017.

(Abdur Rahman/BenarNews)

Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, commissioner of Office of Refugee, Relief and Repatriation, said the Bangladesh government was working to determine the number of new refugees in the camps and has sought assistance for them.

“We provided headcount data to the World Food Program, which started providing food support to the newly arrived Rohingya,” he told BenarNews.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Abdur Rahman and Mostafa Yousuf for BenarNews.

Military planes bombed Kyauk Ni Maw village on the coast in Ramree township on Wednesday afternoon sparking huge fires that destroyed about 600 homes, residents said, sending clouds of black smoke up over the sea.

The area is under the control of anti-junta Arakan Army, or AA, insurgents but a spokesman said no fighting was going on there at the time of the air raid.

“The targeting of innocent people where there is no fighting is a very despicable and cowardly act … as well as a blatant war crime,” AA spokesman Khaing Thu Kha told Radio Free Asia.

(Arakan Princess Media)

Hla Thein, the junta’s spokesman for Rakhine state, told RFA he was not aware of the incident. Posters in pro-military social media news channels said Kyauk Ni Maw was a transport hub for the AA.

A resident helping survivors said medics were trying to give emergency treatment to the wounded amid fears that the air force could return at any time and let loose bombs and missiles.

“People are going to help them out and more are coming,” said the resident, who declined to be identified for safety teaspoons.

“We’ve been treating the injured since last night but we don’t dare to keep too many patients in the hospital for fear of another airstrike.”

(Arakan Princess Media)

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The AA has made unprecedented gains against the military since late last year and now controls about 80% of Myanmar’s westernmost state.

On Dec. 29, the AA captured the town of Gwa from the military, a major step toward its goal of taking the whole of Rakhine state, and then said it was ready for talks with the junta, which seized power in a February 2021 coup d’etat.

But the junta has responded with deadly airstrikes, residents say.

The military denies targeting civilians but human rights investigators and security analysts say Myanmar’s army has a long reputation of indiscriminate attacks in civilian areas as a way to undermine popular support for the various rebel forces fighting its rule.

“The military is showing its fangs with its planes, that people can be killed at any time, at will,” aid worker Wai Hin Aung told RFA.

(Arakan Princess Media)

The bombing of Kyauk Ni Maw is the latest bloody attack on members of the persecuted Rohingya Muslim minority. About 740,000 Rohingya fled from Rakhine state to neighboring Bangladesh following a bloody crackdown by the military against members of the largely stateless community in August 2017.

Over the past year, Rohingya have suffered violence at the hands of both sides in the Rakhine state’s war, U.N. rights investigators have said.

The AA took a hard line with the Rohingya after the junta launched a campaign to recruit, at times forcibly, Rohingya men into militias to fight the insurgents.

On Aug. 5, scores of Rohingya trying to flee from the town of Maungdaw to Bangladesh, across a border river, were killed by drones and artillery fire that survivors and rights groups said was unleashed by the AA. The AA denied responsibility.

Edited by RFA Staff.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Burmese.

The new arrivals, documented from November 2023 to December 2024, add to a huge population of Rohingya refugees, who have been sheltering at sprawling camps and settlements in Cox’s Bazar district for at least seven years.

Bangladeshi authorities say they are set to collect biometric data from the newcomers, who number about 64,700 people, or some 17,480 families.

“The government has principally agreed to issue biometric identification for the newly arrived Rohingyas. It found the number to be around 60,000 after [a] head count,” Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, commissioner of the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commission (RRRC) Office, told BenarNews on Thursday.

The Rohingya entered Bangladesh despite declarations from the previous government that it wouldn’t allow any more Rohingya into the country and it had sealed the borders to them.

The previous government, led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, fell in August 2024 under pressure from a student-led uprising. A transitional government has been in charge of Bangladesh since then.

However, details have not yet been released about the biometric identification system, which is set to start next month.

Human rights advocates had earlier raised concerns that the biometric details of Rohingya refugees – which may include fingerprints, facial and iris scans, as well as personal data – would be shared with Myanmar’s ruling junta without their consent or knowledge.

The biometric identification process would begin as soon as the government approves it, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, or the UNHCR, which is involved in the activity.

“The Biometric Identification Exercise is not a registration, but will allow UNHCR to de-duplicate individuals who were counted more than once during the headcount, as well as exclude already-registered refugees who arrived in 2017 and who may have been counted,” the U.N. agency said in a statement sent to BenarNews.

(BenarNews)

About 740,000 Rohingya fled from Rakhine following a bloody crackdown against members of their stateless Muslim minority group in August 2017. They joined other Rohingya who had settled in camps in and around Cox’s Bazar, bringing the total number of refugees in southeastern Bangladesh at the time to just over 1 million.

In June 2021, Human Rights Watch accused UNHCR of “improperly” collecting and sharing personal information from the Rohingya refugees with the Bangladeshi government, which shared them with the Myanmar junta.

“The agency did not conduct a full data impact assessment, as its policies require, and in some cases failed to obtain refugees’ informed consent to share their data with Myanmar, the country they had fled,” HRW alleged.

In response, UNHCR said it had followed proper procedures in its biometric data collection system.

Rakhine’s deteriorating situation

Bangladeshi authorities fear there may be a spike of Rohingya refugees fleeing from Rakhine as the situation in the Myanmar state continues to worsen.

“The recent influx was triggered [by the takeover] of Maungdaw township in Rakhine by the Arakan Army [AA],” the RRRC commissioner said.

There have also been incidents of Rohingya villages being razed, forcing residents to take shelter across the border, he also said.

This month, ethnic minority AA insurgents – which are fighting for self-determination in Rakhine state – said they had captured a major military base in the town of Ann.

The AA’s capture of the base was the latest major setback for the Burmese junta, which seized power in a February 2021 coup.

Refugee Zahangir Alam told BenarNews that AA members were taking many young Rohingya captive.

“The Arakan Army’s torture [of] Rohingya is more agonizing than that of Myanmar Army. I used to study at an educational institute there in Maungdaw and had to flee to save myself from their torture. My younger brother is still held hostage in the camp run by the Arakan Army,” Zahangir said.

Refugees who earlier fled violence and persecution in Myanmar said they had been kidnapped and forced to fight in the country’s ongoing civil war for both the junta and the AA.

With the help of a smuggler, also known as a “broker,” Zahangir was able to flee to Bangladesh. He is currently staying at a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar.

Bangladeshi authorities said smugglers had been helping Rohingya – in exchange for hefty fees – to cross the border areas between southeastern Bangladesh and northwestern Myanmar.

Some refugees claimed they had to pay smugglers bribes ranging from Tk 20,000 (U.S. $166) to Tk 25,000 ($200) to cross the border.

If the situation further deteriorates, there may be more Rohingya fleeing into Bangladesh, foreign ministry official Ferdousi Shariar and foreign affairs adviser Md. Touhid Hossain said.

Amid the unrest in Myanmar, Bangladeshi authorities said they were closely watching the border areas at the town of Teknaf and Saint Martin’s Island.

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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Abdur Rahman and Mostafa Yousuf.

The boy, who like other Rohingya in this report are not identified because of concerns for their safety, said he was one of about 80 Rohingya who were abducted from their camp and forced to cross the nearby border into Myanmar.

“We were blindfolded and led to a boat. I don’t know where exactly they (the kidnappers) delivered us in Myanmar, but it was a military base,” he told BenarNews.

“They (the junta) posted pictures of us with firearms online. They didn’t give us ammunition but put us on the front lines” he said, adding that he and other Rohingya were not trained to fight.

In September and October, BenarNews spoke to several Rohingya who had returned from Myanmar, where the Arakan Army and other insurgents have been fighting Burmese junta-aligned forces to gain control of Rakhine state.

About 740,000 Rohingya fled Rakhine and settled in Bangladesh refugee camps in the months that followed a brutal military crackdown in 2017. Both the insurgents and the junta have kidnapped and forced Rohingya into battle.

“(The Arakan Army) said you will be trained and receive 10,000 taka (U.S. $83) monthly. All you have to do is kill the army,” a 25-year-old Rohingya returnee told BenarNews.

“The firearms didn’t work. If you pull the trigger five times, it will fire twice. We discarded guns jammed with bullets. But it was risky to dispose of these firearms – even if you appear unarmed, the attacker will kill you,” he said.

The man said he saw about a dozen Rohingya die in battle.

“After four months, I wanted to return. Then they didn’t let me go. When I tried to escape, they locked me up,” he said.

Recounting his time in Myanmar, the 25-year-old said members of the Arakan Army forced him and others to burn down a Rohingya neighborhood.

“There, they seized all of our guns. Then, when army drones attacked, we had a chance to run,” he said.

The man said he and seven others stayed at a house overnight where they were fed before paying 12,000 taka ($100) each to charter a boat to return to Bangladesh.

Some fought for six months

BenarNews interviewed Rohingya who fought in Myanmar and returned to the Kutupalong-Balukhali Mega Camp in Ukhia, the world’s largest refugee camp. Some said they were able to escape after a month while others said they were trapped for six months.

The Rohingya said they had been kidnapped from refugee camps by men who claimed they were members of the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO), an armed group. After they returned, the Rohingya said they were beaten by RSO members who threatened to kill them.

Md. Zahirul Haque Bhuiyan, an assistant superintendent of police near the camps, said sources were providing information about Rohingya leaving Bangladesh and returning after fighting in Myanmar.

“We have this information. However, there is no particular complaint. If we receive any complaints, we will address them legally and take proper action,” Zahirul said.“ Every few days, we carry out joint operations,” he said.

When militants with the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and RSO are operating within the camps, “we execute raids, arrest them, prosecute them and acquire their weapons,” he said.

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A human rights activist, meanwhile, called on fellow Bangladeshis to treat the Rohingya fairly.

Activist Nur Khan Liton, a lawyer, said people should remember that Rohingya fled to the camps in and around Cox’s Bazar because they feared for their lives in Myanmar.

“And those who attempt to use these individuals against their will are committing a serious moral crime,” he said.

People returning from the conflict are being hunted down by RSO and ARSA, Liton said, referring to the RSO and ARSA.

“They are committing increasingly severe crimes and putting our country’s security in jeopardy.”

He also called on the Bangladesh government to take positive action regarding the Rohingya.

“The government and many people in our country know that Rohingya are being forcibly taken – this news has been in the media several times. Regretfully, the government hasn’t taken sufficient steps in this field,” Liton said.

Some were willing to fight

While most Rohingya who spoke to BenarNews told of being forced to fight, not all who went to Myanmar were abducted.

“We weren’t forced to go. We willingly went to battle for the nation,” a 42-year-old Rohingya told BenarNews. “We went after hearing such a request from the Myanmar government.”

He said some volunteers were in their 50s while others were in their 30s or 40s.

“Those firearms are vintage Myanmar-made G3 guns. All are old scraps, utterly useless due to abandonment,” he said.

“The Myanmar government didn’t take us to fight. They used us as (human) shields – they have misled the world and fooled the Rohingya.”

Mohammed Jubair, leader of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights (ARSPH), said both sides were trying to get rid of the Rohingya.

“Let the Rohingya be wiped out anyway. What will the world hear? They fought, they died fighting on both sides,” Jubair told BenarNews.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Abdur Rahman, Sharif Khiam for BenarNews.

The uptick comes with Bangladesh enmeshed in political turmoil and amid worsening violence in Rakhine, which lies just across its southeastern border. Arakan Army insurgents have been waging a fierce campaign to wrest control of the state from Myanmar’s military government. 

“There is a terrible situation in Rakhine. There is no condition to stay there. No food, no shelter, no treatment for sick people,” said Mohammed Feroz Kamal, who arrived last week from Rakhine’s Maungdaw district.

“Drone attacks are being carried out, especially on the people who have gathered to flee to the border in that country,” he told BenarNews. “Hundreds of people are dying. ”I saw many dead bodies on the way.”

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Rohingya community leader Mohammed Jubair, chairman of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Humanity, said at least 20,000 people had crossed into Bangladesh during the past three months. 

But a Bangladeshi official put the number at around 16,000.

“They used the poor law-and-order situation as an advantage,” Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner Mohammed Mizanur Rahman told BenarNews, referring to the chaotic and lawless atmosphere in Bangladesh before and after the Sheikh Hasina government fell in early August.

Earlier this week, in the face of new cross-border arrivals, Bangladesh transitional government head Muhammad Yunus called on the international community to speed up efforts to resettle Rohingya refugees in third countries.

The “resettlement process should be easy, regular and smooth,” Yunus said during a meeting on Sept. 8 with the International Organisation for Migration, Reuters reported.

The interim administration headed by Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and pioneer of microcredit loans, has been struggling to maintain law and order since Hasina resigned and fled the country amid student-led, anti-government protests.

This week, a BenarNews correspondent visited several villages, including the municipal town of Teknaf, which lies along the border with Myanmar. 

According to local officials, Rohingyas are crossing the frontier into Bangladesh every day.

“Border Guard Bangladesh and Bangladesh Coast Guard are working to prevent Rohingyas at the border,” Mohammed Adnan Chowdhury, executive officer of Teknaf Upazila sub-district, told BenarNews. “However, some Rohingyas are entering the border in the middle of the night. Many of them are renting houses in the main towns of the city and entering the villages.”

He and others described how the recent influx differed from those in the past, including in 2017 when some 740,000 Rohingya fled into Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district over a period of months.

Rented digs

Most of the new arrivals are businessmen or from relatively well-to-do families in Maungdaw district, Rohingya community leaders said.

Feroz, who paid a broker 50,000 Bangladeshi taka (US$418) to enter Bangladesh, is now spending 4,000 taka (US$33) per month to stay in a six-room, tin-roofed house in Teknaf alongside two other Rohingya families already living there. 

Another Rohingya, Nur Shahed, is staying in an apartment with another Rohingya family in Teknaf’s Shilbania neighborhood 

He said he had intended to take his family to the Kutupalong refugee camp, but there was no more space. 

“So many people like me have taken shelter here in villages and in rented houses,” he told BenarNews.

Immigration expert C.R. Abrar, a professor at Dhaka University, underlined that regardless of their income status, the new arrivals were being forced to come to Bangladesh to save their lives.

“Therefore, they should not be treated as criminals under any circumstances; they should be given facilities and security as refugees,” he said, noting that Bangladesh — with its huge refugee population — should pass laws on how to treat them, and participate in related international agreements. 

“Those who are outside the refugee camps are in a more vulnerable situation than those inside the camps,” he said. “They are likely to face various forms of harassment and violence. Therefore, they should be taken to the camps, from a humanitarian point of view, as the primary task.”

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Abdur Rahman and Ahammad Foyez for BenarNews.

Rohingya living in Rakhine state in western Myanmar have been caught in crossfire between ethnic minority insurgents fighting for self-determination against Myanmar’s military, with both sides accused of killing them.

Some analysts have warned that the latest attacks are worse than those inflicted on the community in 2017, when a Myanmar military crackdown against Rohingya militants triggered an exodus of some 700,000 people to Bangladesh.

As then, Rohingya are again fleeing the violence to Bangladesh, many crossing a border river in small boats.

On Monday, a crowded boat crossing the Naf River to Bangladesh sank killing 26 of those onboard, witnesses said, the latest in a spate of deadly accidents on the river.

"There were 30 people on the boat including 18 children. Only four survived. The rest died,” said one of the witnesses who declined to be identified because of security fears.

Rescue workers searching for bodies had found seven victims, including four children and a pregnant woman, he added.

Aung Kyaw Moe, deputy minister of human rights for Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government, said the boat was heading to Bangladesh because of intense fighting in Maungdaw township on the border between junta troops and the Arakan Army, or AA, insurgent group.

"They fled for their lives. They were worried about where the heavy artillery would fall,” he said. “The Naf River is dangerous because of the ebb and flow of the tide. They had to risk their lives."

Aung Kyaw Moe said the situation in Rakhine state was confusing because some areas were controlled by junta forces while others were in the hands of the AA, with tens of thousands of Rohingya caught up in the conflict.

The AA draws its support from the largely Buddhist ethnic Rakhine community, the majority in the state. The rebels are fighting Myanmar’s military for greater autonomy, in alliance with ethnic minority forces from other areas and democracy activists who took up arms after the army overthrew an elected government in 2021.

Both sides have been accused of killing Rohingya, with AA fighters blamed for attacking people believed to be supporting junta forces.

On Aug. 5, dozens of Rohingya people were killed by fire from heavy weapons as they waited for boats to cross to Bangladesh, survivors told Radio Free Asia. Some survivors said the AA was responsible though the insurgents denied that.

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Torched homes

On Aug. 12, Human Rights Watch said both the junta and the AA had committed extrajudicial killings and widespread arson against Rohingya, Rakhine and other civilians in Rakhine state.

“Ethnic Rohingya and Rakhine civilians are bearing the brunt of the atrocities that the Myanmar military and opposition Arakan Army are committing,” said the group’s Asia director Elaine Pearson. “Both sides are using hate speech, attacks on civilians, and massive arson to drive people from their homes and villages, raising the specter of ethnic cleansing.”

The recent attacks on Rohingya were “worse than in 2017” and represents a “second wave of genocide”, two experts told a press briefing in the United States this month.

There were about 60,000 displaced people in Rakhine state before the latest round of fighting resumed late last year but now there are more than 500,000, aid groups there say.

Echoing growing concerns about the Rohingya, the U.K.-based Burma Human Rights Network, or BHRN, called on Wednesday for the international community to protect Rohingya, particularly those in Maungdaw.

It cited witnesses as saying many Rohingya had been killed in boat accidents or from bombs on the banks of the Naf River. The group cited witnesses as saying AA fighters had torched Rohingya homes in Maungdaw. 

“These problems started when the junta forcibly recruited Rohingya for military service,” Kyaw Win, director of Burma Human Rights Network, told RFA. “If there are violations by AA troops on the ground, the AA needs to be exposed and action needs to be taken.”

The AA, in an Aug. 18 statement, accused “Muslim armed forces” of setting fire to homes and it warned that rights activists making accusations could affect harmony between ethnic groups. The AA said it had evacuated nearly 20,000 people, including Rohingya, from embattled Maungdaw town and would move more to safety.

Kyaw Win said forces opposed to the junta throughout the country, including the National Unity Government and other insurgent groups, had been reluctant to criticize the AA, their anti-junta ally. 

But he said the international community should investigate the AA's actions and take measures, including sanctions, if necessary.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Up to 200 Rohingya Muslims were killed in drone strikes last week in Burma as they attempted to flee to Bangladesh. This comes amid intensifying conflict between the military junta and the Arakan Army, a rebel armed group. Human Rights Watch says the military and the Arakan Army have both committed extrajudicial killings, unlawful recruitment for combat, and widespread arson against Rohingya civilians. “They are the enemy of each other, but when it comes to the Rohingya issue, they have the same intention,” says Nay San Lwin, co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition. Only about 600,000 Rohingya remain in Burma, down from about 1.4 million before a campaign of ethnic cleansing began in 2016, though Nay San Lwin says the Rohingya genocide goes back even further to 1978.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

Intense combat in Rakhine state’s Maungdaw township between ethnic insurgent Arakan Army and Myanmar military junta forces have caused thousands of Rohingya to leave the township’s administrative center and surrounding villages in search of safety.

More than 1,500 Rohingya have arrived in camps in Bangladesh over the last several days, a Rohingya resident of Bangladesh identified as Mahmud Hussain told Radio Free Asia. 

“About 500 are detained by the Bangladesh Border Guard force,” he said. “They are kept in one place. More than 1,000 people have arrived in the camp.”

About 1 million stateless Rohingya refugees live in tightly packed border camps in Bangladesh. Most fled there in 2017 to escape violent crackdowns in Rakhine state that were blamed on the Myanmar military.

But more Rohingya have been seeking refuge in Bangladesh lately as security has deteriorated in Rakhine state.

People are being charged 800,000 kyat (US$150) to be carried across by boat from Maungdaw to Bangladesh, according to Hasan, a 25-year-old Rohingya man who spoke to RFA earlier this week. 

On Monday, homemade rockets, artillery and drones were fired at Rohingya on a riverbank, leaving dozens of people dead. 

Witnesses who spoke to RFA put the death toll as high as 200, although RFA was unable to verify those estimates.

Several Rohingya told Radio Free Asia that the Arakan Army, or AA, were responsible for the attack. The AA denied in a statement on Wednesday that their troops fired the weapons.  

Maungdaw city flashpoints

The AA has recently made gains in its fight for control of Maungdaw township – part of a wider civil conflict that has consumed much of the country since a 2021 military coup.

Residents on Thursday told RFA that junta troops continue to fight fiercely to defend their positions.

“The AA is attacking at four or five places in Maungdaw city,” one resident said. 

Thousands of civilians are trapped in the city’s junta-controlled neighborhoods. In villages near fighting taking place outside of the city, AA troops have been escorting people – most of them Rohingya – to safer areas, residents who requested anonymity for security purposes said.

Various armed groups, including the AA and some smaller groups aligned with the junta, have been using Rohingya residents as human shields in the recent fighting, according to Rohingya rights activist Mamud Kasein.

“The current situation is very terrible,” he said. “All armed groups are concerned with these crimes. International organizations must protect these civilians.”

RFA was unable to contact AA spokesperson Khaing Thu Kha, junta spokesperson Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun and Rakhine state Attorney General Hla Thein on Friday.

The Bangladesh Embassy in Yangon didn’t immediately reply to an email sent Friday asking for comment on the numbers of Rohingya attempting to cross into Bangladesh.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The attacks on Monday were described variously as caused by homemade rockets, artillery and drones that destroyed a motorboat and hit crowds of people who gathered on the Naf River. The victims were fleeing recent intense fighting between the ethnic insurgent Arakan Army and Myanmar junta forces.

Video seen by RFA and circulated on social media showed dozens of bodies on a riverbank, some of them mutilated, amid suitcases and scattered possessions. RFA could not immediately verify the date or location of the citizen-shot video.

Hasan, a 25-year-old Rohingya man who was unharmed in the attack, told RFA that it was carried out by the Arakan Army, or AA, which has made gains in its fight for control of Maungdaw township in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state – part of a wider civil conflict that has consumed much of the country since a 2021 military coup.

“The junta did not attack us with rockets. It was carried out by the AA. We tried to flee to Bangladesh for our survival,” he said. “The victims are our villagers.”

Rohingya have recently been expelled from Maungdaw city’s downtown area, where many had fled because of fighting in rural areas, according to Wai Wai Nu, a Burmese activist and visiting senior research fellow at University of California, Berkeley.

The situation in Maungdaw is a “deadly catastrophe” as Rohingya civilians are being targeted for “escalating atrocities,” she wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. 

“I’m being informed of mass killings of 50+ #Rohingya civilians by the #Arakan Army, among many other brutalities,” she wrote, citing community sources. “Rohingya are also being killed in crossfires of armed conflict between #Myanmar junta & #AA by drones & heavy weaponry.”

Witnesses who spoke to RFA put the death toll as high as 200. RFA was unable to verify those estimates.

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AA’s denial

Maungdaw is a key trade hub for goods flowing in and out of Myanmar via Bangladesh. The city of Maungdaw is the township’s administrative center and has served as an important base for junta forces in Rakhine state.

In a statement on Wednesday, the AA expressed its condolences for the victims at the Naf River but said it wasn’t responsible for the deaths, which it noted took place in an area of Maungdaw township that isn’t under its control.

The AA also noted that it began warning civilians in Maungdaw township to leave their homes on June 16, just before fighting intensified for Maungdaw city. 

RFA attempted to contact AA spokesperson Khaing Thu Kha via Telegram to ask about the attacks but he didn’t immediately respond. 

The AA, which has long fought against central rule in Myanmar, claims to represent everyone living in Rakhine state but is predominantly Buddhist and has previously been accused of atrocities against Rohingya.

Rohingya activist Ro San Lwin, who is based in Europe, said he was also told that the AA targeted Rohingya civilians with rocket attacks, which he said should be designated as crimes against humanity and war crimes.

“We have informed this attack to foreign governments, relevant governments, Western governments and ASEAN countries,” he said. “They have reportedly contacted the AA to persuade the AA not to do so.”

Trapped in Maungdaw

About 1 million stateless Rohingya refugees live in tightly packed border camps in Bangladesh. Most fled there in 2017 to escape violent crackdowns in Rakhine state that were blamed on the Myanmar military.

The flow of people seeking refuge in Bangladesh has picked up as security has deteriorated due to the latest fighting in Rakhine state. Over the last two days, about 1,000 Rohingya have entered Bangladesh, a person who has lived in one of the Bangladesh camps since 2017 told RFA.

That’s despite the recent domestic political turmoil that has gripped Bangladesh. Earlier this week, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina resigned and left the country following weeks of protests and deadly clashes in the capital, Dhaka. 

People are being charged 800,000 kyat (US$150) to be carried across from Maungdaw to Bangladesh, Hasan said. Those who cannot afford the fee – likely thousands of people – are still trapped in Maungdaw, he said.

On Tuesday, a boat carrying Rohingya capsized in the Naf River, killing at least 10 people, including children.

Authorities in Teknaf in Bangladesh told Agence France-Presse that 29 Rohingya were on board and just 10 bodies have been recovered. Some of those on the boat were able to swim to shore, according to the report.

Elsewhere in Rakhine state, about 100 civilians were arrested in Sittwe on Monday night as junta troops conducted security checks out of concern that AA members had infiltrated the state capital, residents said. 

A battle between the AA and the junta for control of Sittwe has been anticipated for months. Junta troops prepared for the defense of the city by deploying heavy weapons, warships and ground forces in surrounding villages.

RFA was unable to reach junta spokesman Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun for comment on the situation in Maungdaw and Sittwe.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Matt Reed.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Wai Mar Tun for RFA Burmese.

Smugglers are targeting members of the stateless Rohingya Muslim minority who are trying to flee clashes between Myanmar’s junta and the Arakan Army, one of the most prominent militias, according to interviews with authorities and Rohingya who recently arrived at a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar district.

Police said they had tightened security at the border, but conceded that more people had been crossing over from Myanmar in recent weeks.

“As the sound of explosions continued on the Myanmar side, I learned that a part of the Rohingyas are staying in different places on the bank of the Naf river on Myanmar’s side,” Teknaf Municipality Panel Mayor Mujibur Rahman told BenarNews.

Mohammad Yusuf, a Rohingya who recently traveled to Bangladesh from the Buthidaung area of Rakhine, said he stayed in the mountains for 40 days where he survived by eating leaves.

“There were 13 members of my family. But suddenly one day, a bomb exploded in my village, and then everyone ran away to save their lives. It is not known where the rest have gone,” he told BenarNews. “We, two brothers together, walked for three days in the hilly area and swam across the river. We were accompanied by seven other people from other villages on the journey.” 

While Yusuf’s group traveled to Bangladesh, he said others worked with brokers to go to Indonesia or Malaysia.

“Families who have money are mainly trying to send young people [away from Myanmar] as youths become targets of both the Arakan Army and Myanmar military,” he said.

Authorities said smugglers – known as “brokers” locally – are active on both sides of the Naf, which marks the border between southeastern Bangladesh and northwestern Myanmar.

The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, said over 70,000 Rohingya were trapped in Rakhine as fighting rages.

Community leaders said brokers were collecting money from Rohingya to leave Myanmar, but did not release any details about recent crossings.

Mohammad Amir Zafar, who commands an Armed Police Battalion (APBn) in Bangladesh, said Rohingya who have been forced from their homes are willing to pay to get across the border.

“The brokers who are involved in this work will be brought to justice,” he told BenarNews.

Along with the APBn, members of the Bangladesh Coast Guard and Border Guard Bangladesh are stationed near the border to prevent infiltration.

Route to safety

Many Rohingya walked from their homes in Rakhine state to the Naf river, where brokers sat in boats waiting to collect fees to carry them across the river.

Mohammad Saje, who entered Bangladesh on June 28 ago and took shelter at a camp with a relative, said he and 12 others crossed the river during heavy rain.

“My home is at Buthidaung. Everything has been destroyed in the war there. My father was killed by a mortar shell attack,” he told BenarNews, adding that the Arakan Army entered his village and ordered everyone leave within an hour. 

“After that, we left the area with some food. Sixty youths were caught by the Arakan Army – I don’t know what happened to them, adding, “I saw with my own eyes the scene of the killing of many young men on the way.” 

Arriving near the river in Maungdaw, he and others took shelter for three days before paying 400,000 kyat (U.S. $190) each for a ride across the river. 

Refugee camps in and around Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, seen as safe locations, are home to about 1 million Rohingya, including over 740,000 who have fled from Myanmar since a military crackdown in August 2017. 

Not all who flee from Myanmar are safe. On June 22, a Rohingya identified as Md. Anwar lost a leg in a land-mine explosion along the border as he tried to cross over from the Myanmar side.

On Tuesday, a Rohingya was killed in a mine blast near the border after crossing into Bangladesh, officials said.

Cox’s Bazar police station officer-in-charge Saiful Islam said the man, identified as Mohammad Ayash and who was between the ages of 22 and 25, undertook the border crossing during heavy rain.

“He was brought to Cox’s Bazar Sadar Hospital with injuries around 3 p.m. But the duty doctor said that he died before he was brought to the hospital,” Saiful Islam said. 

BenarNews is an online news outlet affiliated with Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Abdur Rahman and Ahammad Foyez for BenarNews.

Twelve Rohingya civilians were killed in junta airstrikes targeting fighters from the Arakan Army, or AA, in Buthidaung township on Friday.  Later in the day, the Arakan Army bombed  a school where Rohingyas were sheltering with drones, killing 18 of them, residents said.

About 200 people were wounded, a Buthidaung Rohingya resident who identified himself as Khin Zaw Moe told RFA.

“People are scared. The casualties may be even higher,” he said. “The exact number is not known due to the difficulty in communicating.”

Rohingyas from about 20 villages were sheltering in the high school when it was attacked, he said. It was not clear why the Arakan Army bombed the school.

RFA tried to telephone the AA spokesman, Khaing Thukha, and the junta’s Rakhine State spokesperson, Hla Thein, but could not get through to either of them. 

The AA, who are battling the junta for self-determination of the Buddhist ethnic Arakan community in the state, said in a statement on Saturday its forces had captured all junta bases in Buthidaung. It did not mention Rohingya civilians.

Rohingya, who have been persecuted for decades in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, are getting caught up in the war between the AA and junta forces, human rights workers  say.

Both sides have pressed Rohingya into their ranks and at the same time have accused Rohingya of helping their rivals. Both the AA and junta forces subjected members of the Muslim minority to violence, residents and rights workers say.

Another Rohingya resident of Buthidaung said the AA burned down homes in eight neighborhoods of the town although he didn’t know how many of the homes had been destroyed.

Rohingya activist Nay San Lwin told RFA that tens of thousands of Rohingyas had fled from their homes after the AA ordered them to leave the town by 10 a.m. on Saturday.

Another township resident told RFA on Saturday that AA fighters had rounded up thousands of Rohingya near Buthidaung prison. 

RFA was unable to confirm any of the accounts because telephone lines and internet links were down.

More than 700,000 Rohingya fled from a Myanmar military crackdown in 2017, in response to a series of attacks on the security forces by Rohingya insurgents. Most of those refugees are sheltering in camps in southeast Bangladesh, where they joined hundreds of thousands who fled earlier abuses.

More than half a million Rohingya remain in Rakhine State, many of them in camps for the internally displaced. Rohingya activists estimate the Rohingya population of Buthidaung to be around 200,000. 

Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Members of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and the smaller Rohingya Solidarity Organization have taken their fellow Muslim Rohingya refugees from the camps for military training, said people living in the world’s largest camp in southeast Bangladesh.

RFA could not reach either of the insurgent groups for comment nor authorities responsible for the camps in Bangladesh.

The reports, if confirmed, could herald intensifying conflict in western Myanmar’s Rakhine State where residents say the Myanmar junta has been pressing members of the persecuted Rohingya minority to help battle one of Myanmar most powerful insurgent forces, the Arakan Army, which draws it support from the state’s majority ethnic Rakhine Buddhist community.

“Everyone is running from the camp,” said one Rohingya refugee who declined to be identified fearing for his safety.

“Children under the age of 18 are being caught and sold to those groups … it’s said they are being sent to the Burma side to reinforce in the battles but I don’t know who they’re fighting against.”

The refugees had been detained in the camps between April 29 and May 8, most of them between the ages of 14 and 30, said the refugee, who complained that Bangladesh authorities were doing nothing to stop the abductions, which averaged at about one young man per household.

ARSA fighters attacked a string of Myanmar government border posts in 2017, triggering a sweeping crackdown by the Myanmar army that sent some one million Rohingya villagers fleeing to safety in Bangladesh.

The rebel force, which is seeking self-determination in the state, surged in strength in the wake of that violence and is now one of Myanmar’s main groups fighting junta forces to end military rule.

 “These are terrorist organizations,” another refugee said of the two groups whose members he said came at night to press-gang people. “Even 12 or 14-year-old children were among those arrested.”

Rohingya villagers still living in Myanmar appear increasingly at risk as the junta army and the Arakan insurgents battle it out.

Since the Arakan Army stepped up its attacks on the military in November, both sides have been accused of recruiting or killing Rohingya from camps for internally displaced people in Rakhine State.

The ARSA has in the past been accused of violence against its own members living in Bangladesh and of faith-based massacres on Hindu villagers.

Nearly one million refugees live in the camps in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district, according to the latest U.N. figures. 

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Kiana Duncan and Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The latest round of compulsory conscription among the stateless Muslim minority comes a month after about 1,000 Rohingya from elsewhere in Rakhine were made to join the military in March. 

More broadly, more than 100,000 young men have fled their homes since the military announced in February it would implement a draft to shore up its ranks after a series of battlefield defeats, according to a report released by the Burmese Affairs and Conflict Study.

Myanmar has been wracked by civil war ever since the military overthrew the civilian-led government in a 2021 coup. Amid the battlefield setbacks over the past six months, the military has said it plans to conscript 50,000 young men and women each year – and is forcibly recruiting Rohingya in Rakhine state to meet quotas.

The effort comes in a state where just seven years ago, the military tortured, raped and killed thousands of Rohingya and sent nearly 1 million fleeing into neighboring Bangladesh.

The 300 Rohingya recruits were taken this week from more than 30 villages in Sittwe township and were all between 18- to 30-years-old, a Rohingya village administrator who wished to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals told RFA.

They were taken by police cars to the military’s Regional Command Headquarters in Sittwe to prepare for training, he said.

Soldiers are now pressing those who remain in a patchwork of villages and internally displaced camps into service to prop up their struggling military campaign in the state against the ethnic Arakan Army. 

In exchange for their service, the junta has promised would-be Rohingya fighters freedom of movement as well as small amounts of food and money. 

‘Worrying around the clock’

Junta officials have communicated through village elders and administrators during the conscription process, according to a Rohingya woman who lives in Sittwe who requested not to be named for security reasons. 

“The officials entice the locals with national identity cards and salary,” she said. “They forced village elders to provide young Rohingya to protect the country. But as Rohingya youth are fishermen, they are not suitable for military service.”

None of the recruits are willing to undergo military training, but they face arrest and beatings if they refuse, she said.

“People in Rakhine state are worrying around the clock about the recruitment for military training,” the village administrator said. “Some people have fled from their homes to other places.”

The 1,000 Rohingya who were recruited in March were put through a two-week training. Afterward, some were deployed to the battlefields while others were sent back to their villages or IDP camps as reserves, residents told RFA.

RFA attempted to contact Attorney General Hla Thein, the junta spokesman for Rakhine state, to ask about this week’s recruitment, but he didn’t answer phone calls.

Pressed into service

Since Myanmar’s conscription law was announced by Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing on Feb. 10, troops nationwide have attempted to press-gang large numbers into the dwindling military. 

It requires men and women aged 18 to 35 to serve in the junta’s armed forces for two years – prompting more than 100,000 to flee their homes to avoid the draft, the Burmese Affairs and Conflict Study found.

The junta has carried out operations to enforce the military service law in 224 townships across the country, the report said. Approximately 5,000 young men were sent to 15 military training sites by the end of March, it said. 

In addition, more than 2,000 people from 40 townships across Myanmar have been enlisted as militia – a number that includes the Rohingya who were recruited in March, the report found.

A resident of Mandalay said people are anxiously watching for the recruitment process to begin again, now that the recent Thingyan water festival holiday has concluded.

“It is anticipated that they will start it in May,” he said. “People are curious about what will happen following Thingyan.”

Eventually, the new recruits will be called on for frontline combat operations, according to former military officer Lin Htet Aung, who participated in the non-violent Civil Disobedience Movement after the coup.

“When the regular army no longer possesses the capacity to execute these tasks, it becomes evident that this deliberate strategy aims to rely solely on the youth of the populace as their military force,” he told RFA.

Translated by Aung Naing and Kalyar Lwin. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The five ethnic Rohingya men were arrested by the Arakan Army in Rakhine State’s Maungdaw township on April 17, they said. Their bodies were found on Monday. The Arakan Army denied killing the men.

Rohingya Muslims have faced persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar for generations. Recently, they have been targeted by the junta in a recruitment drive to bolster their army’s numbers. Many Rohingya have been forced to move into poorly equipped camps because of a surge in fighting between members of the Arakan Army, drawn largely from the Buddhist community, and junta forces. Travel bans and security blockades have further affected many residents of the state.

The five men, from Ah Bu Gyar village,  had not been heard from after they were detained, one person close to the family of one of the dead said. 

The Arakan Army detained the men for interrogation after clashing with members of a Muslim insurgent group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, near the village, residents said. 

“They have been arrested since April 17 and have not been able to contact their families. [The Arakan Army] said they would release them,” said one resident, who declined to be identified for security reasons. “But on April 22, some villagers found them at the Ywet Nyo Taung creek shore.”

The families did not  know why the five were killed, one relative said, adding that relatives were also not allowed to collect the bodies.

Sources close to the families identified the victims as Abdul Amen, 54, a former village secretary, Malawe Mohamed Sayad, 40, Aisalam, 61, Arbul Karlam and Numar Lal Hakem 27.

Arakan Army spokesman Khaing Thukha told RFA his group did not arrest the five residents, nor did it kill detainees. The group had “nothing to do,” with the case, he said.

“We would never do this kind of lawless and unjust killing,” Khaing Thuka told RFA.

Khaing Thukha said various insurgent groups and drugs gangs operated in the region

“It’s a complex area,” he said. “Among the criminal gangs, there are sometimes murders because one side is not satisfied with the other.”

He also said that people opposed to the Arakan Army could be trying to damage its reputation in the community.

Arakan Army fighters attacked a police station near the border with Bangladesh, near Maungdaw township’s Ywet Nyo Taung village, on April 17, residents said. Almost all villagers in the area had abandoned their homes and fled after the attack.

A Myanmar army offensive in the area launched after insurgent attacks on police posts in 2017 sparked an exodus of some 750,000 refugees into Bangladesh.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Kiana Duncan and Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

About 1 million Rohingya refugees have lived in Bangladesh since 2017, when an operation by Myanmar’s military drove them across the border. Hundreds of thousands more, though, remain in Myanmar, and have been designated as “stateless” by the United Nations.

In its annual human rights country reports, which detail the rights situation in each of the world’s countries and were released Monday, the State Department says the Rohingya remaining in Myanmar continue to face “severe discrimination based on their ethnicity.”

In many cases, the Myanmar country report says, Rohingya civilians are even taken to be fair targets for military operations amid the country’s civil war, which has hit the ethnic minority hard.

On Aug. 25, it notes, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army claimed responsibility for attacks on a series of security outposts in northern Rakhine state, which led to the deaths of 12 security personnel. 

In response, the security forces and “local vigilante groups” then “committed widespread atrocities against Rohingya villagers.”

The atrocities included “extrajudicial killings, disappearances, rape, torture, arbitrary arrest, and burning of tens of thousands of homes and some religious structures and other buildings.”

“These atrocities and associated events forced more than 655,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh as of December,” says the report, “and constituted ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya.”

Uyghur genocide

The China country report noted that many of the 1.8 million Uyghurs who have been “detained in the government’s mass arbitrary detention campaign” still “remain imprisoned” to this day, despite the Chinese government’s claims that most of the camps have now closed.

China’s government says that the camps, which it claims are in fact vocational training centers, were mostly closed in mid-2019, with the detained Uyghurs having graduated and found employment. 

U.S. officials have said in the past that the claims are questionable. 

The 2023 human rights country report for China says that the genocide against the mostly Muslim Uyghurs in the far western region of Xinjiang continued last year, with “forced disappearances” against Uyghurs also not abating.

“Genocide and crimes against humanity occurred during the year in China against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang,” the report says. 

In many cases, family members of Uyghurs who are subjected to “forced disappearances” and not even informed as to the location of the person detained, or the length of time they will be detained.

For other RFA target countries – including North Korea, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam – the 2023 report noted few overall changes.

“There were no significant changes in the human rights situation,” the reports for those countries say, even if the situation remains poor.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alex Willemyns for RFA.

Just before midnight on Feb. 25, Ali opened his door to see junta soldiers pointing guns at him. Myanmar’s military had been making its way through Rakhine state, as part of a newly launched forced conscription campaign and the young Rohingya man was their latest victim.  

Ali (whose name has been changed for security reasons) said they pushed him into a car and brought him to the Light Infantry Battalion No. 535 military camp in Buthidaung. The next day, a tactical operation commander urged the new recruits to take their military training seriously, offering them a deal. 

If these Rohingya men formed a militia and held off the Arakan Army, which had recently made significant gains against the junta in Rakhine state, Ali and his fellow conscripts would be given legal status. They promised him a salary of 1,000,000 kyats along with rations.

"They demonstrated how to shoot the gun, how to walk, and how to avoid [injury] during the battle,” he said. They told him that the training would last 14 days, after which they would be prepared to form militias to fight the AA. 

“He tried to persuade us, saying that we were brought there in consideration of our religion. He also quoted the Prophet Muhammad, saying that we need to fight for our faith,” said Ali, who managed to escape after 10 days. 

The invocation of the prophet likely came as a bitter irony for the Rohingya conscripts, who are not legally recognized as citizens and whose ethnic and religious identity has long made them the targets of violence, particularly from Myanmar’s military, or Tatmadaw.

Seven years after the Tatmadaw tortured, raped and killed thousands of Rohingya and sent nearly 1 million fleeing into neighboring Bangladesh, soldiers are now pressing pressing those who remain in a patchwork of villages and IDP camps into service to prop up their struggling military campaign. 

Myanmar’s military, which came to power in a Feb. 2021 coup, has faced mounting battlefield losses since October. Earlier this year, the military announced a draft law that would see 50,000 young men and women forcibly recruited each year. Since then, thousands of civilians across the country have been pressed into military service, while countless more have fled. 

But the military appears to be forcibly conscripting Rohingya in particularly large numbers, according to accounts given to Radio Free Asia by village residents and those who escaped training.

“These Rohingya are being forced into military service. They are being unlawfully detained, thrust into frontline combat, and compelled to participate,” said Nay San Lwin, co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition. “Thus, the ongoing genocide against our people persists.” 

Replenishing its ranks

In late October, the Arakan Army, Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army and Ta’ang National Liberation Army — in partnership with other ethnic armed groups and anti-junta forces — began making significant gains against the leadership. “Operation 1027” launched by the Three Brotherhood Alliance initially saw mass surrenders and a number of key cities taken over in northern Shan state. 

In March, an ethnic army captured a major trade route near the China border. And most recently, the Arakan Army, or AA, has captured six of Rakhine state’s 17 townships. By early April, the AA held 170 junta camps. 

Faced with mounting losses in Rakhine, the junta have been forcibly recruiting Rohingya in high numbers from the internally displaced camps in which they have been forced to live for years. In exchange for their service, the junta has promised would-be fighters freedom of movement as well as small amounts of food and money — intended to appeal to a desperately poor population. 

“Initially enticed by a bag of rice and fifty thousand kyats, they volunteered for the first round of training,” said a Rohingya man who had familiarity with the situation and asked to remain anonymous for security concerns. “Some even returned for a second session. However, after witnessing fatalities among those deployed to the frontline during battles, many hesitate to participate for a third time out of fear."

In the Rohingya camps, young men are reportedly being forced into service by the hundreds — far more than the estimated two or three youths called up per village elsewhere in the country. 

Starting in late February, residents reported forcible enlistments of Rohingyas from Kyaukphyu, Sittwe and Buthidaung townships. Among those coerced into military service are Rohingyas residing in IDP camps including South Ohn Taw Gyi, North Ohn Taw Gyi, Baw Du Pha I, Baw Du Pha II, Hman Si Taung, Thea Chaung, and Thet Kay Pyin.

Over the span of a single month, nearly one thousand Rohingya refugees underwent military training in three separate batches, according to residents. RFA has previously reported that captives are threatened with violent deaths if they refuse to take part in the training and told their families would be targeted if they flee.  

Given the scant training, once they are sent to the frontlines, the Rohingya fighters appear to be little more than human shields. The Rohingya witness said that those sent off to fight were dying at an extraordinarily high rate. 

"Out of about hundred trainees, 61 died while 41 sustained injuries and are currently hospitalized.”

The AA, too, has reported large numbers of Rohingya fighter casualties. In a March 17 press statement, the group said that when they took control of the junta camps in Rathedaung, they discovered the bodies of several Rohingya who had undergone brief military training and were deployed to the front lines. The release included photos of the killed men.

Approximately 600 out of the nearly 1,000 Rohingyas who underwent military training were sent back as reservists to their respective refugee camps in the second week of March. However, the status of the remaining 300 is unknown, according to another Rohingya witness who asked not to be named for security reasons. He also said that because the junta is calling back the Rohingya who were returned to the camps, some of them are fleeing because they are afraid of being sent to the battlefield again.

Breaking the law 

The night Ali was taken was a busy one for the Myanmar military’s conscription drive in Rakhine. 

According to accounts provided by IDP camp residents, on Feb. 25 and 26 alone, 39 Rohingya from four villages and wards in Buthidaung township were forced into training by the Light Infantry Battalion No. 535.

In Kyaukphyu, the Light Infantry Battalion No. 542 trained around 100 Rohingyas from Kyauk Ta Lone Rohingya IDP camp for a period of 14 days, commencing at the end of February, according to locals.

Fifty of them were outfitted with military uniforms and weaponry on March 28 and were assigned security duties at four army camps within the township, said a young woman from Kyauk Ta Lone village who preferred to remain anonymous for security reasons.

Given their lack of citizenship status, Rohingya legally should not be eligible for conscription, lawyers have told RFA. And the junta seems to be skirting its own conscription law in other ways. 

The military draft law stipulates that those eligible for direct service are men aged 18-35 and women aged 18-27. Professionals – such as doctors, engineers and technicians – aged 18-45 for men and 18-35 for women must also serve. But the Kyauk Ta Lone resident said Rohingya far outside that age range were drafted.

"They brought young people from 18 to over 40. People up to 55 years old were also called up for training,” she said. “All are Muslims."

RFA could not independently confirm these accounts. An official from the Rakhine State Committee on Summoning People’s Military Service said he was not the right person to speak to about the matter while Hla Thein, the Rakhine state attorney general and spokesperson of the junta, did not respond to calls.

For Ali, who remains in hiding lest he be killed for desertion, the forced recruitment represents only the latest brutality levied by the military. 

“They carried out attacks [against us in 2017] and now they are trying to use kind words to persuade us. I really hate them because they have destroyed our lives.”

Translated by Aung Naing and Kalyar Lwin. Edited by Abby Seiff, Malcolm Foster, Joshua Lipes, and Boer Deng.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Some 1 million Rohingya refugees have been living across the border in Bangladesh since 2017, when they were driven out of Myanmar by a military clearance operation. 

Another 630,000 living within Myanmar are designated stateless by the United Nations, including those who languish in camps and are restricted from moving freely in Rakhine state.

The killings since the Nov. 13 start of the conflict in Rakhine state have further traumatized the Rohingya community and left them fearing for their lives when airplanes appear overhead, they told RFA.

An investigation by RFA found that at least 79 Rohingyas were killed and 127 injured by junta bombardment in Rakhine state as of Monday. They include 27 dead and 43 injured in Minbya township, 24 and 45 in Buthidaung, 17 and 17 in Kyauktaw, four and 17 in Mrauk-U, and seven and five in Sittwe.

At least two mass casualty incidents occurred over the same period.

On March 18, an airstrike on Minbya’s Thar Dar village killed 22 Rohingya and injured 29, according to residents. In January, junta artillery strikes on Buthidaung’s Hpon Nyo Leik village killed 12 and injured 32, sources in the region told RFA.

‘We’re just victims’

A Rohingya resident of Thar Dar village called the mass killing in March “heartbreaking” and questioned why members of his ethnic group are being caught up in the conflict.

“We [Rohingyas] don’t want to take over the country and we aren’t attacking [the military],” he said, adding that the Rohingya simply want to live their lives in peace. “We’re just victims of conflict [between two other groups].”

Restrictions on the Rohingya’s movement make it difficult for members of the community to earn an adequate income. Few have the means to relocate amid the fighting in Rakhine.

A Rohingya from Kyauktaw’s Let Saung Kauk village, where junta bombardment killed six people in February, called the military’s fighter jets “messengers of death” for his community.

“We live in fear that the junta will drop bombs and cry when we hear fighter jets,” he said. “We don’t know whether to flee or stay here and die.”

Attacks on civilians and forced recruitment

Nay San Lwin, a Rohingya activist, said that the junta targets civilians in response to attacks by the Arakan Army, or AA.

"The armed conflict in Rakhine state is between the AA and the army, but the junta responds not only by attacking the AA, but also civilians,” he said. “The military always commits massacres. They burn down villages. Civilians, including Rohingyas, are suffering great losses in the conflicts.”

Myanmar’s military is desperate for new recruits after suffering devastating losses on the battlefield to the AA in Rakhine state. Since November, the military has surrendered Pauktaw, Minbya, Mrauk-U, Kyauktaw, Myay Pon, Ponnagyun, Ramree and Rathedaung townships in the state, as well as Paletwa township in neighboring Chin state.

Residents say the military has forcibly recruited more than 1,000 Rohingyas in Buthidaung, Sittwe, Maungtaw and Kyauktaw townships for military service, and has forced Rohingyas to hold public protests against the AA.

Attempts to contact junta spokesperson Major General Zaw Min Tun for comment on RFA’s findings went unanswered Monday.

RFA’s investigation also found that junta artillery fire, airstrikes, landmines and small weapons fire killed some 187 civilians and injured 531 others in the four months since the start of the conflict in Rakhine state.

Translated by Aung Naing. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

But a representative of the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, said little money was left over after aid cuts that currently see the refugees provided with only $10 worth of food a month.

About 90% of the 1.2 million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh struggled to have “acceptable food consumption” late last year, according to the World Food Programme, when their monthly ration of food was bumped up from about $8 to about $10 per person. 

Speaking at an event on Capitol Hill to mark two years since the United States labelled Myanmar’s atrocities in 2017 against the Rohingya a “genocide,” the activists said aid was not always spent in ways most helpful for the Rohingya refugees living in Cox’s Bazar.

“There are ways to do it effectively,” said Yasmin Ullah, a Canada-based rights activist born in Myanmar’s Rakhine state and the director of the Rohingya Maiyafuinor Collaborative Network.

The activist said her group had raised $20,000 through crowdfunding to be disbursed by refugee-run groups in the camp to improve livelihoods there. But she noted global aid flows were far larger.

“We know our issues. We know how and where to put this money. We can run with $10,000 farther than any other humanitarian groups can,” she said. “We are asking for aid to be utilized and to directly go to refugee-led initiatives and refugee-led organizations.”

Unsolved problems

Aid for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh has dwindled, with less than two-thirds of the approximately $850 million in annual aid requested by aid agencies in the country being fulfilled, a U.N. report said.

Lucky Karim, a Rohingya refugee who resettled in the U.S. state of Illinois in 2022 and now works with the International Campaign for the Rohingya, said that any international aid sent to help people in the camps “means a lot to us as refugees” and was appreciated.

But she questioned why the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into the camps each year were not improving conditions.

“It’s not about how many years the U.S. has been supporting Rohingya,” Karim said. “What are you guys able to solve?”

“Did you solve the labor issue? Did you solve the sexual and domestic and the other violence in the camps? Did you solve the human trafficking issue? Did you figure out the security risks at the camp? Did you figure out and identify the gangs and the nonstate actors in the camp at night?” she said. “Those are the only questions we have.”

Requests for more help, she added, were “not just about increasing funding,” with many Rohingyas understanding funds are limited. 

“When it comes to the funding issue, when I talked to USAID, for example, they're like, ‘Oh no Lucky, we have other places in war, like Gaza, for example, and Ukraine, for example,’” Karim recounted, noting there were “many other cases coming up every few years.”

Like Ullah, she said some aid could be spent more effectively.

“The amount of funding you're sending to Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar and elsewhere should go to the right people at the right time to the needed situations,” she said. “How do you ensure it without Rohingya’s involvement in the decision making process?”

Limited funds

Peter Young, the USAID director for South and Central Asia, told the event that the United States had sent more than $1.9 billion in aid to support Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh since the 2017 genocide.

But he acknowledged the global aid being made available “is not sufficient to meet the needs of people” in the refugee camps. What was once a $12 monthly food ration to the refugees, he explained, was cut to just $8 last year before the eventual bump back to $10.

At the end of the day, he said, aid groups were left grappling with the fact they have few funds left after disbursing those meager rations.

“We certainly agree with – as Lucky said – the importance of working with and through the Rohingya community,” Young said. “We do make sure our projects that are implemented there are staffed by Rohingya there [or] developed in consultation with community leaders.”

“At the same time, if you do the math, $10 a month for a million people consumes our entire budget pretty quickly,” he said. “So the bandwidth that we have to do other programming besides food is limited.”

One of the first priorities for the refugee camps outside of food would be “durable shelters,” Young said, due to both the propensity of the camps to be hit by devastating disasters and the “understanding that there will be a lot of people there for some time into the future.”

But for the Rohingya activists, that’s only a start.

Karim, the Illinois-based refugee, said little will change in the camps until Rohingyas are given some decision-making powers – and “not just coming to D.C. every six months” for forums on Capitol Hill.

“You take a bunch of notes, you leave us, you forget us,” the activist said. “We want a specific seat at the table.”

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alex Willemyns for RFA.

Some of the 75 Rohingya who were rescued had told officials that the wooden boat was carrying around 150 members of the stateless minority group from Myanmar, but an Indonesian official, who declared an end to the search operation on Thursday, later pushed back at reports that people had died.

On Friday, the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR said it feared that more than 70 refugees were dead or had gone missing from the boat that overturned in waters off West Aceh regency last Wednesday.

Of the 11 bodies recovered from the capsized boat, six were found relatively close to each other in waters off Jaya district in West Aceh, on Monday afternoon, said Mirza Safrinadi, an operations commander at the local Search and Rescue Task Force.

“The bodies were initially spotted by local fishermen and reported to authorities. Because the location was near Banda Aceh, the [search-and-rescue] team quickly responded to evacuate the victims,” he said.

The bodies were transported to Calang City and then transferred to Teuku Umar General Hospital in Aceh Jaya district.

One body was discovered by fishermen who were searching for turtle eggs at a beach in Arongan Lambalek District, West Aceh, on Monday morning, Mirza said.

“After discussions with UNHCR and IOM [International Organization for Migration], we can confirm that these individuals were Rohingya refugees who were victims of the capsized boat incident,” Mirza said.

The bodies were laid to rest in the mass cemetery in West Aceh for victims of the 2004 tsunami in Aceh, an official said. Two more bodies of Rohingya refugees, found on Saturday and Sunday, were also laid to rest in the same cemetery.

Of the 11 dead refugees, nine were women, said Faisal Rahman, a UNHCR protection associate.

Boat originated in Bangladesh

Of the 75 Rohingya rescued, six were saved on March 20, and 69 others, who had been clinging to their wooden boat for nearly a day and were suffering from hunger and dehydration, were brought ashore the next day. 

Supriadi, the captain of the search-and-rescue ship that saved 69 refugees, on Friday took issue with the UNHCR and IOM’s contention that 76 people may have perished or were missing at sea.

He said he didn’t believe this was the case because the 69 (of 75) refugees rescued Thursday “had clear coordinates provided by fishermen who witnessed the refugees in distress.” 

“If there are still victims, where are they located?” he had said.

Meanwhile, UNHCR’s Faisal said the agency was able to get more clarity on how many passengers were on the boat and where it had originated.

Faisal said that after collecting more data the agency concluded that there were 142 Rohingya refugees and seven crew members on the boat.

Additionally, he said the boat had not originated in Malaysia with Australia as the planned destination as they were originally told, he said.

The boat had left from Cox’s Bazar in southwestern Bangladesh, where the refugee camps host some 1 million Rohingya, including 740,000 who fled a brutal military crackdown  by the Myanmar military in 2017.

“Through our interviews with several refugees, we can confirm that they departed from Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh,” Faisal said.

“Initially, they were headed to Malaysia, where some of their family members already resided. Others had plans to reach Indonesia.”

This latest incident occurred amid the increasing arrival of Rohingya refugee boats in Indonesia. 

“In 2023 alone, more than 2,300 Rohingya refugees arrived [in Indonesia], with a significant increase from November onwards. This number exceeds the number of arrivals in the previous four years as a whole,” UNHCR and IOM said.

The Rohingya have been accommodated in locations across Aceh, according to the UNHCR.

UNHCR reported that 569 Rohingya refugees had died or gone missing at sea last year, as they made the perilous journey by sea to oppression in their home country or the crowded and violent refugee camps in southwestern Bangladesh to get to Southeast Asia.

Pizaro Gozali Idrus in Jakarta contributed to this report. BenarNews is an online news outlet affiliated with Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Nurdin Hasan for BenarNews.

Those rescued were brought to shore for medical treatment, said Supriadi, captain of the rescue ship, even as some locals protested their arrival. Six others from the same boat were rescued Wednesday by local fishermen.

“When they were found, they were weak due to dehydration and perhaps had not eaten for several days,” said Supriadi, who goes by one name. 

Authorities reported that search efforts were complete.

A video taken by a fisherman on Wednesday showed more than 50 Rohingya standing on the overturned hull of the barely visible boat as they frantically waved for help. The boat had flipped over in waters off Kuala Bubon port (16 nautical miles from Meulaboh), possibly after being struck by large waves, according to officials.

Zaned Salim, one of the original six to be rescued, said 150 Rohingya departed from a Malaysian refugee camp 24 days ago, hoping to sail to Australia, adding that about 50 people had died during the journey. Authorities said they did not recover any bodies during rescue efforts, adding that those efforts were finished. 

Meanwhile, hundreds of residents blocked roads in protest against the latest Rohingya arrival. 

“The residents demand that the Rohingya refugees not be placed in their village,” said Iswahyudi, West Aceh’s deputy police chief, who goes by one name.

Local journalists reported that villagers were carrying banners and shouting their opposition to the refugees’ presence. 

“We do not accept refugees here. … Why bring them to our village?” said one resident.

Indonesia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, but has a long history of hosting refugees from various conflicts. It allows refugees to stay temporarily, while they wait for a third country to resettle them, a process that can take years.

Aceh has a history of welcoming Rohingya, specifically, but there has been growing resistance fueled by negative sentiment on social media. Some residents claimed there are not enough resources for both themselves and the Rohingya.

Faisal Rahman, an associate with the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) praised the collaborative rescue operations by the local leadership and law enforcement.

“The UNHCR deeply appreciates the swift and compassionate action of the West Aceh district officials and their teams in aiding the Rohingya,” Faisal said, adding several of those rescued were in poor health and rushed to a local hospital.

Rahman said Zaned Salim’s claim that as many as 150 people were aboard the boat needed to be verified. 

“If the refugee’s claims were true, it implies a tragic loss of lives at sea, as only 75 individuals have been accounted for,” he said. 

Persecuted minority

The Rohingya are members of a persecuted stateless Muslim minority from Myanmar who have been fleeing violence and oppression in their homeland for years. 

Following a 2017 military offensive in Myanmar’s Rakhine state that the U.N. described as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” about 740,000 Rohingya fled from their homes across the border to Bangladesh. About 1 million Rohingya live in crowded camps in and around Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh.

Desperate, many leave overcrowded refugee camps in Bangladesh, seeking better lives in other Muslim countries including Malaysia and Indonesia. 

The latest wave of Rohingya began arriving in Aceh in October 2023. 

Since then, over 1,800 refugees have landed in Indonesia and have been accommodated in locations across Aceh, according to the UNHCR.

In January, the UNHCR reported that 569 Rohingya refugees had died or went missing at sea in 2023 while attempting to flee from Myanmar or Bangladesh.

BenarNews is an online news affiliate of Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Nurdin Hasan for BenarNews.

Officials arrested the group on Tuesday morning in Myanmar’s coastal Mon state. The boat was intercepted off the shores of Ye township’s Kaleguak Island in the Andaman Sea.

Mon state’s junta spokesperson Aung Myat Kyaw Sein told RFA that although Mon’s administration was made aware of the arrest, other details have yet to be confirmed.

“The estimated number is about 80, but we do not know the genders yet,” he said, adding that unspecified official processes still need to be carried out.

The arrested Rohingya will be treated well and officials will follow official procedures, he said. 

RFA was able to confirm the group traveled on a boat named Zwel Khit San, but could not identify where the group traveled from or where it intended to go.

Many Rohingya who had remained in Rakhine state after being targeted in a genocide by the Myanmar military in 2017 fled to Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia following the country’s 2021 coup. In October and November 2023, junta troops arrested over 200 Rohingya escaping to nearby countries by boat, citing job scarcity, unemployment and increasing restrictions placed on the ethnic minority.

After junta troops announced the enactment of the People’s Military Service Law on Feb. 10, videos originating from Rakhine state’s west a month later showed Rohingya undergoing military training. Troops have also preyed on Rohingya in internally displaced people’s camps, offering them freedom of movement in exchange for bolstering the junta’s numbers. 

Mon state residents said that junta forces arrested 117 Rohingya on a rubber farm in Thanbyuzayat township’s War Kha Yu village in January, but the reason is still unknown. 

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported on Jan. 23 that during 2023, at least 569 Rohingya died and went missing after leaving Myanmar and refugee camps in Bangladesh.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Kiana Duncan and Mike Firn. 

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The enactment of the People’s Military Service Law on Feb. 10 has sent draft-eligible civilians fleeing from Myanmar’s cities, saying they would rather leave the country or join anti-junta forces in remote border areas than fight for the military, which seized power in a 2021 coup d’etat.

Myanmar’s military is desperate for new recruits after suffering devastating losses on the battlefield to the ethnic Arakan Army, or AA, in Rakhine state. Since November, when the AA ended a ceasefire that had been in place since the coup, the military has surrendered Pauktaw, Minbya, Mrauk-U, Kyauktaw, Myay Pon and Taung Pyo townships in the state, as well as Paletwa township in neighboring Chin state.

But rights campaigners say the junta is drafting Rohingya into military service to stoke ethnic tensions in Rakhine state, while legal experts say the drive is unlawful, given that Myanmar has refused to recognize the Rohingya as one of the country’s ethnic groups and denied them citizenship for decades.

Some 1 million ethnic Rohingya refugees have been living in Bangladesh since 2017, when they were driven out of Myanmar by a military clearance operation. Another 630,000 living within the country are designated stateless by the United Nations, including those who languish in camps for internally displaced persons, or IDPs, and are restricted from moving freely in Rakhine state.

Residents of the Kyauk Ta Lone IDP camp in Rakhine’s Kyaukphyu township told RFA Burmese that junta forces, including the township administration officer and the operations commander of the military’s Light Infantry Battalion 542, took a census of the camp’s Muslims for the purpose of military service on Monday.

Junta personnel compiled a list of more than 160 people deemed eligible for conscription and informed them they would have to take part in a two-week military training program, according to one camp resident who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on condition of anonymity due to security concerns.

“The township administration officer came … and told us that Muslims must also serve in the military, but we refused to follow his order,” the resident said. “Then, the military operations commander arrived here along with his soldiers, and forced us to do so under the military service law. They collected the names of more than 160 people.”

Freedom of movement

Some 1,500 Rohingyas from around 300 families have been living at Kyauk Ta Lone since ethnic violence forced them to flee their homes in Kyaukphyu 12 years ago. 

Since taking the census on Monday, junta officers have repeatedly visited the camp, trying to persuade Rohingya residents to serve in the military with an offer of free movement within Kyaukphyu township, said another camp resident. 

“They won’t guarantee us citizenship,” he said. “But if we serve in the military, we will be allowed to go freely in Kyaukphyu.”

Other camp residents told RFA they “would rather die” than serve in the military, and suggested the recruitment drive was part of a bid by the military to create a rift between them and ethnic Rakhines – the predominant minority in Rakhine state and the ethnicity of the AA.

No date was given for when the training program would begin, they said. After receiving training, the recruits would be assigned to a security detail along with junta troops guarding routes in and out of Kyaukphyu, and dispatched to the battlefield “if necessary.”

Rohingya IDPs are afraid to serve in the military, but are unable to flee the camp because it is surrounded by junta troops, residents added.

Other recruitment efforts

The military service census at the Kyauk Ta Lone IDP camp came as Rohingyas in the Rakhine capital Sittwe, the Rakhine townships of Buthidaung and Maungdaw, and other parts of Kyaukphyu reported that junta troops have been arresting and collecting data from members of their ethnic group as part of a bid to force them into military training.

On Monday and Tuesday evening, military personnel arrested around 100 Rohingyas of eligible service age from the Buthidaung villages of Nga/Kyin Tauk, Tat Chaung, Pu Zun Chaung and Kyauk Hpyu Taung, said a resident who also declined to be named.

“People doing business in the village were arrested. Village elders were also arrested,” said the resident, who is also a Rohingya. “At least one young person from every house was arrested and taken to the army. The parents of those who were arrested are quite worried now.”

Junta troops said that the AA had established camps near the Rohingya villages and residents would have to undergo military training to defend the area, he added. They said the residents would be equipped with weapons and returned to their villages after the training was complete.

Rohingyas in Sittwe and Maungdaw, where an AA offensive is now underway, also reported junta census efforts and pressure to join military training. They said that larger villages are expected to provide 100 people for training, while smaller ones should send 50 residents.

Law does not apply

A lawyer who is representing Rohingyas in several legal cases told RFA that the People’s Military Service Law “does not apply” to members of the ethnic group because they do not have citizenship status in Myanmar.

He added that the junta's attempt to recruit Rohingyas is part of a bid to drive a wedge between them and the people of Myanmar, many of whom oppose the military regime.

Nay San Lwin, an activist on the Rohingya issue, said that the junta hopes to divert attention from its losses to the AA in Rakhine state by igniting tensions between ethnic Rakhines and Rohingyas.

“If the Rohingyas are forced into their army, there could be a lot of problems between the Rakhines and the Rohingyas,” he said. “That's what they want. Once that happens, they’ll drop all support for the Rohingyas as usual. But the main reason is to use the Rohingyas as human shields.”

Nay San Lwin noted that as successive governments in Myanmar have denied the Rohingya citizenship, there should be no pressure to force them to serve in the military.

The junta has released no information on efforts to recruit Rohingyas in Rakhine state and attempts by RFA to contact junta Deputy Information Minister Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun and Rakhine State Attorney General Hla Thein, who is the junta’s spokesman in the region, went unanswered Thursday.

The AA issued a statement on Wednesday calling on ethnic Rakhines to take refuge from junta oppression – which it said includes unlawful arrests, extortion, forced military recruitment, and extrajudicial killings – in AA-controlled territory, instead of fleeing to other areas of the country.

Conscription eligibility

According to Myanmar’s compulsory military service law, men aged 18-35 and women aged 18-27 face up to five years in prison if they refuse to serve for two years, while highly skilled professionals aged 18-45 must also serve, but up to five years. More than 13 million of the country’s 54 million people are eligible for service.

Conscription is slated to be implemented at the end of April 2024, with a goal of recruiting up to 60,000 service members each year, in batches of around 5,000 people.

Translated by Aung Naing and Kalyar Lwin. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Recognized Contemporary Genocides

In Rwanda, the larger Hutu population (85%) felt dominated by the smaller (15%) and wealthier Tutsi ethnicity. Independence led to Hutu control, followed by massacres of Tutsis, and forced displacement of 400,000 by the ruling government that portrayed Tutsis as threats to Rwanda.

The April 6, 1994 downing of a plane carrying Rwanda’s President Habyarimana and Burundi’s President Cyprien Ntaryamira prompted extremist Hutus to blame Tutsi rebels from the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) for the attack and deaths of the two Hutu presidents. Rwanda’s Hutu militia organized attacks against all Tutsis. Assisted by forces in neighboring Uganda and Tanzania, the RPF successfully engaged the Hutu militia, captured the country, and gained control of the government. The victory did not stop a three-month Hutu rampage that randomly murdered an estimated 500,000 – 900,000 Tutsis.

In Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist nation, Rohingya people are an ethnic and religious minority of Muslim and Indo-Aryan origin. Despite tracing their presence in Myanmar to before the 18th century, the government considers them “Bengali, with no cultural, religious, or social ties to Myanmar,” and denies them citizenship and services. A conflict between the Rakhine people and the Myanmar authorities spilled over into the ongoing conflicts between Rohingya and their Rakhine neighbors and the Myanmar military. In 2017, the violence caused an excess of 10,000 Rohingya killed and more than 300 villages destroyed. About 700,000 of an estimated 1.4 million Rohingya people fled to nearby countries, mostly to Bangladesh.

Cambodia found itself drawn into the Vietnam War when U.S. forces expanded their military operations into Cambodia to combat Vietnamese communist forces seeking sanctuary. Prince Sihanouk severed relations and the U.S. initiated a U.S.-backed coup that dethroned Sihanouk and brought General Lon Nol to power as President of the Khmer Republic. An exiled Sihanouk joined forces with the North Vietnamese and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge communists, defeated the Lon Nol army, and captured Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975. Guided by leadership from Pol Pot, the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) instituted a series of purges that evacuated cities, killed previous Lon Nol officials, brutally persecuted Buddhist monks and ethnic minorities, and attempted to eliminate dissidents to the regime. In 1979, Pol Pot’s previous ally, victorious North Vietnam, now a unified Vietnam, invaded Cambodia, overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime, and created the People’s Republic of Kampuchea.

The Cambodian genocide was not conventional; more of a super killing field, reminiscent of Robespierre’s terror campaign during the French Revolution.

The World War II genocide started with severe persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany during the pre-war years and emerged in Poland during the early war years. A complete genocide, known as the Holocaust, reached maximum intensity with the slaughter of Jews after their forced transfer from all of Europe to labor camps. The most severe statistic has only 3.5 million of the 9.5 million Jews who lived in Europe before the war listed as survivors. An agreement between the Zionists in Palestine and the Nazi regime enabled some 53,000 Jews to emigrate from Germany to Palestine. About 170,000 displaced persons migrated to Israel after the war. Jews are now accused of genocide of the Palestinian people.

Armenians have suffered genocidal violence throughout their history. According to Britannica:

Anti-Armenian feelings erupted into mass violence several times in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. When, in 1894, the Armenians in the Sasun region refused to pay an oppressive tax, Ottoman troops and Kurdish tribesmen killed thousands of Armenians in the region. Another series of mass killings began in the fall of 1895, when Ottoman authorities’ suppression of an Armenian demonstration in Istanbul became a massacre. In all, hundreds of thousands of Armenians were killed in massacres between 1894 and 1896, which later came to be known as the Hamidian massacres. Some 20,000 more Armenians were killed in urban riots and pogroms in Adana and Hadjin in 1909.

These atrocities were a prelude to the 1915 genocide that some estimate caused 1-1.5 million Armenian deaths by Turkish Ottoman authorities who claimed that questionable loyalty of the Armenian population necessitated their transfer away from the neighboring Russian enemy. Turkish officials asserted that the massacres occurred from enraged populations and not from a design by the Turkish Ottoman government.

Uniqueness of the Palestinian Genocide

Most of the previously recognized genocides occurred spontaneously, involved local people, were relatively short, and ended abruptly. In their essential feature, the government accused a minority of not having social and cultural ties with the majority and being intruders in the land. No foreign governments or foreign people assisted in the genocide and assisted the oppressed people. The genocide of the Palestinian people does not share these characteristics.

Zionists were not part of the local population; they intruded into the area and were a small minority at the time they started the Palestinian genocide. An established Israeli government slowly increased the genocide process, has continued it for a lengthy time, and is now providing a planned path to conclusion. Whereas, other genocides occurred quickly — Rwanda Tutsi, Armenian, Rohingya — or were not readily apparent — World War II Holocaust — the Palestinian genocide is occurring for a long period and in full view of the world. Several foreign governments, mainly the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany, and Jewish and Evangelical people and institutions actively aid the genocide. On the other hand, several Middle Eastern governments and people throughout the world recognize the desperate plight of the Palestinians and valiantly fight to protect them from destruction. The unique characteristics, no visible end to the catastrophe, involvement of external actors in perpetrating the genocide, and increasingly violent reactions indicate that this genocide will provoke unavoidable clashes. More destruction will be visited upon other innocents.

Beyond the Genocide

The South African delegation gave a convincing presentation to the International Court of Justice at The Hague’s case of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people.

More than 23,000 people in Gaza have been killed during Israel’s military campaign, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory. That toll does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Nearly 85% of Gaza’s people have been driven their homes, a quarter of the enclave’s residents face starvation, and much of northern Gaza has been reduced to rubble.

The response from U.S. and Israeli authorities certified the genocide.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called the accusation of genocide “meritless.” National Security Council Spokesperson John Kirby said, “That’s not a word that ought to be thrown around lightly, and we certainly don’t believe that it applies here.”

John Kirby is correct. “Genocide is not a word that ought to be thrown around lightly.” Normal, serious, and compassionate people don’t lightly reject the accusation, don’t immediately call it meritless, and listen carefully to the pleadings. Simple adjectives and adverbs are not a reply and point-by-point refutation to exacting statements is the only acceptable answer. By judging before listening, American officials indicated they could not reply and the charge of genocide is accurate. Surprisingly, the Israeli government’s reply was more damaging to its defense. Its defense lawyer uttered, “Genocide is one of the most heinous acts any entity or individual can commit, and such allegations should only be made with the greatest of care. Israel has the right to defend itself against Hamas’s terrorist acts — acts that Hamas has vowed to repeat again and again until Israel is completely destroyed.” Israel insisted that its war in Gaza was a legitimate defense of its people and Hamas militants were guilty of genocide who want to wipe out all Jews.

This war is an offensive war and not a defensive war. Israel is not defending itself, it is offending all of Gaza and its population. Can any knowledgeable and competent individual believe that Hamas, with its peashooters and 15,000 fighters, can repeat and repeat its October 7 action, destroy nuclear-armed Israel, commit genocide on the Israeli people, and wipe out all Jews? Only a twisted mind can offer those reasons as an excuse for the daily murder of the Gazans and the destruction of their housing, institutions, hospitals, and will to live.

Realizing the oppression cannot force the Palestinians to submit or leave and has no foreseeable end, the Israeli government took advantage of the October 7 single event (it will become a remembrance date throughout the Western world) to convince the world that the Palestinians are mass murderers and therefore mass murder of millions of them is acceptable. How will this eventually play out? Noting the enormity of the last 75 years of destruction throughout the Middle East, North Africa, Western nations battle against international terrorism, and Israel’s intensification of its assaults in Gaza and the West Bank, anticipated future destruction throughout the world, which includes strikes against Israel’s principal opponents, will be vast.

Start with Gaza

Israeli leaders have twittered and tittered with vague propositions that Gazans have a choice of either leaving the area or remaining surrounded and confined. President Biden recommends the Palestinian Authority (PA) govern Gaza; the PA that cannot support itself, is not popular with the Palestinian people, cannot stop the daily aggression against its citizens in the West Bank, and subsidized 1/3 of the budget of Hamas ruled Gaza, is the PA that is going to tend to two million Palestinians in a barren Gaza.

Another suggestion is for the United Nations (UN), which has supplied succulence to the Gazans for 75 years, to govern (by a Trusteeship Council???) and increase succulence by several magnitudes. This is the UN that passed a myriad of resolutions for administrating the chaos and has not been able to implement any of them. The UN Trusteeship Council consists of the five permanent members of the Security Council — China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States — few of whom trust one another. UN peacekeepers have rarely been able to keep the peace in any areas of their presence.

In a previous article, The Fate of the Palestinians, the writer described a depressing scenario for Gaza’s future.

In this gigantic plantation, where a huge population cramps into an area that cannot contain it, labor will be plentiful and jobs will be scarce. Gazans will work for low wages and receive a marginal life. With every aspect of their lives controlled by an outside force, they will be unable to control their destiny; population increase will be regulated and population decrease will be ruthlessly managed…until extinction.

I have not seen another serious scenario that capably contradicts this drastic scenario. One feature of those contending the Palestinian genocide is that they are mostly retroactive and not proactive; few actions prevent events and many actions only recite events. What are the possible scenarios? What is expected to happen? Preparing for certainty is preferred to waiting for Godot.

West Bank

Israel has addressed the Palestinians in the West Bank territory in a different manner than addressed in Gaza. Arranging the West Bank Palestinians for their demise requires another approach. The Gazans live in one contiguous area; West Bank Palestinians live in separate enclaves. No settlements or settlers in Gaza; many of both are in the West Bank. No soldiers, checkpoints, or roadblocks in Gaza; daily occurrence in the West Bank. No recognized authority that Israel will deal with in Gaza; PA in the West Bank.

Expanding settlements, periodic stealing of Palestinian lands, and daily encroachment on Palestinian lives indicate that Israel is not amenable to having Palestinians between the river and the sea. Recent events show Israel is attempting to quell all resistance, no matter how minor. From October 7, 2023, to January 11, 2024, more than 2,650 Palestinians in the West Bank have been arrested. According to the Palestinian Authority health ministry, “some 300 West Bank Palestinians have been killed. Based on military estimates, the vast majority of those killed since October 7 were shot during clashes amid arrest raids.” Two problems exist that prevent Israel from completing its plans.

(1)    Palestinians have not budged and their population has not reduced.

(2)    Military opposition grows stronger each day. Iran advances in all warfare technology — drones, long-range missiles, and nuclear weapons.

Israel has a dilemma — should Palestinians be removed before addressing the military problem or is it wise to silence enemies before they develop capability to defend themselves? Israel’s strategists realize their foes may be able to challenge the expulsion and once the foes are eliminated the expulsion becomes easier. Look at history and find Iran and Hezbollah as the last-standing antagonists who can prevent the Zionists from accomplishing their objectives. Other antagonists have been sidetracked.

The Sudan, a perceived Israel antagonist, which had potential of becoming a major nation, has been carved into two hapless nations, much due to U.S. actions. The U.S. invasion, urged by Israel’s fifth column, the Neocons, overthrew Saddam Hussein and prevented Iraq from becoming a major power in the Middle East and a threat to Israel. Libya, another Israel antagonist, has been destroyed and driven to anarchy by NATO’s incomprehensible and falsely driven military actions. Egypt and Jordan have been pacified.

Israel expected Syria’s Assad would be defeated and a new government would eschew relations with Iran and Hezbollah. Overthrow of the Assad regime and replacement by a new government would have deprived Hezbollah of a compatible border and access to its Iran ally. In Iraq or Syria, a Kurdish success in establishing an independent state would have given Israel a friend on the borders with Iraq and Iran. Because none of these expectations have been realized, a new approach to debilitating Iran and Hezbollah and assuring they do not have weapons to cause great danger to Israel is being processed.

Iran is the last man standing. Hezbollah and the Houthis are irritants that will become ineffective once Iran has been destroyed. Provoking Iran into serious military action has not occurred and the Islamic Republic is not falling for the bait, which means the provocations will become stronger and stronger until Iran has no choice. The Islamic Republic also has internal enemies and restless ethnicities who seek independence. Arranging the dominos and churning the pot are everyday tasks for Israel’s Mossad; assuredly, they have been hard at work on the problem. Once the massive strikes from sea and air hit Tehran and other cities, other internal land strikes will scorch the countryside. Iran will become an inferno of external war, religious war, civil war, and tribal rebellions.

With Iran subdued, Israel will turn its intention to the recalcitrant Palestinians, whom the government will accuse of siding with Iran and cannot be trusted. Expulsion of three million indigenous people, who had tilled the soil for generations, and replacing them with foreign newcomers, who had walked city streets for generations, is difficult. Israel cannot evict the Palestinians. The separation of the Palestinian population in several and widely separated cities in the West Bank does not allow forcible eviction. Israel will find another means and the most logical is covertly administrating population decline.

The CIA publishes interesting statistics (they do some helpful things) and the population and economic statistics reveal the precarious life of the Palestinians on their home grounds.

WEST BANK POPULATION STATISTICS

The present statistics don’t favor Israel’s approach to getting rid of those pesky Palestinians. High birth rates and low death rates offset ultra-high maternal and infant mortality rates and a high migration rate. The Palestinian population continues to increase at 2.3%/yr. So, how can Israel engineer a severe population decline? This was previously discussed in an article, “Ever Again.” Changing the statistics to be more favorable to decreasing Palestinian presence in the West Bank is another way.

Make life more brutal, which Israel will do, and the migration rate, already high for young males, will greatly increase. This will lower the number of marriages and births. Families will also leave. The Palestinian economy is not well developed, with no major industries, mainly services (77.6%, 2017 est.), agriculture, and small industry. Unemployment is at 25 percent. Imports absorb one-half of the GDP. In 2022, Palestinian imports of goods and services were $8.20 billion and exports were $1.58 billion and much of the trade was with Israel. Imports from Israel were $4.64 billion and exports were $1.40 billion.

Israel has a stranglehold on Palestinian lives and economy — appropriating land reduces agriculture and animal husbandry output and increases demand for food imports; lowering Palestinian labor in the Israel economy augments Palestinian unemployment; crime and violence follow unemployment and urge people to leave, harassment and physical attacks create anxiety, leading to escalating illness, deaths, and miscarriages.

Continually encroached on and reduced to diminishing living space, agriculture, water, and resources, life for Palestinians will become unbearable. Will the Palestinians continue to live at lower and lower subsistence levels? Migration will escalate.

If the population decreases by 5 percent annually, in 14 years, the population is halved, and, in 50 years, the population decreases to 10 percent of its initial amount. By these methods, the West Bank Palestinian population can be reduced from 3 million to 300,000. The remaining Palestinians will be faceless and wandering people among the many millions of Israelis.

Physical destruction is noticeable. Psychological, cultural, political, social, cultural, and economic havoc (oil embargos) go unnoticed.

Hesitatingly murmured is that descendants of those who suffered the World War II genocide are committing the present genocide. The Israeli Jewish population has a strong voice in a democratic nation and has not expressed indignation; they, and a great number of Jews throughout the world are supporting the genocide. Are those who suffered and died during the Holocaust being used to shadow another genocide? Have the decades of abundant references to the Holocaust been an emotional preparation to have others accept the ongoing genocide? Have the lessons of World War II, which should have been used to prevent further community destruction, been subverted to enhance destruction? Have contemporary Jews betrayed their ancestors who lie buried in the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Mauthausen, Ravensbruck, Sobibor, and others?

Reactions to the gathering genocide have already occurred. The extent to which they grow and affect the Jewish people remains undetermined. Will they be short-lived and mildly punishing or will they grow in intensity, be gravely punishing, and last from here to eternity?

A relatively small clique determines America’s future, who succeeds and who fails, who receives and who is denied, who gets pardoned, and who gets punished. American democracy in action.

In the Middle East, it has become “who lives and who dies.”

From Plymouth Rock to Western Wall granite, the American dream shapes the fate of people and skews world history.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

In 2023, the world witnessed a sustained attack on the very foundations of the international legal order.

Russia, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, continued its illegal invasion in Ukraine. Israel’s response to the deadly October attack by Hamas exceeded its legitimate right to self-defence. And Venezuela threatened force against Guyana over an oil-rich area of disputed territory.

But is it all bad news for the international legal order?

• READ MORE: South Africa has made its genocide case against Israel in court. Here’s what both sides said and what happens next
• Myanmar charged with genocide of Rohingya Muslims: 5 essential reads

There are six ongoing international court cases initiated by states or organisations seeking to clarify the law and hold other states to account on behalf of the international community.

These cases offer smaller countries, such as New Zealand, an opportunity to have a significant role in strengthening the international legal order and ensuring a pathway towards peace.

A departure from the legal norm?
Normally, cases are brought to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) when a state’s direct interests are impacted by the actions of another state.

However, six recent court cases reflect a significant departure from this tradition and mark an important development for international justice.

These cases argue the international community has a collective interest in certain issues. The focus of the cases range from Israel’s actions in Gaza (brought by South Africa) through to the responsibility of states to ensure the protection of the climate system (brought by the United Nations General Assembly).

South Africa’s justice minister Ronald Lamola outlined the country’s genocide case against Israel, as a landmark hearing opened at the International Court of Justice pic.twitter.com/AvlM8BwhQI

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) January 11, 2024

Holding states accountable for genocide
Three of the six cases seek to hold states accountable for genocide using Article IX of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Put simply, Article IX says disputes between countries can be referred to the ICJ.

In late December, South Africa asked the court to introduce provisional measures — a form of international injunction — against Israel for genocidal acts in Gaza.

These proceedings build on the precedent set by a 2019 case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar for its treatment of the Rohingya people.

In 2022, the ICJ concluded it had jurisdiction to hear The Gambia’s case on the basis that all parties to the Genocide Convention have an interest in ensuring the prevention, suppression and punishment of genocide.

According to the ICJ, The Gambia did not need to demonstrate any special interest or injury to bring the proceedings and, in effect, was entitled to hold Myanmar to account for its treatment of the Rohingya people on behalf of the international community as a whole.

South Africa has made the same argument against Israel.

In the third case, Ukraine was successful in obtaining provisional measures calling on Russia to suspend military operations in Ukraine (a call which has been reiterated in several United Nations General Assembly resolutions).

While Ukraine is directly impacted by Russia’s actions, 32 states, including New Zealand, have also intervened. These countries have argued there is an international interest in the resolution of the conflict.

In November 2023, following the example of intervention in Ukraine v Russia, seven countries — Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom (jointly) and the Maldives — filed declarations of intervention in The Gambia v Myanmar, in support of The Gambia and the international community.

States can apply for permission to intervene in proceedings where they have an interest of a legal nature that may be affected by the decision in the case (in the case of the ICJ, under Article 62 of the ICJ Statute). That said, intervening in judicial proceedings in support of the legal order or international community more generally was relatively rare until 2023.

South Africa is taking Israel to the ICJ, accusing it of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Al Jazeera’s @nabilabana explains what’s behind the case pic.twitter.com/Hv9R4orEa8

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) January 11, 2024

Climate change obligations under international law
But it is not just acts of genocide that have attracted wider international legal involvement.

In 2023, three proceedings seeking advisory opinions on the legal obligations of states in respect of climate change under international law have been introduced before the ICJ, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

These cases can be similarly characterised as having been brought on behalf of the international community for the international community. New Zealand has intervened in the Law of the Sea case.

Collectively, these six cases comprise actions taken on behalf of the international community with the overarching purpose of strengthening the international legal order.

They demonstrate faith in and support for that legal order in the face of internal and external challenges, and constitute an important counter-narrative to the prevailing view that the international legal order is no longer robust.

Instituting proceedings does not guarantee a positive outcome. But it is worth noting that less than three years after the ICJ issued an advisory opinion condemning the United Kingdom’s continued occupation of the Chagos Archipelago, the UK is quietly negotiating with Mauritius for the return of the islands.

New Zealand’s support for the global legal order in 2024
The international legal order underpins New Zealand’s security and prosperity. New Zealand has a strong and internationally recognised track record of positive intervention in judicial proceedings in support of that order.

In 2012 New Zealand intervened in the case brought by Australia against Japan for whaling in the Antarctic. Following our contributions to cases before the ICJ and ITLOS in 2023, we are well placed to continue that intervention in future judicial proceedings.

Calls have already been made for New Zealand to intervene in South Africa v Israel. Contributing to this case and to The Gambia v Myanmar proceeding provides an important opportunity for New Zealand to make a proactive and substantive contribution to strengthening the international legal order.

Dr Karen Scott is professor in Law, University of Canterbury. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

In 2023, the world witnessed a sustained attack on the very foundations of the international legal order.

Russia, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, continued its illegal invasion in Ukraine. Israel’s response to the deadly October attack by Hamas exceeded its legitimate right to self-defence. And Venezuela threatened force against Guyana over an oil-rich area of disputed territory.

But is it all bad news for the international legal order?

• READ MORE: South Africa has made its genocide case against Israel in court. Here’s what both sides said and what happens next
• Myanmar charged with genocide of Rohingya Muslims: 5 essential reads

There are six ongoing international court cases initiated by states or organisations seeking to clarify the law and hold other states to account on behalf of the international community.

These cases offer smaller countries, such as New Zealand, an opportunity to have a significant role in strengthening the international legal order and ensuring a pathway towards peace.

A departure from the legal norm?
Normally, cases are brought to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) when a state’s direct interests are impacted by the actions of another state.

However, six recent court cases reflect a significant departure from this tradition and mark an important development for international justice.

These cases argue the international community has a collective interest in certain issues. The focus of the cases range from Israel’s actions in Gaza (brought by South Africa) through to the responsibility of states to ensure the protection of the climate system (brought by the United Nations General Assembly).

South Africa’s justice minister Ronald Lamola outlined the country’s genocide case against Israel, as a landmark hearing opened at the International Court of Justice pic.twitter.com/AvlM8BwhQI

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) January 11, 2024

Holding states accountable for genocide
Three of the six cases seek to hold states accountable for genocide using Article IX of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Put simply, Article IX says disputes between countries can be referred to the ICJ.

In late December, South Africa asked the court to introduce provisional measures — a form of international injunction — against Israel for genocidal acts in Gaza.

These proceedings build on the precedent set by a 2019 case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar for its treatment of the Rohingya people.

In 2022, the ICJ concluded it had jurisdiction to hear The Gambia’s case on the basis that all parties to the Genocide Convention have an interest in ensuring the prevention, suppression and punishment of genocide.

According to the ICJ, The Gambia did not need to demonstrate any special interest or injury to bring the proceedings and, in effect, was entitled to hold Myanmar to account for its treatment of the Rohingya people on behalf of the international community as a whole.

South Africa has made the same argument against Israel.

In the third case, Ukraine was successful in obtaining provisional measures calling on Russia to suspend military operations in Ukraine (a call which has been reiterated in several United Nations General Assembly resolutions).

While Ukraine is directly impacted by Russia’s actions, 32 states, including New Zealand, have also intervened. These countries have argued there is an international interest in the resolution of the conflict.

In November 2023, following the example of intervention in Ukraine v Russia, seven countries — Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom (jointly) and the Maldives — filed declarations of intervention in The Gambia v Myanmar, in support of The Gambia and the international community.

States can apply for permission to intervene in proceedings where they have an interest of a legal nature that may be affected by the decision in the case (in the case of the ICJ, under Article 62 of the ICJ Statute). That said, intervening in judicial proceedings in support of the legal order or international community more generally was relatively rare until 2023.

South Africa is taking Israel to the ICJ, accusing it of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Al Jazeera’s @nabilabana explains what’s behind the case pic.twitter.com/Hv9R4orEa8

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) January 11, 2024

Climate change obligations under international law
But it is not just acts of genocide that have attracted wider international legal involvement.

In 2023, three proceedings seeking advisory opinions on the legal obligations of states in respect of climate change under international law have been introduced before the ICJ, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

These cases can be similarly characterised as having been brought on behalf of the international community for the international community. New Zealand has intervened in the Law of the Sea case.

Collectively, these six cases comprise actions taken on behalf of the international community with the overarching purpose of strengthening the international legal order.

They demonstrate faith in and support for that legal order in the face of internal and external challenges, and constitute an important counter-narrative to the prevailing view that the international legal order is no longer robust.

Instituting proceedings does not guarantee a positive outcome. But it is worth noting that less than three years after the ICJ issued an advisory opinion condemning the United Kingdom’s continued occupation of the Chagos Archipelago, the UK is quietly negotiating with Mauritius for the return of the islands.

New Zealand’s support for the global legal order in 2024
The international legal order underpins New Zealand’s security and prosperity. New Zealand has a strong and internationally recognised track record of positive intervention in judicial proceedings in support of that order.

In 2012 New Zealand intervened in the case brought by Australia against Japan for whaling in the Antarctic. Following our contributions to cases before the ICJ and ITLOS in 2023, we are well placed to continue that intervention in future judicial proceedings.

Calls have already been made for New Zealand to intervene in South Africa v Israel. Contributing to this case and to The Gambia v Myanmar proceeding provides an important opportunity for New Zealand to make a proactive and substantive contribution to strengthening the international legal order.

Dr Karen Scott is professor in Law, University of Canterbury. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The U.N.’s World Food Program (WFP) announced Monday that it was increasing the monthly food provision for the refugees from U.S. $8 to $10 (877 to 1097 taka) per person, which was previously cut twice from $12 (1316 taka) because of funding shortages.

While this increase is supposed to help Rohingya offset the effects of rising inflation in Bangladesh, half a dozen refugees told BenarNews that this adjustment does little to compensate for the severe consequences of the original reduction from $12, an amount they thought was already insufficient.

“In the six years since coming to Bangladesh, I still could not manage to have a piece of meat,” said Dil Mohammad, a resident of Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar. 

“Due to the scarcity of food after the reduction in food aid, I went outside the camp to find work and make ends meet. I had one of my legs broken and have been bed-ridden ever since.”

With their monthly food voucher, Rohingya can purchase only essential food items – such as rice, pulses, oil, garlic, spices, and potatoes – from WFP-designated storage facilities. The items do not include any protein.

“I feed my baby rice powder instead of milk as there are no child-specific food items,” Begum Nur Nahar, a Rohingya woman, told BenarNews.

A staggering 90% of the 1.2 million refugee population in Bangladesh was struggling to have “acceptable food consumption” as of November, an increase of 11% from June, according to a news release issued by the World Food Program on Jan. 1.

Around the same time, acute malnutrition levels rose to 15.1%, the highest since the Rohingya influx began in 2017, it said, while noting children suffered even more.

The WFP said it would introduce “fortified rice” laced with multivitamins to help address the nutrition gap.

The genetically modified rice should also help Rohingya combat malnutrition-induced diseases such as marasmus (protein-energy malnutrition) and nyctalopia (night blindness), said Abu Toha MR Bhuiyan, chief refugee health coordinator in Cox’s Bazar.

The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) and the WFP declined to respond to BenarNews’ requests for comment and referred the news service to their original statements.

The WFP said the shortfall in funding from donor nations forced it to cut back food aid in 2023 from $12 to $8 over two phases, in March and June, and that it still lacks $61 million (6.7 billion taka) in necessary funding.

“The focus of the international community has been diverted primarily by the Russia-Ukraine war and the subsequent Gaza situation,” Asif Munir, an independent migration expert, told BenarNews. “As a result, the Rohingya are now deprioritized in the global agenda.”

Muhammed Jubair, a Rohingya civil society leader, told BenarNews that the lack of food is silently driving refugees out of Bangladesh camps, where authorities frequently crackdown against Rohingya employment over concerns that they were taking jobs from locals.

Many Rohingya are venturing beyond the barbed-wire fences that surround the refugee camps in and around Cox’s Bazar to find work despite tight restrictions and threat of jails, while others join violent gangs, he said.

Many others are undertaking perilous boat journeys to migrate to Southeast Asia, even as sympathies for Rohingya are wearing thin in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia.

“If the Rohingya get enough rations in the camp, their tendency to leave the camp will decrease,” Jubair said. “Otherwise, the journey of death without destination on the sea will not stop.”

Bangladesh Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen agrees.

“It’s positive that food aid for the Rohingya increased by two dollars, but let’s not forget that it had decreased by four dollars before,” he said. 

“If the food aid is not restored to $12, the violence in the camps will continue to increase.”

BenarNews is an online news outlet affiliated with Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ahammad Foyez and Abdur Rahman for BenarNews.

Their comments came amid a flood of condemnation of the “inhumane” incident, which resulted in the students forcing the 137 terrified refugees in Banda Aceh, mostly women and children, into trucks to another location.

The Rohingya will now be guarded by security forces, a top minister said Thursday.

Observers noted that the mob action on Wednesday – which was captured on video and widely circulated – was not typical of student protests in Aceh. 

Hendra Saputra, the project coordinator of Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) Indonesia, an NGO in Aceh, said he suspected that Wednesday’s incident was not spontaneous, but “organized and systematic.”

He told BenarNews that the students were influenced by social media posts that spread hate and misinformation about the Rohingya.

“[The posts] also accused the refugees of taking their food and land, and of sexual harassment and other bad behavior. But these are all false accusations,” he said, adding that no evidence was presented to substantiate the claims. 

Besides, the refugees couldn’t be a burden because the government is not spending money on them, Hendra said.

“There’s no government budget allocated for refugee management,” he said.

Aceh, a predominantly Muslim province that has special autonomy status in Indonesia, has a history of welcoming the Rohingya refugees, who are also Muslim. 

However, as more than 1,500 Rohingya have arrived since mid-November, the province’s villagers have been demanding they be sent back, claiming there weren’t enough resources for the refugees as well.

Those demands grew to small protests, which on Wednesday escalated to the student mob charging into the Rohingya shelter, kicking their belongings and creating mayhem, as many of the refugees sobbed uncontrollably or looked on, frightened and shocked.

The government will move the 137 Rohingya refugees to the local Indonesian Red Cross headquarters and the Aceh Foundation building, said Mohammad Mahfud MD, the coordinating minister for political, legal, and security affairs.

“I have instructed security forces to protect the refugees because this is a humanitarian issue,” Mahfud told journalists in Sidoarjo, East Java.

Some analysts have attributed the hostility towards the Rohingya to deliberate misinformation.

Chairul Fahmi, a Rohingya researcher and law lecturer at Ar-Raniry State Islamic University in Banda Aceh, said some of this disinformation could be linked to political actors who have an interest in exploiting the refugee issue for their own agenda.

“The authorities might have had a hand in the Rohingya disinformation campaign. The protest yesterday did not reflect the typical student movement,” he told BenarNews. “There is a possibility that the students were instructed.”

Political parties or groups could try to stir up anti-Rohingya sentiment ahead of the general election in February, suggested Ahmad Humam Hamid, a sociologist at Syiah Kuala University in Banda Aceh.

“Aceh should not be used as a battleground for the presidential election over the Rohingya matter. It would be very dangerous,” Ahmad told BenarNews.

Meanwhile, Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto, the frontrunner in the Feb. 14 presidential election, was in Aceh on Thursday, and spoke about the Rohingya.

He said that while Indonesia should be humanitarian towards the stateless Rohingya, it should also prioritize the welfare of its own people.

“Many of our people are struggling, and it is unfair to take in all the refugees as our responsibility, even if we feel humanitarian and sympathetic,” Prabowo said, according to local media.

Della Masnida, 20, a student at Abulyatama University who took part in Wednesday’s incident at the shelter, accused Rohingya refugees of making “unreasonable demands.”

“They came here uninvited, but they act like this is their country. We don’t think that’s fair,” she told reporters on Wednesday.

The student mob collectively issued a statement saying they rejected the Rohingya “because they have disrupted society.” 

“We all know that President Joko Widodo has stated that there is a strong suspicion of criminal acts of trafficking among them. Even the Aceh police have said that this is an international crime,” they said in the statement issued Wednesday.

The Rohingya are a persecuted Muslim minority from Myanmar, who have been fleeing violence and oppression in their homeland for years. Close to one million live in crowded camps in Bangladesh.

With few options after years of a stateless existence, many Rohingya are desperate to leave and that makes them susceptible to exploitation by human traffickers, analysts have said.

Gateway to Malaysia

Most of the Rohingya who arrived in Aceh recently had left violent and crowded refugee camps in Myanmar’s neighbor, Bangladesh, where 740,000 of them took shelter after a brutal crackdown by the Burmese military in 2017.

For the Rohingya, Indonesia is a gateway to Malaysia, which is a top destination for migrant workers from many South Asian and Southeast Asian nations.

The Indonesian government, which has not ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention, has said that it does not have the obligation or the capacity to accommodate the Rohingya refugees permanently, and that its priority is to resettle them in a third country.

Earlier this month, government officials complained they were overwhelmed and Indonesia was alone in bearing the burden of the Rohingya.

Mitra Salima Suryono, spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR in Indonesia, believes nothing could be further from the truth, and cited some numbers to illustrate her point.

“There are about 2,000 Rohingya refugees in Indonesia, compared to 105,000 in Malaysia, 22,000 in India, and nearly 1 million in Bangladesh,” she said.

Arie Firdaus in Jakarta contributed to this report.

BenarNews is an online news outlet affiliated with Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Uzair Thamrin and Pizaro Gozali Idrus for BenarNews.

The protesters then evicted the 137 shaken-up and distressed refugees from their basement shelter, forced them onto two trucks, and transported them to another location, the U.N. refugee agency, or UNHCR, said.

The agency said it was “deeply disturbed to see a mob attack on a site sheltering vulnerable refugee families,” adding that many in the group were children and women.

“Hundreds of youngsters stormed a building basement on Wednesday where refugees were sheltered,” UNHCR said in a statement.

“The mob broke a police cordon and forcibly put 137 refugees on two trucks, and moved them to another location in Banda Aceh. The incident has left refugees shocked and traumatized.”

While the students were roughing up the Rohingya and creating mayhem at the shelter, most of the refugees either looked shell-shocked or were sobbing uncontrollably, video footage shot by Agence France-Presse news agency showed.

All the while, the protesters were shouting slogans such as “kick them out” and “reject Rohingya in Aceh,” an AFP report said.

The refugee agency said it “remains deeply worried about the safety of refugees.” 

It called on local law enforcement authorities to take urgent action to ensure the Rohingya and humanitarian staff are protected.

Indonesia has a history of welcoming the Rohingya, Myanmar’s persecuted Muslim minority, and has traditionally been a supporter of the Rohingya cause. 

Most of the Rohingya who arrive in Aceh have left crowded and violent refugee camps in Myanmar’s neighbor, Bangladesh, where 740,000 of them have been sheltering since they faced a brutal crackdown by the Burmese military in 2017.

However, as hundreds of Rohingya began to arrive in boats on Aceh’s shores starting mid-November, the province’s villagers grew testy, first rejecting a vessel and then demanding the refugees be sent back. More than 1,500 Rohingya have arrived since last month.

Villagers claimed that resources were already scarce for the locals, while some said they had unpleasant experiences with the Rohingya who had arrived previously and were “troublesome.”

Small protests then made way for online campaigns against the Rohingya, with Indonesians accusing the refugees of being colonizers and demanding their deportation, authorities said in recent weeks. 

The campaign against the Rohingya was fueled by misinformation and propaganda on social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok, where fake accounts and anti-refugee posts have gone viral.

Following Wednesday’s incident, however, the refugees found some support on X.

Herriy Cahyadi, an Indonesian who runs his own humanitarian NGO, lambasted the university students who participated in Wednesday’s incident as “barbarians” in a post on X.

“What's the difference between you and the uneducated, violent group? Your alma mater is a symbol of higher education. But your mentality is savage,” Herriy, posting under @herricahyadi, said.

His comment had been liked by more than 4,400 people on X, and was reposted or cited more than 3,200 times by late Wednesday.

UNHCR said that it wished to emphasize that the Rohingya refugees seeking shelter in Indonesia are victims of persecution and conflict, and survivors of often deadly sea journeys. 

The U.N. agency was referring to the rickety vessels that ferry the Rohingya to Southeast Asia, sometimes taking as long as two months. In January, the agency said that at least 348 individuals died or went missing at sea in 2022.

“The U.N. refugee agency is also alerting the general public to be aware of the coordinated and well-choreographed online campaign on social media platforms, attacking authorities, local communities, refugees and humanitarian workers alike, inciting hate and putting lives in danger,” the UNHCR statement said.

“UNHCR appeals to the public in Indonesia to cross-check information posted online, much of it false or twisted, with AI-generated images and hate speech being sent from bot accounts.”

Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, meanwhile, said earlier this month that the government would provide temporary humanitarian assistance to the refugees while prioritizing the local community’s interests. 

The government plans to coordinate with the UNHCR and other international organizations to address the issue, he said.

Indonesia’s top diplomat, Retno Martsudi, took a plea on the Rohingya to Geneva, where she urged the UNHCR to find third countries for resettling the refugees. 

In a meeting Dec. 11 with Filippo Grandi, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees who heads UNHCR, Retno emphasized the need for a collective approach to the refugee crisis.

The Southeast Asian nation is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, but has a long history of hosting refugees from various conflicts. It allows refugees to stay temporarily, while they wait for a third country to resettle them, a process that can take years.

But advocates for refugee rights say that Indonesia is bound by the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits the forced return of refugees to their home countries.

BenarNews is an online news outlet affiliated to Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Pizaro Gozali Idrus for BenarNews.

Retno Marsudi said she met on Monday with Filippo Grandi, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees who heads UNHCR, and emphasized the need for a collective approach to the refugee crisis, after more than 1,500 Rohingya had arrived in Indonesia by boat since November.

“I told UNHCR in the meeting that they should continue to urge states [that are] party to the refugee convention to start accepting resettlement,” Retno told a news conference from Geneva. 

“The U.N. high commissioner understood the challenges faced by Indonesia and UNHCR will try its best to help solve this problem … by providing assistance to support the lives of the refugees,” Indonesia’s top diplomat told a news conference in Geneva.

Retno did not specify whether UNHCR’s assistance would go towards the Rohingya in Indonesia.

A UNHCR Indonesia spokesperson in Indonesia, Mitra Salima Suryono, did not immediately respond to a request for comment from BenarNews.

Retno was in Geneva, the headquarters of the UNHCR, for talks on the crisis in Gaza and Israel at events to mark International Human Rights Day on Dec. 10.

Her plea to the U.N. refugee agency came after some residents of Aceh province in Indonesia, where most Rohingya boats have arrived in recent weeks, rejected the refugees and refused to let them land. 

The Indonesian government then agreed to provide the Rohingya temporary shelter. On Sunday, another 400-odd Rohingya arrived on a boat that reached Aceh, a province at the northwestern tip of Sumatra island.

Indonesia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, but has a long history of hosting refugees from various conflicts. It allows refugees to stay temporarily, while they wait for a third country to resettle them, a process that can take years.

UNHCR has said that about 12,000 refugees and asylum seekers were in Indonesia as of June. They are  mostly from Afghanistan, Somalia, Myanmar and other countries, and face uncertain futures as prospects of being resettled in a third country are increasingly dim.

Refugees in Indonesia have no access to formal education and jobs.

For the Rohingya, Indonesia is a gateway to Malaysia, which is a top destination in Southeast Asia for migrant-workers from many South Asian and Southeast Asian nations.

Last week, Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo said that an entire criminal network was in place to smuggle hundreds of Rohingya into Aceh. He promised strict action against human traffickers.

In Indonesia, the smuggling of people is punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

Police arrested three people in Aceh last week on suspicion of smuggling six Rohingya refugees from a shelter, local media reported. 

They had planned to transport the refugees by bus to Medan, the capital of North Sumatra province, to allow them to travel to Malaysia, police reportedly said. 

Since 2017, about 740,000 Rohingya have fled their homes in Myanmar’s Rakhine state and settled in Bangladesh refugee camps in and around Cox’s Bazar after the Burmese military carried out a brutal crackdown that the U.N. called “ethnic cleansing.”

Human rights groups say the Rohingya refugees had undertaken and continue to take perilous sea journeys to escape the deteriorating situation in Myanmar since the military coup in February 2021 and the worsening conditions in the refugee camps in Bangladesh.

ASEAN efforts ‘have always failed’

Still, few countries are willing to open their doors to large numbers of refugees, said Poltak Partogi Nainggolan, a researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency. 

“On the other hand, efforts to find a joint solution through ASEAN have always failed,” he told BenarNews, referring to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, of which Myanmar and Indonesia are members. 

Last week, local rights groups gave the administration a severe tongue lashing after it said it was contemplating a plan to return the Rohingya to Myanmar. 

But Mohammad Mahfud MD, the coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, had said any return, if it happened, would be through the U.N.

Amnesty International in Indonesia approved of Indonesia’s continued coordination with UNHCR on the Rohingya issue.

“But Indonesia must not shirk its responsibility to ensure that the refugees have a decent and safe place to live, free from threats of violence,” Usman Hamid, executive director of the human rights watchdog group, told BenarNews. 

“[I]t must be committed to protecting the right to life and freedom for everyone, as mandated by its 1945 Constitution.” 

Some Indonesians, in comments and content posted on social media, have accused the Rohingya of being colonizers and demanded their deportation. 

The controversy has been fueled by misinformation and propaganda on social media platforms such as X and TikTok, where fake accounts and anti-Rohingya posts have gone viral. 

Nazarudin Latif in Jakarta contributed to the report.

BenarNews is an online news outlet affiliated with Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Pizaro Gozali Idrus for BenarNews.

The Indonesian government announced the plan a day earlier without giving a deportation date, saying Aceh province, where boats carrying Rohingya mostly land, was running out of space and money. In addition, residents were rejecting the foreigners’ presence.

“We’ve been lending a helping hand, and now we’re overwhelmed,” said Mohammad Mahfud MD, the coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs. “We will discuss how to return them to their country through the U.N. I will lead the meeting.” 

The ministry reported that 1,487 Rohingya were in Indonesia, according to media reports. President Joko “Jokwoi” Widodo had tasked the minister with leading government efforts to deal with the issue.

Vice President Ma’ruf Amin, however, proposed a different solution: Relocate the Rohingya to an island near Singapore where the Indonesian government had sheltered Vietnamese refugees who escaped their country in the 1980s and 1990s.

Nadine Sherani, an activist with KonstraS, a Jakarta-based human rights group, said that by sending the Rohingya to Myanmar they could be exposed to atrocities linked to the junta, which seized power in a military coup in February 2021.

“That step will transfer them to the hell they have experienced before,” Nadine told BenarNews. 

“Does the government think about the long-term impact of repatriation? The main actor of violence in Myanmar is the junta. That is the reason they left the country,” she said.

Oppressed people

The Rohingya are one of the world’s most oppressed stateless people, according to the United Nations. They have been denied citizenship and basic rights by the Myanmar government, which considers them illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh. 

Following a military offensive in Myanmar’s Rakhine state in 2017 that the U.N. described as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” about 740,000 Rohingya fled across the border to Bangladesh.

Seeking to escape difficult living conditions in Bangladesh refugee camps in and around Cox’s Bazar district, thousands of Rohingya have risked their lives on perilous sea journeys to reach Indonesia and other destinations.

On Wednesday, police in Cox’s Bazar reported that four Rohingya had been killed within 24 hours during gunfights between members of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army and the Arakan Solidarity Organization gangs in the Ukhia refugee camp.

Those killings brought the death toll to 10 in the sprawling Rohingya camps over the last 15 days and a total of 186 fatalities linked to violence in the camps since 2017.

Meanwhile in Aceh province, the Rohingya presence has caused resentment and hostility from some locals who have accused them of being a burden and a nuisance. 

On Nov. 16, a boat carrying 256 Rohingya was initially rejected by at least two groups of villagers in Aceh but was finally allowed to land after being stranded for three days. Another boat carrying more than 100 Rohingya landed on Sabang island on Dec. 2 after locals threatened to push it back to sea.

‘Urgent appeal’

Since then, UNHCR, the U.N. Refugee Agency, issued “an urgent appeal to all countries in the region, particularly those in the area surrounding the Andaman Sea, to swiftly deploy their full search and rescue capacities in response to reported vessels in distress with hundreds of Rohingya at risk of perishing.” 

In its statement issued on Saturday, UNHCR said it was concerned that Rohingya on two boats would run out of food and water. “[T]here is a significant risk of fatalities in the coming days if people are not rescued and disembarked to safety.”

Mahfud MD said Indonesia had shown compassion by taking in the Rohingya even though it was not a party to the U.N refugee convention, an international treaty that defines rights and obligations of refugees and host countries. 

“We could have turned them down flat. But we also have a heart. They could die at sea if no one wants them,” he said.

Ma’ruf, the vice president, suggested the Rohingya be settled temporarily on the island near Singapore.

“We used Galang island for Vietnamese refugees in the past. We will discuss it again. I think the government must take action,” Ma’ruf said on Tuesday.

Galang housed about 250,000 Vietnamese refugees, known as “boat people,” from 1979 to 1996. The UNHCR built healthcare facilities, schools, places of worship and cemeteries.

Ma’ruf said the government could not turn away the Rohingya, but also had to consider local people’s objections and the possibility of more refugees arriving.

Angga Reynaldi Putra, of Suaka, a Jakarta-based NGO that advocates for the rights of refugees, said Indonesia was bound by the principle of non-refoulement – or the forced return of refugees to their home countries – because it had ratified the anti-torture convention through a law in 1998. 

“The anti-torture convention ratified by Indonesia also states that there is an obligation to prevent a person from returning to a situation where he or she experiences torture,” Angga told BenarNews.

He added that Indonesia issued a presidential regulation in 2016, which mandates providing assistance and protection for refugees in coordination with the regional government, the International Organization for Migration and the immigration office.

Angga warned that putting Rohingya on Galang island could limit their access to basic rights, such as health and education.

“If we consider human rights, there is a right to freedom of movement. Being placed on a certain island, their movement would be restricted,” he said.

Women and children

Mitra Salima Suryono, a UNHCR spokeswoman in Indonesia, said she hoped the issue could be resolved humanely.

“We are optimistic and hope to see the same strong spirit of solidarity and humanity as before,” Mitra said.

She said the Rohingya who arrived in Aceh a few days ago had endured difficult conditions after traveling for several days or weeks.

“Because of their long sea journey, many of them were exhausted and needed help such as food, drinks, clean water, sanitation and medicine when they arrived,” she said, adding that most of the Rohingya were children and women.

Adriana Elizabeth, a researcher at the National Research and Innovation Agency, a government institution, said sending the Rohingya back to their home country should be a last resort.

“The Myanmar government does not recognize them. Their citizenship status is also unclear,” Adriana told BenarNews.

She said the best step for Indonesia was to press Myanmar to acknowledge the refugees’ plight.

“The presence of the Rohingya in several regions in Indonesia has created new problems in the country,” she said.

Abdur Rahman in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, contributed to this report.

BenarNews is an online news outlet affiliated with Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Arie Firdaus and Nazarudin Latif for BenarNews.

Sunday’s landings in Aceh included about 250 people who were on a boat that had reached the province’s coast last Thursday but was pushed back to sea by villagers at two locations before it was finally allowed to come ashore after an urgent appeal by UNHCR, the U.N.’s refugee agency.

“The three ships that landed this morning were in three different locations, in Bireuen, Pidie and East Aceh, with around 500 people,” Mitra Salima Suryono, a spokesperson for UNHCR in Indonesia, told BenarNews, a news outlet affiliated with Radio Free Asia. The landings brought to 866 the total number of Rohingya who have arrived in Aceh aboard five people-smuggling boats since last Monday. 

The three boats that landed on Sunday had spent between a month to two months on the open water after setting sail from Cox’s Bazar, in southeastern Bangladesh, officials said. The district is home to sprawling camps that house about 1 million stateless Rohingya Muslim refugees from the nearby Rakhine in Myanmar, officials said. 

Some of the 241 Rohingya who disembarked from the boat in Pidie regency (pictured) looked famished, sick and exhausted, according to a representative of a local fishermen’s association.

“Their physical conditions were unstable because they didn’t eat enough while at sea,” Marfian, the secretary in Pidie for Panglima Laot, the fishermen’s group, told BenarNews.

A police official in Bireuen confirmed that the boat with 249 people, which was pushed back to sea twice earlier, had landed in that regency along the northern coast near the western tip of Sumatra island. 

“We are looking after them and making sure everything goes well,” Second Inspector Marzuki, a spokesperson for the Bireuen police who goes by one name, told BenarNews.  

Residents of two villages along Aceh’s coast pushed back the boat on Thursday after two other boatloads of Rohingya had landed in the region on Nov. 13 and Nov. 14. Police at the time said that locals had been complaining about bad behavior shown by some among the 1,000-odd Rohingya who were already sheltering in Aceh. 

Indonesia and neighboring Malaysia, both majority-Muslim countries, are popular destinations for Rohingya who decide to pay human smugglers money to embark on the often perilous and potentially deadly sea journey from Cox’s Bazar. 

“[T]he sailing season has started, and many refugees try to leave the camps in Bangladesh where they face precariousness, overcrowding, insecurity, lawlessness and now also food rations cuts,” Chris Lewa, the director of the Arakan Project, a Thailand-based human rights group that advocates for rights for the stateless Rohingya people, told BenarNews in an email early Monday (Bangkok time). 

“We know of one more boat still at sea, maybe more. Surely more will be planning to leave.”

Miftachuddin Cut Adek, deputy secretary-general of Panglima Laot, the fishermen's association, said that members of his group were always open to allowing in the Rohingya. 

"We accepted them for humanitarian reasons," he told BenarNews. “It's a pity that they were adrift in the sea when they reached the shoreline, but were rejected.”

Usman Hamid, executive director of Amnesty Inetrnational’s branch in Indonesia called it irresponsible for locals to have forced the Rohingya on that one boat to return to potential perils out on the open sea.

“This reflects a major decline in Indonesian civility. Even though the locals previously showed generosity and humanity towards Rohingya refugees,” Usman Hamid said in a statement issued before the boat with 249 people aboard was allowed to land.

“Indonesia has an obligation to help them. The policy of returning them to their country of origin clearly violates the non-refoulement principle, a basic pillar of the life of civilized nations," said Usman.

In January 2023, Jakarta called for region-wide cooperation to conduct rescue operations for Rohingya stranded at sea, so that Indonesia wouldn’t have to bear the burden of this task disproportionately.

Indonesia does not grant asylum or legal status to refugees. Refugees who arrive in Indonesia are usually confined to temporary shelters or detention centers, and face an uncertain future, as they have no access to formal education and jobs.

Human rights groups have said that the number of Rohingya leaving for third countries highlights the dire conditions at the refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh and the deteriorating situation in post-coup Myanmar.

Many Rohingya have grown desperate because they see no hope of being repatriated to Myanmar, which has been convulsed with violence following the February 2021 coup by the Burmese military, rights advocates and NGOs in the region have said.

The year 2022 was the deadliest since 2014 for Rohingya attempting such sea voyages, according to the United Nations. At least 348 individuals died or went missing at sea, UNHCR reported in January.

Imran Vittachi contributed to this report from Washington.

BenarNews is an online news outlet affiliated with Radio Free Asia.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Pizaro Gozali Idrus and Uzair Thamrin for BenarNews.

The foreign ministry said people smugglers had taken advantage of Indonesia’s generosity over the years in allowing in members of the stateless and persecuted minority group from Myanmar, while police said that locals were complaining about bad behavior by some among the 1,000-odd Rohingya sheltering in Aceh.

The wooden boat, which had been adrift for several days, first made its appearance on Thursday near the shore of Bireuen district, where police and the military tried to persuade villagers to let the refugees land on humanitarian grounds, said a spokesman for the Bireuen police.

But the villagers refused, saying they had unpleasant experiences with Rohingya who arrived on previous occasions and had been “troublesome,” said spokesman Marzuki, who goes by one name.

“We negotiated, but the locals refused to accept them,” the police official told BenarNews.

The police and the military have the power to override the locals, but Marzuki didn’t say why officials did not use that authority.

Jolly Ronny Mamarimbing, an intelligence officer for the Bireuen police, said the Rohingya were given food and drinks, and five of them who appeared very unwell were allowed to disembark and stay on in the village.

The boat then left and attempted to dock at Lhokseumawe, in northern Aceh, but was met with similar resistance from locals there, said Salman Alfarisi, a local police spokesman.

“They were going to [set] sail again, but their boat had engine trouble,” he said.

This latest group of Rohingya followed the more than 400 others who arrived in Aceh by sea on Monday and Tuesday. The Aceh police and the local fishing community said they provided food, water, medical care and temporary shelter to the people who disembarked from the first two boats.

According to fishermen, Rohingya on those boats had sailed from the refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh. One of the refugees on the boat that was turned away on Thursday, told the Agence France-Presse news agency that its passengers had also left Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district near the Myanmar border, where the crowded camps are located. 

The camps host some 1 million Rohingya, nearly 740,000 of whom escaped a military crackdown in 2017, which the U.N. later described as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” A Muslim minority, the Rohingya have faced decades of systematic discrimination, statelessness and targeted violence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.

Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, has a history of welcoming Rohingya, who are considered one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. 

In 2015, Indonesia allowed thousands of Rohingya to disembark on its shores, along with migrants from Bangladesh, after they were stranded at sea for months.

Indonesia has no legal or practical obligation to host refugees, nor can it offer them a permanent solution, because it is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, said Lalu Muhammad Iqbal, a spokesman for Indonesia’s Foreign Ministry.

“Ironically, many countries that are parties to the convention have closed their doors and even implemented push-back policies against the refugees,” he said in a statement Thursday.

“Indonesia’s kindness in providing temporary shelter has been exploited by people smugglers who seek financial gain from the refugees without caring about the high risk they face, especially vulnerable groups such as women and children,” he said.

UNHCR ready to assist

The U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) urged the Indonesian government to keep its borders open to refugees.

“UNHCR is ready to assist the government, the authorities and the community in carrying out efforts to save the lives of refugees,” Mitra Salima, spokeswoman for the agency in Indonesia, told BenarNews.

“But we hope they will still provide assistance, considering there are many vulnerable women and children.”

In January, Jakarta called for regional cooperation to conduct rescue operations for Rohingya stranded at sea, so that Indonesia wouldn’t have to disproportionately bear the burden of this task. 

Indonesia does not grant asylum or legal status to refugees. 

Refugees who arrive in Indonesia are usually confined to temporary shelters or detention centers, and face an uncertain future, as they have no access to formal education and jobs.

Meanwhile, human rights groups have said that the numbers of Rohingya leaving for third countries further highlight the dire conditions at the Cox’s Bazar camps and the deteriorating situation in Myanmar after the February 2021 military coup.

Many Rohingya have grown desperate because they see no hope of being repatriated to Myanmar, which is convulsed with violence following the coup, human rights advocates and NGOs in the region have said. 

In Bangladesh, the refugees cannot work or properly educate their children.

To flee what feels like a hopeless situation, many undertake perilous journeys by sea, often on ramshackle boats, so they can lead a better life in one of the Southeast Asian nations, where they can access schools and jobs. 

Last year was the deadliest since 2014 for Rohingya attempting such sea voyages. At least 348 individuals died or went missing at sea, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Pizaro Gozali Idrus for BenarNews.

The Muslim-majority nation – mainland Africa’s smallest country – accused Myanmar of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention during a campaign of military-led violence in 2017 that led to thousands of Rohingya deaths. 

The Hague-based court on Oct. 16 said that Gambia can wait until May 16, 2024, to submit pleadings in the case, while the junta regime has until Dec. 16, 2024, to submit its counter-argument.

The deadlines have already been extended several times by the court, which is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations.

“The Rohingya are frustrated that they have to wait for so long, year after year, to get a solution for the crimes committed by the Myanmar military,” said Phil Robertson, the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch. 

“I hope this is the last delay,” he said. “The court needs to stop granting the Myanmar military every time it asks for extension of time.” 

Alleged atrocities

The military’s alleged atrocities included indiscriminate killings, mass rape and village torchings as more than 740,000 fled across the border to Bangladesh.

The violence was committed during the tenure of the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi, who in December 2019 defended the military against allegations of genocide at the ICJ. 

The Nobel Peace Prize winner and one-time democracy icon now languishes in prison — toppled by the same military in a February 2021 coup d’etat.

In 2022, the National Unity Government, formed by former Myanmar lawmakers who operate as a shadow government in opposition to the military junta, said they accept the authority of the ICJ to decide if the campaign against Rohingya constituted a genocide, and would withdraw all preliminary objections in the case.

Later in 2022, the ICJ rejected all of the junta’s objections to the case, clearing the way to consider the factual evidence against Myanmar, a process that could take years.

Ro Anamul Hasan, a Rohingya teacher living in one of the Bangladesh refugee camps, believes the junta is delaying the ICJ trial while it moves forward on a plan to repatriate some Rohingya under a small pilot project. 

“The junta is buying time for pilot repatriation,” she told Radio Free Asia. “They think that if pilot repatriation happens, the seriousness of the crime in the ICJ case will be reduced.”

Seven years of waiting

Another Rohingya woman told RFA that the delays in the case are frustrating. 

“It has been seven years of relying on them and waiting for a solution,” she said. “Life in the refugee camp where we live is getting worse day-by-day.”

NUG spokesman Nay Phone Latt told RFA on Tuesday that the “the longer the delay in getting justice, the bolder the perpetrators become.”

RFA’s calls to junta spokesman Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun for comment on the extensions went unanswered.

The Rohingya, whose ethnicity is not recognized by the junta regime, have faced decades of discrimination in Myanmar and are effectively stateless. Myanmar administrations have refused to call them “Rohingya” and instead use the term “Bengali.”

Myanmar faces other lawsuits, including one filed in 2019 in Argentina under the principle of “universal jurisdiction,” and an authorization by the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes against humanity over the alleged forced deportation of the Rohingya.

Gambia’s complaint, also brought in 2019, was filed on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

The ICJ was established in 1945 to settle disputes in accordance with international law through binding judgments with no right of appeal.

Translated by Htin Aung Kyaw. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The World Food Program, or WFP, twice this year has reduced its food allocation for Rohingya refugees to U.S. $8 per person per month, as more than half of the yearly support requested by the United Nations remains unmet, U.N. officials said.

“I have a family of seven members, and due to the reduction in rations, we are starving,” said Nur Jahan, a refugee who met with Afreen Akhter, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, in Cox’s Bazar on Tuesday.

The southeastern district along the border with Myanmar is home to sprawling camps and settlements where about 1 million Rohingya are sheltering.

“Rohingya people are increasingly trying to go outside the camps in search of work, and many of them are being detained by police,” she said. “Others are getting involved in illicit activities because they don’t have enough food.”

Bangladesh’s government, which has hosted hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees for years, has steadfastly rejected requests to allow them to work outside their camps, making them almost completely reliant on foreign aid.

Jamila Akhter, a 25-year-old pregnant woman from the Ukhia refugee camp, told Akhter that she worried about her unborn child’s health.

“I am an expectant mother. I should be able to eat better now,” she told BenarNews. “But we are not getting any nutritious food.”

The U.S. official said she had witnessed the “dire conditions” in the camps, but she also emphasized the United States’ oversized role in helping the refugees.

“The United States is the single largest donor, by far, when it comes to supporting Rohingya refugees,” she told reporters after meeting with local officials in Cox’s Bazar. “We’ve far outpaced anyone else in our support for Bangladesh in their response to this crisis.”

The U.S. has contributed $2.2 billion in response to the humanitarian crisis since 2017 when at least 740,000 Rohingyas fled Myanmar during a military crackdown that a top U.N. official described as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

Meanwhile in Bangkok on Tuesday, Filippo Grandi, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, urged donor nations during a high-level meeting on the regional Rohingya refugee crisis to make substantial pledges of support for the Rohingya.

“This is a crisis that should not be forgotten ... If contributions decline, we are in trouble,” Agence France-Presse quoted him as saying.

A humanitarian fund for the Rohingya managed by the U.N. has so far received only 42% of the $875.9 million required for the refugees this year, according to data from the United Nations.

At the gathering in Bangkok, the British government committed $5.5 million (£4.5 million) in fresh support, which appeared to be the only instance of a new pledge of substantial aid announced so far.

“This decline in humanitarian assistance makes it more difficult to continuously, for example, renew the shelters,” Grandi said, according to the Reuters news agency.

“You have to invest money all the time and that money is becoming short, so conditions are now beginning to regress.”

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ahammad Foyez and Abdur Rahman for BenarNews.

Myanmar’s government has made at least two attempts to invite Rohingya back to the country since the military carried out a brutal offensive in their home state of Rakhine in August 2017, but with little success. 

About 1 million Rohingya, including about 740,000 who fled the offensive, live mostly in crowded and sprawling refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh.

On Tuesday, Union Minister Ko Ko Hlaing told state-owned media that 7,000 Rohingya will be repatriated from Bangladesh camps to Myanmar by the end of the rainy season next month.

He said 20 new villages will be constructed for the Rohingyas and that plots for 1,000 houses had already been cleared for those who return. The union minister claimed that China and “other members of the international community” had agreed to provide assistance in building additional homes.

The comments came days after the junta invited officials from foreign embassies – including Bangladesh, Thailand, and Sri Lanka – to examine arrangements for readmitting Rohingya refugees to Myanmar.

‘Just for show’

But while the junta appears to be rolling out the red carpet to the Rohingya, residents of the camps in Bangladesh told RFA Burmese they believe the offer is a trick.

“They are doing it just for show, due to international pressure,” said Ali Jaina, a Rohingya living in the Balukhali refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar. “They have been putting on these kinds of shows since we arrived [in Bangladesh]. But no one has gone back.”

Al Jaina said that the Rohingya in Bangladesh “have no confidence” in the junta.

“How can they give us peace when they can’t even make peace with the ethnic groups who already live there?" he said.

Since seizing power in a February 2021 coup d’etat, Myanmar’s military has become embroiled in a multifront conflict with an armed resistance and multiple ethnic armies based in the country’s remote border regions. 

Junta troops have killed more than 4,000 civilians since the takeover, according to Thailand’s Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma).

Al Jaina dismissed the junta’s plan to repatriate Rohingya as a “program that will move refugees from one camp to another,” and suggested that those who accept will face an even worse food crisis than they do in Bangladesh, due to restrictions their ethnic group faces in Myanmar.

‘No desire’ to return without guarantees

Another Rohingya at a camp in Bangladesh said they would only return if they are guaranteed citizenship, access to education, freedom of movement, and the right to resettle their original land.

“If we are provided with these, we will go back right away,” the refugee said, speaking on condition of anonymity citing fear of reprisal. “No one would need to plan for our return or persuade us to go back –  we would do it ourselves. If not, none of us are going to go back. We have no desire to do so.”

Union Minister Ko Ko Hlaing has said that returnees will be issued a “screening card” for citizenship, although they will need to apply. Rohingya who want to return to their original communities can do so “with official approval from village and state authorities,” he said.

Attempts by RFA to contact Hla Thein, the junta’s spokesman for Rakhine state, for comment on the screening process for readmitting Rohingya went unanswered Tuesday.

Nay San Lwin, co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition, said that the junta's readmission plan will fail because it does not provide any substantial opportunities for the Rohingya refugees.

“The key to the readmission process is providing the Rohingya with the right to citizenship and [recognition of their] ethnicity,” he said. “Without these, no one will return. Simply moving refugees from the camps in Bangladesh to other camps on the Myanmar side won’t be successful."

In 2018 and 2019, Myanmar and Bangladesh made two attempts to repatriate some 6,000 Rohingya. However, with no guarantees of citizenship or resettlement of original communities, no one accepted the offer.

Based on an analysis of the situation in Rakhine state, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said on March 19 that conditions were not acceptable for the Rohingyas to return home for the foreseeable future.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

From being “among the best funded humanitarian responses” until last year, an annual fundraising plan by international agencies for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh may record its lowest contributions in 2023 since it was set up in 2017, data indicates.

The Joint Response Plan (JRP) for the Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis has so far received less than half the contributions this year than in 2022, data from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) shows. And the U.S. $268 million the plan has got so far is a third of the $876 million it sought for the year.

This drop comes at a time when the World Food Program earlier this year reduced food assistance to the Rohingya 33% – to $8 a month per person – citing a funds shortage, even as it acknowledged that that 45% of refugee families were not eating a sufficient diet and malnutrition was widespread in the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar.

“Aid [for the Rohingya] has been dwindling in the last few years, and the JRP is still underfunded. Donors are stretched thin responding to the situation in Ukraine, Sudan, and Afghanistan,” John Quinley III, director of advocacy group Fortify Rights, told BenarNews.

“The decline in food aid has had significant health consequences for Rohingya refugees – both their physical and mental health. Donor governments should ensure Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have access to adequate food.”

The United States, the largest donor to the JRP since it was set up in 2017, has contributed $100 million this year so far, down from $336.7 million in total last year. By contrast, U.S. non-defense assistance to Ukraine spiked to $22 billion in 2022-2023 compared to an annual average of $500 million in earlier years, according to foreignassistance.gov, a United States government database.

About 1 million Rohingya, including about 740,000 who fled Myanmar following a brutal military offensive in their home state of Rakhine in August 2017, live mostly in crowded and sprawling refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh.

The international agencies’ fundraising plan will continue to receive funds through the end of the year, but it likely won’t match past amounts, said Romain Desclous, a spokesperson at the U.N refugee agency UNHCR in Bangladesh.

That’s not because of “fatigue” or “disinterest” from donors, he told BenarNews.

“[The Rohingya crisis] was up until last year among the best funded humanitarian responses,” Desclous said. 

He said the crisis was no longer considered an emergency situation but a protracted one, which means the emergency has lasted so long that it has become a normal situation. 

“That means humanitarian emergency funds get directed towards other emergencies, and the world is not lacking in emergencies,” he said.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the situation in the former Soviet republic became one such emergency situation, noted Sultan Mohammed Zakaria, a Bangladesh country specialist in the U.S. with rights watchdog Amnesty International.

“The Russia-Ukraine war has shifted global diplomatic priorities as the conflict has deeply unsettled the global security architecture while the world is still grappling with the economic fallout of COVID-19,” he told BenarNews.

“Yet we live and thrive on the strength of our collective consciousness. There must never be any excuse to forget a million refugees.”

Need ‘continuation, not reduction, of life-saving aid’

The huge decline in funds for the Rohingya this year stems from a drastic drop in U.S. contributions, which mostly ramped up its funding over 2018-2022, even as contributions from other sources waned. The JRP was able to make up what it lost from other donors through the U.S. funds increases.

The United States has provided at least 40% of total global funds contributed toward the Rohingya refugees to the JRP so far since 2017, according to OCHA’s data.

In 2022, the U.S. contributed the most it had ever done – $336 million – to the JRP.  By comparison, the UK, the second-highest donor, contributed only a tenth of that amount last year.

Therefore, the U.S. contribution of $100 million so far this year represents a drastic reduction. But, it turns out, American assistance globally has dropped in 2023, according to a government database.

U.S. global assistance fell to $27 billion so far this year from $58 billion last year, according to data from ForeignAssistance.gov.

This decline in U.S. humanitarian assistance over the last year has occurred “even as needs reach record levels,” is negatively affecting refugees around the world, acknowledged Daniel Sullivan, a regional director for Refugees International.

“In March 2021, [U.S.] Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an official genocide determination and committed to helping the Rohingya build a path out of genocide, Sullivan told BenarNews.

“That path must begin with continuation, not reduction, of life-saving aid.”

The more than 1 million Rohingya in the makeshift camps are fully dependent on international aid because Bangladesh does not allow them to work in the country. Some enterprising refugees who set up shops within the camps had to see the authorities shut down their establishments or even demolish them.

Washington, for its part, has not publicly discussed the steep drop in its global assistance and a State Department official who BenarNews contacted suggested, like the U.S. had done before, that the Rohingya be allowed to work.

“[We] continue to meet with and encourage the government of Bangladesh to re-examine its restrictions on allowing refugees to earn a living, which would allow our humanitarian partners to focus on assisting the most vulnerable,” the department spokesperson said in a statement.

Bangladesh Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen ruled out allowing the refugees to work inside or outside the camps.

“The West advises us to employ the Rohingya through training. It is not possible,” he told BenarNews. 

“We are struggling to give work to our own people.” 

Ahammad Foyez in Dhaka contributed to this report. BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Nazmul Ahasan for BenarNews.

From being “among the best funded humanitarian responses” until last year, an annual fundraising plan by international agencies for Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh may record its lowest contributions in 2023 since it was set up in 2017, data indicates.

The Joint Response Plan (JRP) for the Rohingya Humanitarian Crisis has so far received less than half the contributions this year than in 2022, data from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) shows. And the U.S. $268 million the plan has got so far is a third of the $876 million it sought for the year.

This drop comes at a time when the World Food Program earlier this year reduced food assistance to the Rohingya 33% – to $8 a month per person – citing a funds shortage, even as it acknowledged that that 45% of refugee families were not eating a sufficient diet and malnutrition was widespread in the refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar.

“Aid [for the Rohingya] has been dwindling in the last few years, and the JRP is still underfunded. Donors are stretched thin responding to the situation in Ukraine, Sudan, and Afghanistan,” John Quinley III, director of advocacy group Fortify Rights, told BenarNews.

“The decline in food aid has had significant health consequences for Rohingya refugees – both their physical and mental health. Donor governments should ensure Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have access to adequate food.”

The United States, the largest donor to the JRP since it was set up in 2017, has contributed $100 million this year so far, down from $336.7 million in total last year. By contrast, U.S. non-defense assistance to Ukraine spiked to $22 billion in 2022-2023 compared to an annual average of $500 million in earlier years, according to foreignassistance.gov, a United States government database.

About 1 million Rohingya, including about 740,000 who fled Myanmar following a brutal military offensive in their home state of Rakhine in August 2017, live mostly in crowded and sprawling refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh.

The international agencies’ fundraising plan will continue to receive funds through the end of the year, but it likely won’t match past amounts, said Romain Desclous, a spokesperson at the U.N refugee agency UNHCR in Bangladesh.

That’s not because of “fatigue” or “disinterest” from donors, he told BenarNews.

“[The Rohingya crisis] was up until last year among the best funded humanitarian responses,” Desclous said. 

He said the crisis was no longer considered an emergency situation but a protracted one, which means the emergency has lasted so long that it has become a normal situation. 

“That means humanitarian emergency funds get directed towards other emergencies, and the world is not lacking in emergencies,” he said.

When Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, the situation in the former Soviet republic became one such emergency situation, noted Sultan Mohammed Zakaria, a Bangladesh country specialist in the U.S. with rights watchdog Amnesty International.

“The Russia-Ukraine war has shifted global diplomatic priorities as the conflict has deeply unsettled the global security architecture while the world is still grappling with the economic fallout of COVID-19,” he told BenarNews.

“Yet we live and thrive on the strength of our collective consciousness. There must never be any excuse to forget a million refugees.”

Need ‘continuation, not reduction, of life-saving aid’

The huge decline in funds for the Rohingya this year stems from a drastic drop in U.S. contributions, which mostly ramped up its funding over 2018-2022, even as contributions from other sources waned. The JRP was able to make up what it lost from other donors through the U.S. funds increases.

The United States has provided at least 40% of total global funds contributed toward the Rohingya refugees to the JRP so far since 2017, according to OCHA’s data.

In 2022, the U.S. contributed the most it had ever done – $336 million – to the JRP.  By comparison, the UK, the second-highest donor, contributed only a tenth of that amount last year.

Therefore, the U.S. contribution of $100 million so far this year represents a drastic reduction. But, it turns out, American assistance globally has dropped in 2023, according to a government database.

U.S. global assistance fell to $27 billion so far this year from $58 billion last year, according to data from ForeignAssistance.gov.

This decline in U.S. humanitarian assistance over the last year has occurred “even as needs reach record levels,” is negatively affecting refugees around the world, acknowledged Daniel Sullivan, a regional director for Refugees International.

“In March 2021, [U.S.] Secretary of State Antony Blinken made an official genocide determination and committed to helping the Rohingya build a path out of genocide, Sullivan told BenarNews.

“That path must begin with continuation, not reduction, of life-saving aid.”

The more than 1 million Rohingya in the makeshift camps are fully dependent on international aid because Bangladesh does not allow them to work in the country. Some enterprising refugees who set up shops within the camps had to see the authorities shut down their establishments or even demolish them.

Washington, for its part, has not publicly discussed the steep drop in its global assistance and a State Department official who BenarNews contacted suggested, like the U.S. had done before, that the Rohingya be allowed to work.

“[We] continue to meet with and encourage the government of Bangladesh to re-examine its restrictions on allowing refugees to earn a living, which would allow our humanitarian partners to focus on assisting the most vulnerable,” the department spokesperson said in a statement.

Bangladesh Foreign Minister A.K. Abdul Momen ruled out allowing the refugees to work inside or outside the camps.

“The West advises us to employ the Rohingya through training. It is not possible,” he told BenarNews. 

“We are struggling to give work to our own people.” 

Ahammad Foyez in Dhaka contributed to this report. BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Nazmul Ahasan for BenarNews.

He hoped that his son could start a new, happier life in Bangkok, free from the difficulties of being a second-class citizen in the Buddhist majority country of his birth.

"The agent took him from our village, promising to get him to Thailand via Yangon … and said nothing bad would happen to him,” Bocholla told RFA Burmese from Rathedaung township’s Nyaung Pin Gyi village.

Bocholla sold his family’s land and house, took out a high-interest loan and even pawned a food assistance booklet from the World Food Program to cobble together the 6.5 million kyats (US$3,100) his son’s handler had demanded to help him relocate.

Not long after his son left in January, Bocholla learned that he had been arrested in Magwe region’s Minbu township and the two lost contact.

“I asked the agent so many times what had become of him and what to do next, but he never responded,” he said.

Bocholla and his family are among tens of thousands of Rohingya living in temporary villages and camps for those displaced by a Myanmar military crackdown in 2017. More than 140,000 are sheltering in camps in Rakhine’s Sittwe township that the UK-based Burmese Rohingya Organization has likened to “open air prisons.”

Desperate to return

Another 740,000 Rohingya fled to neighboring Bangladesh from Rakhine during the military clearance operations and have refused to take part in a repatriation program that would see them sent to camps in Rakhine state, saying they want to return to their original homesteads because they find the camps unsafe.

With few options after years of a stateless existence, many Rohingya are now doing whatever they can to sail or travel over land to Muslim majority countries in the region, including Indonesia and Malaysia, or nations with a more open society, such as Thailand and India. 

But their desperation to leave makes them susceptible to exploitation by human traffickers.

Bocholla’s experience is not uncommon for Rohingya living in Rakhine and Bangladesh. Members of the ethnic community say similar tales of falling victim to trafficking can be heard throughout villages and camps for the displaced.

Mamotsolein, a 16-year-old Rohingya boy, recently left the Ohn Taw Ghi (North) Rohingya camp in Sittwe after a trafficker promised him a job with good pay in Rakhine’s Rathedaung township. 

Instead, he was kidnapped and held for a 6 million-kyat (US$2,860) ransom, his father said.

“We don’t have that much money so we offered to pay 3 million, but they wouldn’t return our son,” he said. “Now they say they’re going to kill him if we can’t pay them what they ask.”

Mamotsolein’s father said that he filed a complaint with the Sittwe Township Police Station about the kidnapping and human trafficking, but authorities have yet to respond.

Trafficking networks

Rohingyas told RFA there are “at least three human traffickers” in each village and camp for the displaced, and that nearly all of them are fellow members of the ethnic group. These people act as groomers to select potential victims and connect them with second-level trafficking networks that arrange their transport to a city such as Yangon, they said. 

From there, a third-level trafficking network sends the victims to a third country, where they are sold for labor or held for ransom.

Members of aid groups working with Rohingya communities told RFA that second- and third-level traffickers include Rohingya, as well as ethnic Rakhines and majority Bamar. They said traffickers also bring Rohingyas to Rakhine state from camps in Bangladesh and “keep them in groups” before transporting them elsewhere.

RFA spoke to at least 10 individuals for this report, including Rohingya human trafficking awareness campaigners, aid workers who help arrested Rohingyas, lawyers for Rohingyas, Rohingyas in camps and villages for the displaced, leaders from Rohingya camps in Bangladesh and Rohingya activists. 

One human trafficking awareness campaigner said that most of the networks operate in Rathedaung township's Ah Nauk Pyin and Nyaung Ping Gyi villages.

"Their head gangs, who are located in Yangon and Thailand, offer lower-level traffickers incentives, such as 200,000 kyats (US$95) per person, if they can recruit people at the Rohingya camps,” said the campaigner, speaking on condition of anonymity citing security concerns.

“They usually leave via motorboat from Ah Nauk Pyin and Nyaung Pin Gyi villages,” he said. “People from the Bangladesh camps, as well as from Rakhine’s Buthidaung, Maungdaw and Sittwe townships, also go there to leave. Those villages are a meeting point for them."

A Rohingya will typically pay 6-12 million kyats (US$2,860-5,720) to traffickers to get to Thailand or Malaysia from Rakhine state, whereas those from camps in Bangladesh pay around 300,000 taka (US$2,750) for the same service.

Convincing victims to leave

Khin Maung, director of the Rohingya Youth Association of Bangladesh's Thankhali camp, said that recruiters work to convince camp residents who are having difficulty earning a living to leave for other countries.

"They persuade the [victims] saying that the food is not good in the camp and they can't go back to Myanmar, so they will have to live like that for the rest of their lives or they can go abroad, and people take the bait," he said.

If those who try to leave are arrested, their traffickers are rarely brought to justice, according to a lawyer who provides legal assistance to Rohingyas. He said the networks typically keep their chain of operations disconnected so that traffickers cannot be caught.

“When there are arrests, they are of the Rohingya victims and dock workers, not the traffickers or the owner of the boats,” he said.

Rohingya activists and residents say human trafficking takes place in areas controlled by the junta as well as by the Arakan Army of ethnic rebels, although they declined to say whether the groups are involved in the networks, due to fear of reprisal.

Attempts by RFA to contact Arakan Army spokesperson Khaing Thukha and junta Deputy Information Minister Major Gen. Zaw Min Tin for comment have gone unanswered.

According to the U.S. State Department's 2023 Trafficking in Persons Report, Myanmar has made no significant efforts to eliminate human trafficking and is the third worst country in the world in terms of willingness to cooperate on combating the problem.

In 2022, the United Nations refugee agency estimated that 2,400 Rohingya embarked on life-threatening sea journeys from Bangladesh's camps, a five-fold increase from the previous year.

Nay San Lwin, co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition, told RFA that in 2022 alone, more than 400 Rohingya died enroute to another country.

Rohingya activists have called for authorities to better police trafficking in camps and villages for the displaced and for a loosening of restrictions at the sites that limit Rohingyas’ right to travel, work and pursue an education.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Rohingya have long sung “Tarana Geet,” a type of lyrical poem, as a musical lament conveying themes of personal and religious tragedies. But in recent years, the ballads have become a must-have feature in Rohingya protest rallies at refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar. 

“Tarana reminds the Rohingyas that they too have a country from which they were exiled,” said Mohammad Alam, a Rohingya leader who chairs a committee in one of the camps in Cox’s Bazar. “Tarana songs tell of a history of ongoing torture on us.”

Cox’s Bazar, a southeastern district of Bangladesh, hosts about 1 million of the refugees in camps that sprawl near the border with Myanmar. These include 740,000 Rohingya who fled across the frontier following a brutal 2017 military crackdown in Rakhine, their home state.

Recent Taranas, usually sung by a single vocalist with minimal instruments such as a mandolin or harmonium, capture a yearning for a lost home and the stresses of camp life. Recitations of popular songs such as “Let’s all go back to Arakan,” referring to the historical name of Rakhine state, evoke strong emotions in protest rallies.

“The Rohingya have an old love for Tarana songs composed with simple words in traditional tunes. We can readily grasp the mood they convey,” said Nur Ahmad, an activist with the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights. “That’s why it’s becoming our protest language now.”

On Aug. 25, 2017, Rohingya started to flee ethnic cleansing and widespread violence in Rakhine when the Burmese military launched an offensive in response to a Rohingya militant attack on border-police outposts.

In the six years since, attempts to repatriate the refugees from Bangladesh have failed as international concerns about their protection and rights persist in Myanmar, which is ruled today by a military government, which seized power in a February 2021 coup.

Sirajul Islam, a Rohingya musician for 24 years, makes a living by singing Taranas. Based on a well-established tune, he recently improvised a new Tarana lyric titled “Rohingya Tragedy.”

He agreed to sing it at a gathering in the Leda refugee camp last year for BenarNews correspondents: “Oh brother, oh brother, listen carefully. Listen to Arakan’s story, oh brother.”

“Someone has lost their husband. Someone has lost a descendant. Oppressed by Moghs and Burmese. Our Rohingya mothers and sisters. How destitute have they made us.”

He went on to describe the pain of camp life: “Come to the refugee camp. See how the situation is, brother. We densely live here, oh brother.”

One of his songs, named “Rohingyas have no peace,” is among the most popular Taranas among the refugee community: “We are now stuck overseas, oh brother. No country has Arakan-like peace. When I recall Arakan, tears fill my eyes.”

“Our desire cries out for Arakan, but we have no way to return.”

Recent upheavals in Rohingya camps inspired Islam and others to compose Taranas with more political themes. Many are crafted as a tribute to Muhib Ullah, a prominent Rohingya leader who was shot and killed two years ago.

Ahmed Hossain, a 42-year-old refugee musician, sings in one of his songs, “Everyone is here. Only Master Mohibullah isn’t. Why is my heart burning, for Master Mohibullah Bhai.”

Preserving ‘Tarana’

Tarana’s popularity has ignited a race to preserve these ballads. 

In the refugee camps, the Rohingya Cultural Memory Center (RCMC), run by the International Organization for Migration, preserves arts, artifacts, cultural treasures and heritage, including about 100 Rohingya songs of different varieties. 

RCMC also hosts performances by Rohingya artists, including Ahmed Hossain, and features traditional Rohingya musical instruments at its exhibition center in a camp in Ukhia, a sub-district of Cox’s Bazar.

Mayyu Khan, a young Rohingya artist and researcher, said he appreciated RCMC’s work, but believed more needed to be done.

His individual collection has more than 100 songs gathered since 2017. But he doesn’t know about the original creators of most lyrics and songs. “I only recorded most of the soundtrack on my phone and also gathered rare songs from other people’s devices.”

He uploads the songs on his social media pages, but aspires to build a more robust archive of the musical treasures.

Meanwhile, a record company in Australia, dedicated to capturing lives in exile, has recorded some of the Tarana music, sourcing songs and lyrics from traditional folklore and refugee artists. 

On its website, Music in Exile said only a few high-quality recordings of the Rohingya traditional music exist and notes that little has been written about the music in English.

“Few musical recordings have been made in Rohingya villages or refugee camps,” the NGO wrote after a trip to the area. “Despite increasing media attention on the crisis, most reports focus solely on the atrocities refugees have faced and not on their culture and memory – an essential part of their story gets left behind.”

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Sharif Khiam and Abdur Rahman for BenarNews.

Eight men were found alive on a beach near the city’s Basara village on Monday night, hours after the vessel went down, along with the bodies of two women, said village administrator Soe Myint. He told RFA that authorities are still searching for the missing people.

“The boat sank after taking on water due to heavy rains and high waves in the sea,” he said.

“The boat reappeared yesterday. Two dead bodies were found and eight people were recovered [alive]. The rest of the missing are likely to die. Now we are looking for the bodies on the beach.”

He said 10 women and 35 men were unaccounted for, adding that eight people survived by holding onto plastic containers when the boat sank.

Residents said the survivors are being cared for in Basara village.

The junta-run Rakhine Daily News reported August 7 that the Rohingya had left Rathedaung township heading to Malaysia by boat.

More than 740,000 Rohingya fled Rakhine following a military crackdown on the ethnic group that started more than five years ago, and now live in refugee camps in Bangladesh. Of the more than 600,000 that remained in Rakhine, around 125,000 are living in displaced people’s camps in the state.

Many Rohingya living in Rakhine state often leave by boat across the Bay of Bengal to Malaysia due to economic hardships and discrimination.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn and Taejun Kang.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Some of these stateless refugees who fled from persecution in Myanmar’s Rakhine state are all the more vulnerable because Bangladeshi authorities force them to act as informants against criminal elements, the New York-based watchdog alleged in a new report.

“Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s past pledges to protect Rohingya refugees are now threatened by violent groups and an indifferent justice system,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch (HRW).

In response, the Bangladesh government and security officials acknowledged the difficulty of policing the camps in Cox’s Bazar, a southeastern district where close to a million refugees live, but said they were doing their utmost to ensure safety. They also denied they were forcing anyone to act as informants.

HRW said it had documented 26 cases of violence against Rohingya, including murder, kidnapping, torture, rape and sexual assault, and forced marriage between January and April 2023.

“Authorities have been forcing Rohingya leaders to serve as informants, putting them at grave risk of being abducted or killed, without access to protection,” Human Rights Watch said in its report, adding that it interviewed 45 Rohingya and gathered supporting evidence, including police and medical reports, for its report.

Of the refugee population of nearly 1 million, about 740,000 Rohingya fled their home state of Rakhine for neighboring Bangladesh amid a brutal military crackdown in 2017.

Refugees told HRW that rebel groups such as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO), and criminal groups such as the Munna gang, were the perpetrators of increasingly brutal crimes in the camps.

“Several majhis [community leaders] who were killed or attacked over the past year were targeted by alleged ARSA members who considered them informants for Bangladesh authorities,” the HRW report said.

“Majhis said that authorities forced them to take part in nighttime watches, to join police raids, and to identify members of armed groups, at times in front of the suspects.”

Rohingya cannot seek redress from police or courts when they have been victims of a crime, the report also said.

‘“Instead, they must approach Bangladesh administrative authorities or security forces in the camps. Several families said they could not get the required approval from the camp-in-charge, a Bangladesh official, to file a report with the police,” HRW said.

“Others said they obtained permission to bring a complaint to the Armed Police Battalion (APBn) but could go no further, as the force has no civilian investigative function. Refugees who did manage to register their case at a local police station said there was no follow-up, often because they could not cover the bribes and legal fees demanded.”

‘We face many challenges’

Providing full security in the sprawling but dense camps is a tough task, the government and the Armed Police Battalion said.

Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said that a large number of people, whom he described as terrorists, were responsible for criminal acts in the camps.

“While working for the security of the Rohingya, sometimes the members of our forces are also in danger,” he told BenarNews.

“It is not very easy to deal with the way crimes are being committed inside the camps. We have to gain a lot of momentum to fight it.”

He denied that the Rohingya had no access to the police or courts.

An ABPn Superintendent, whose battalion patrols in the Cox’s Bazar area, expressed similar sentiments.

“Being a densely populated area, we face many challenges in carrying out our duties in the camps. Yet we are carrying out our duties risking our lives,” said 8-APBn Superintendent of Police Farooq Ahmed.

He denied the police had forced any refugee to become informants for law enforcement.

“Many times the Rohingya leaders keep in touch with the law enforcement agencies for the sake of the security of their people,” he told BenarNews.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ahammad Foyez and Abdur Rahman for BenarNews.

Separately, following a four-day visit to refugee camps in that southeastern district, International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan urged the world to provide more humanitarian support because, he said, Rohingya were missing meals after the U.N. World Food Program had cut monthly aid to U.S. $8 from $12 on June 1.

The killings in Friday’s shootout before dawn marked the latest bloodshed between the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO). Up until relatively recently, Bangladesh officials had denied that Rohingya militants had a foothold in the sprawling refugee camps near the Myanmar border, where security has deteriorated sharply.

“The gunfight that left five dead this morning was between two Rohingya armed groups, ARSA and RSO,” Md. Farooq Ahmed, an assistant superintendent with the Armed Police Battalion, told BenarNews.  

Sheikh Mohammad Ali, officer-in-charge of the Ukhia police station, said law enforcers recovered the corpses of those killed in the gunfight, which took place around 5 a.m. at the Balukhali camp. 

Camp resident Nur Hafez said gunshots woke him.

“I heard a hue and cry. Rushing to the scene, I found some blood-stained injured people lying on the ground. The police took them away after a while,” he told BenarNews.

“Due to contests among different groups inside the camp, the killings are increasing,” Hafez said.

Syed Ullah, a Rohingya camp leader, said that the feud between the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army and Rohingya Solidarity Organization had surfaced over efforts to exert dominance in the camps.

“The ordinary Rohingya people have been living in a terrified atmosphere,” he said.

The population of the densely crowded camps has swollen to about 1 million after about 740,000 Rohingya crossed the border into Bangladesh as they fled a brutal military offensive in their home state of Rakhine in Myanmar. That followed a series of deadly attacks by ARSA forces on Burmese military and police posts in Rakhine in August 2017. 

Ullah said uncertainty over efforts to repatriate the Rohingya to Myanmar had caused frustration, leading to an increase in criminal activities at the camps.

“We at the camps have faced two-pronged difficulties – our monthly food allocations have been reduced twice and now we face the danger of being killed by the armed groups,” he said.

Karim Khan, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, visited the camps to interview Rohingya about atrocities they suffered before fleeing to Bangladesh. 

He had made a similar visit in February 2022 after the Hague-based ICC authorized the investigation in 2019, but that was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The pre-trial chamber concluded at the time that it was reasonable “to believe that since at least 9 October 2016, members of the Tatmadaw [the Myanmar military], jointly with other security forces and with some participation of local civilians, may have committed coercive acts” against the Rohingya people that constitute crimes against humanity, according to a 55-page court document.

In a separate investigation, the International Court of Justice allowed a case to proceed that the Gambia had brought against Myanmar’s military regime alleging genocide against Rohingya. 

The ICJ in May ruled to allow Myanmar officials until Aug. 24 to present arguments and evidence “necessary to respond to the claims” made against them.

Following his four-day visit, Karim Khan expressed concern that Rohingya are going without meals.

“[U]p to March, Rohingya men, women and children were given three meals a day, they were given enough money to eat three times a day. And since March, they have (been) eating twice a day, and not even twice,” he told reporters at the Inter-Continental Hotel in Dhaka hours after flying in from Cox’s Bazar.

Mohammad Alam, a leader of Leda camp in Teknaf, had told BenarNews that the new monthly allocation translates to about 28 taka (25 cents) per day per person or about nine taka (eight cents) per each of three meals a day.

“Is it possible to feed a family with such an allocation,” Alam asked.

During his news conference, Karim Khan, who said he discussed the issue with Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, expressed similar concerns.

“What could you do with nine taka – I was told one egg is 12 taka,” he said, pointing out that some meals are skipped.

He said children would ask their parents, “‘Where is lunch?’”

“The heart should note that this is an area where the world should give support,” Karim Khan said while urging the World Food Program and other United Nations agencies to step up.

“[I]t is a symptom of a malaise in which we have to show that every human life matters, that we give resources fairly and adequately wherever possible, that we realize 1.1 million people in a camp, the government of Bangladesh also needs support,” he said. “If people are hungry and there is no hope, it will lead to tension and difficulties.” 

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated online news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Abdur Rahman and Ahammad Foyez for BenarNews.

The criminal complaint of genocide by Myanmar’s armed forces against the Muslim Rohingya minority includes detailed accounts of stomach-churning atrocities.

Argentina accepted the case under the principle of “universal jurisdiction,” in which crimes that are especially abhorrent can be taken by any country.

Hearings at a federal court in Buenos Aires, set to end Tuesday, include in-person testimony from Rohingya witnesses – a historic first. For security reasons the case is being held behind closed doors.

“The net is closing in around Myanmar’s military leaders. This trial shows that they cannot hide from justice anywhere in the world,” said Tun Khin, head of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK, or BROUK, the London-based advocacy group that brought the case.

The case centers on abuses committed in Myanmar between 2012 and 2018. Those named include military junta leader Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, radical Buhddist cleric Ashin Wirathu, and ousted civilian leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi.

Tomas Ojea Qintana, who was United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar between 2008 and 2014, is representing BROUK in court.

Much of the case is based on Ojea Quintana’s own work in the region, the work of his successor Yanghee Lee, and reports submitted in 2018 and 2019 by a United Nations “Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar.”

Easy Target

The Rohingya live in the impoverished western state of Rakhine, which borders the Bay of Bengal and Bangladesh. They shared the region with other groups, mainly the Buddhist ethnic Rakhine.

According to the criminal complaint, the “genocidal final plan” against the Rohingya was born in 2012, when a nominally elected military government, seeking support from the country’s Buddhist majority, began to promote hatred towards Myanmar’s Muslims and especially the Rohingya.

The Rohingya, who had faced various forms of discrimination for decades, were an easy target.

“In a coordinated manner among all state entities, the use of the name Rohingya began to be forbidden,” replaced by the generic term “Bengalis,” the complaint reads.

A campaign, fueled by radical Buddhist priests, then spread the idea that the tiny Muslim minority was plotting “to take over the country and convert it to Islam.”

Two waves of violence broke out in October 2012 in Rakhine State, affecting 12 townships. Further violence broke out in the town of Thandwe in 2013. At the time authorities dismissed the incidents as “intercommunal unrest.”

The attacks against the Rohingya and another Muslim ethnic group, the Kaman, were really part of a months-long plan “to instigate violence and amplify tensions” fueled by “various Rakhine organizations, radical Buddhist monk organizations, and several officials and influential figures,” the complaint reads.

Security forces “were at least complicit, often failing to intervene to stop the violence, or actively participated.”

‘Genocidal plan’

Witnesses in the towns of Sittwe and Kyaukpyu said police and soldiers stopped people from extinguishing fires set by Rakhine mobs, while witnesses at Maungdaw “described security forces shooting indiscriminately at Rohingya and conducting mass arrests.”

Some 140,000 people were displaced, mostly fleeing to Bangladesh.

Following the November 2015 elections which ushered in Aung San Suu Kyi’s civilian government, “the genocidal plan was perfected,” the complaint states.

“In a cruel twist of history” this allowed for “the worst atrocities to be committed under the authority of those who had fought with their lives for democratic freedoms, human rights and peace,” it says.

Violence escalated dramatically in August 2017 when the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army – a small, poorly armed resistance group – attacked security forces across northern Rakhine state, killing 12 people.

The military response, “launched within hours, was immediate, brutal and grossly disproportionate,” encompassing hundreds of villages in so-called “clearance operations.” Within a year nearly 725,000 Rohingya had fled to Bangladesh, with an estimated 10,000 people killed.

“Rape and other forms of sexual violence were perpetrated on a massive scale. Large scale gang rape was perpetrated by Tatmadaw soldiers in at least 10 village tracts” in Rakhine state, the complaint said.

Massacres

People were shot dead indiscriminately by soldiers, while others were burned to death in their homes. Rakhine men often joined the soldiers wielding long knives and machetes.

“Sometimes up to 40 women and girls were raped or gang-raped together,” often in public and in front of their families “to maximize humiliation.” Men and boys were not spared “genital mutilation and sexualized torture,” the document reads.

Of the approximately 500,000 Rohingya children currently in Bangladesh, “many fled alone after their parents were killed or after being separated from their families.”

In a particularly heinous incident on August 30, 2017, soldiers and armed ethnic Rakhine stormed the village of Min Gyi and attacked Rohingya who had taken refuge there.

Soldiers opened fire on people trying to flee. Villagers who surrendered were rounded up, and women and children were separated from the men.

The men were slaughtered and their bodies dumped into three pits, doused gasoline and set ablaze.

Women and girls were taken into rooms where they were robbed, raped and stabbed. Children and infants were killed or stabbed.

“All interviewees identified Tatmadaw soldiers as the main perpetrators,” the complaint says, adding that ethnic Rakhine “and members of other ethnic minorities participated.”

At least 750 people died in that attack.

Downplayed

Aung San Suu Kyi, then head of Myanmar’s civilian government, downplayed the violence when presented with evidence, describing it as “fake news” and “an iceberg of misinformation.”

Two other international court cases are attempting to hold Myanmar’s authorities accountable.

In 2019 the International Criminal Court began looking into abuses against Rohingya on the border with Bangladesh. Myanmar is not a member of the ICC, but Bangladesh is, so this probe is limited in scope.

And in November 2020 The Gambia filed a case focusing on Myanmar’s responsibility as a state for the Rohingya genocide at the UN’s top court, the International Court of Justice.

“Argentina is on the other side of the world from Myanmar but even here the Burmese military cannot escape justice,” plaintiff Tun Kihn said.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Carlos G. Hamann, special for RFA.

The hearing is being held in Argentina under the principle of “universal jurisdiction” enshrined in the country’s constitution, which holds that some crimes are so heinous that alleged perpetrators thousands of miles away can be tried.

“This is a historic fight for justice,” said Tun Khin, president of the London-based advocacy group Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK, or BROUK, which filed the complaint with the Federal Criminal Correctional Court in Buenos Aires.

The hearings, which will run through June 13, will call seven Rohingya witnesses to testify before federal prosecutor Guillermo Marijuan, who is gathering evidence in the case.

The 46-page criminal complaint centers on violence in 2012 and 2018 that drove about 1 million Rohingyas from Myanmar, mostly to neighboring Bangladesh, where many live in squalid refugee camps to this day.

In harrowing detail, the document describes rapes, beheadings and the slaughter of Rohingya civilians committed by Myanmar’s military, known as the Tatmadaw, and their civilian supporters.

It describes “the gang rape of women, girls and boys” and includes “the virtually total destruction of their towns and villages by intentionally setting them on fire.”

Goal: Arrest or extradition

Ultimately, the complaint calls for the perpetrators to be identified “and the necessary measures be adopted” for them to be interrogated by a judge, “including their arrest and/or extradition if necessary.”

“The idea is that someone will be caught and brought trial. It forms part of a longer arc of accountability and truth-telling,” said Akila Radhakrisan, head of the New York-based Global Justice Center, a group specializing in human rights and sexual violence against women.

But cases like these can take decades to be resolved, Radhakrisan said.

For example, it was only on May 23 that a key fugitive in the 1994 Rwandan massacre was found in South Africa and arrested following a warrant issued by the United Nations’ International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals.

The public shaming and a pending arrest warrant for perpetrators in Myanmar could limit their travel, and also deter others around the world that might engage in similar human rights abuses, officials said.

Prosecutor Marijuan is technically still in the phase of collection of evidence. 

Aside from the courtroom testimony, evidence includes detailed information collected by a 2017-2019 UN-backed Independent International Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar, which interviewed hundreds of witnesses in Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Those named in the accusation include Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, head of Myanmar’s armed forces and the ruling junta, which overthrew the civilian government in a coup two years ago, senior officials in the police and border guard, and radical Buddhist monks including Ashin Wirathu.

The accusation also names pro-democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto head of Myanmar’s civilian government between 2016 and 2021, as being complicit in the genocide. Removed from power in the coup, she is now serving a lengthy prison term in Myanmar on charges that supporters say are politically motivated.

Anonymous testimony

Fearing retaliation from agents of Myanar’s military government, the Rohingya witnesses coming to the court have taken strict measures to remain anonymous. The hearings will be held behind closed doors. 

The Rohingya are represented in court by Tomas Ojea Quintana, an Argentine attorney who has served as U.N. Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar between 2008 and 2014.

Argentine prosecutors may travel to a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh if they deem that more information is needed, he said.

Argentina has held previous cases about alleged crimes committed elsewhere.

A 2010 case examined crimes committed in Spain during 1939-1975 fascist rule of Francisco Franco; a 2014 case against Israeli authorities for crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip; and a 2018 case against Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Salman for crimes against humanity committed in Yemen.

Edited by Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Carlos G Hamann, special for RFA.

Shubham Sharma (@Shubham_fd), the founder of propaganda website Neo Politico, tweeted the picture on June 6 with the following caption: “A Brahmin minor girl was kidnapped, raped and killed by a Rohingya who was living with a Hindu name in the village. Muzaffar Ali, allegedly a Rohingya, living in the village of Shravasti district of UP. The girl was brutally killed and raped by Muzaffar Ali alias Shil Kumar. No media reported this heinous crime.” The tweet has received over 3 lakh views and has been retweeted over 4,000 times. Under this tweet, he added another tweet that carried an image of the person who is apparently the accused. (Archive)

A Brahmin minor girl was kidnapped, raped and killed by a Rohingya who was living with a Hindu name in the village. Muzaffar Ali, allegedly a Rohingya, living in the village of Shravasti district of UP. The girl was brutally killed and raped by Muzaffar Ali alias Shil Kumar. No… pic.twitter.com/zAUg1F7xz2

— Shubham Sharma (@Shubham_fd) June 6, 2023

Neo Politico also published a report the same day where they claimed in the first paragraph that the accused was identified as Muzaffar Ali who was living in the village under the name Sheel Kumar. Further, in the fifth paragraph, the report mentions that the accused was in the village for two decades with a Hindu identity despite being Muslim. The report does not cite any source for these claims. (Archive)

After Neo Politico published their report, several other Right Wing propaganda Twitter accounts such as ShriKant Tripathi (@AkkhaPandit), हम लोग We The People (@ajaychauhan41), HinduPost (@hindupost) and others like @EkamTamilnadu (according to the Twitter bio, he is the founder member and Tamil Nadu state convenor of Ekam Sanatan Bharat Dal) shared the same image with similar claims. (Archive 1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Hindu Post also re-published Neo Politico’s Hindi report on their website.

Fact Check

Since Neo Politico’s report mentioned that the accused had been arrested, we checked for updates from Shravasti Police on their official Twitter handle. We came across a tweet made on June 4 in Hindi which said that within 12 hours, Gilaula police arrested the accused who kidnapped and killed the girl. The rope, clothes and motorcycle used in the act had been recovered.

The tweet also carried a video clip from a press conference conducted by Shravasti SP Prachi Singh. In it, the SP says that the incident happened in Rampur Painda village under Gilaula police station area. She also mentions that the name of the accused is Sheel Kumar, son of Rampheran, and that the case was initially registered under IPC Section 363 (Punishment for Kidnapping). There is no mention of the accused faking his religious identity.

#Shravastipolice
लड़की का अपहरण कर हत्या करनें वाले अभियुक्त को गिलौला पुलिस ने 12 घण्टे के अन्दर किया गिरफ्तार।
घटना में प्रयुक्त आला कत्ल रस्सी,कपड़े व मोटरसाइकिल बरामद।
पुलिस अधीक्षक @prachiIPS द्वारा प्रेस वार्ता कर दी जानकारी।#UPPolice pic.twitter.com/VedBkNmfIa

— shravasti police (@shravastipolice) June 4, 2023

We also came across another tweet by Shravasti Police from the same day announcing the arrest. The tweet included an official notice which had the same details as mentioned by the SP.

It says that on June 3, Rammohan Pathak, father of the victim, filed a complaint after his daughter had not returned from the accused Sheel Kumar’s place. Apparently, Sheel Kumar called the girl on the pretext of some work. Police immediately filed a case against Sheel Kumar under IPC Section 363. On June 4, the accused was arrested and police could locate the victim’s body using the information they got out of Sheel Kumar during interrogation. The police further added Sections 376A, 302, 201 and 5(M)/6 POCSO Act to the case.

#Shravastipolice
थाना गिलौला-

लड़की का अपहरण कर हत्या करनें वाले अभियुक्त को गिलौला पुलिस ने 12 घण्टे के अन्दर किया गिरफ्तार।
घटना में प्रयुक्त आला कत्ल रस्सी,कपड़े व मोटरसाइकिल बरामद।@prachiIPS#UPPolice pic.twitter.com/4yjlqYJ4rV

— shravasti police (@shravastipolice) June 4, 2023

Alt News reached out to Gilaula police station to further verify the viral claims. SHO Akhilesh Pandey said, “The accused’s name is Sheel Kumar and he is 24. He is a Hindu Brahmin and his father’s name is Rampheran.” He further denied the claims that were raised by Shubham Sharma and other social media users that the accused was originally a Rohingya Muslim and that his real name was Muzaffar Ali.

Therefore, the claims that the accused in this case had faked his religious identity and that his real name was Muzaffar Ali are false. The accused, Sheel Kumar, has been arrested in relation to the case of kidnapping, rape and murder of a minor girl from Rampur Painda village in Shravasti district, and he is a Hindu.

The post UP rape-murder accused Sheel Kumar is Hindu, ‘Rohingya’ claims false: Police appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.

Shivam Dixit, a Twitter Blue user, whose bio describes him as a deputy editor at RSS mouthpiece Panchjanya, shared the video on May 19 with a caption in Hindi that said, “In Kolhapur, Maharashtra, a truck carrying 63 Muslim children was intercepted by the police near Ruikar Colony at 2 pm today. All the children claimed to be from Bihar but railway tickets from West Bengal have been recovered from them. Now let me tell you that Rohingyas from Bangladesh are allowed to enter West Bengal and from there they are being transported across the country. What is the plan after all…?” The tweet has received over 1,22,000 views and has been retweeted over 2,000 times. (Archive)

महाराष्ट्र कोल्हापुर में 63 मुस्लिम बच्चों को ले जा रहा एक ट्रक आज दोपहर 2 बजे रुइकर कॉलोनी के पास पुलिस ने पकड़ा। सभी बच्चों ने खुद को बिहार से होने का दावा किया

लेकिन उनके पास से पश्चिम बंगाल के रेलवे टिकट बरामद हुए है।

अब बता दूँ कि बांग्लादेश से रोहिंग्याओं को पश्चिम बंगाल… pic.twitter.com/Iz8UCsFf5O

— Shivam Dixit (@ShivamdixitInd) May 19, 2023

Twitter user ‘Izlamic Terrorist’ (@raviagrawal3), posted the same video on May 18 saying: “Alerts’What is the plan after All’..? Maharashtra Kolhapur: A truck carrying 63 Muslim children was caught near Ruikar Colony (Kolhapur) at 2 pm today. The children claimed to be from Bihar, but were found to have railway tickets to West Bengal.” The tweet has received over 2,70,000 views and has been retweeted 2,000 times. (Archive)

Alerts

“What is the plan after All” ..?

Maharashtra Kolhapur: A truck carrying 63 Muslim children was caught near Ruikar Colony (Kolhapur) at 2 pm today. The children claimed to be from Bihar, but were found to have railway tickets to West Bengal. pic.twitter.com/SX2V92Tdb4

— Izlamic Terrorist (@raviagrawal3) May 17, 2023

In the comments, one user asks @raviagrawal3 whether this is a case of child trafficking, to which @raviagrawal3 replied saying they are not children, they are terrorists.

Another Twitter user, @KumarSingh600, shared the same video on the same day with the following caption in Hindi: “Congress and secular parties will never allow India to be free from poverty and unemployment.
*63 Bangladeshis were caught in Kolhapur. This cannot be possible without the cooperation of any traitor, high-level investigation is very necessary in this matter”. The tweet has received over 17,000 views and has been retweeted 800 times. (Archive)

कुछ bhi bolo,हिंदुस्तान ko,कांग्रेस aur सेक्युलर दल, कभी गरीबी,बेरोजगारी se मुक्त होने hi nahi देगा ?Ek to ye कौम,खुद bhi 4-40 करेगा aur.. ?

*कोल्हापुर में 63 बांग्लादेशी पकड़े गये। ये बिना किसी देशद्रोही के सहयोग के संभव नहीं हो सकता,इसलिये इसकी उच्च स्तरीय जांच अति आवश्यक है।* pic.twitter.com/lfcDMBxQ5n

— brajesh singh (@KumarSingh600) May 18, 2023

More such posts can be found on Twitter and Facebook where the video has been shared with the claim that the children are from Bangladesh or Rohingyas.

Fact Check

Through a relevant keyword search in Hindi, we came across some reports and video coverage by news channels on the matter. According to an India TV report, the 63 Muslim children who were in the truck were from Bihar and they were going to Kolhapur, Maharashtra, to receive education in a Madrasa. The report also mentioned that the incident was from May 17 and that the police stopped the truck after some Hindutva organisations had expressed suspicion. Later, police found that all the children had their Aadhar cards with them that could confirm their identity. The Maulana from the madrasa was also contacted to confirm the matter and he provided the police with more information such as the children’s names, family details, etc.

We also came across a video report by IANS TV, the reporter mentions that initially, the police suspected it to be a case of child trafficking since the children had come from faraway places. But later, it was clear that they had come to study at a madrasa located in Kolhapur, Maharashtra.

Alt News reached out to the Kolhapur police to know the details of the case. An official said, “These children have been studying in a Madrasa at Ajara — a town in Kolhapur district — for some time and they had gone back to their homes on the Eid vacation. This time, while they were getting back to the Madrasa to resume their studies the issue was raised since they were all travelling in a truck.” The police personnel added that the children had been coming to Kolhapur for studies from Bihar’s two districts for quite some time now.

We also reached out to a policeman who was directly involved in the handling of the case. He informed us that the children had been handed over to the Kolhapur Child Welfare Committee (CWC). A source close to the developments told us that the boys were from Araria and Supaul districts of Bihar, and they had boarded a train from Howrah station in West Bengal to reach Pune, from where they travelled to Kolhapur.

A CWC Kolhapur member told Alt News, “The children are in our custody and they will be sent back to their homes in Bihar. We got in touch with CWC Bihar and their identities had been confirmed.” CWC also mentioned that the actual number of children that were present in the truck was 69.

Therefore, the claims that these children are illegal migrants from Bangladesh or belong to the Rohingya community who have illegally entered India are false. The children who can be seen in the video have travelled to Kolhapur from Bihar via West Bengal to receive education at a madrasa.

The post Video of children going to Kolhapur madrasa viral with ‘Rohingya’ claim appeared first on Alt News.

This content originally appeared on Alt News and was authored by Oishani Bhattacharya.

As we celebrate Mother's Day, I am inspired by the incredible strength and resilience of mothers worldwide. But as an obstetrician-gynecologist who has treated patients in crisis regions around the world, I am reminded of the countless mothers globally who struggle to keep their children healthy and safe, often in the face of insurmountable obstacles. Through my travels, I have witnessed firsthand the devastating consequences that can result when women do not have access to the basic maternal health services they need. The consequences of inadequate maternal health services are heartbreaking, from preventable complications during pregnancy and childbirth to the devastating loss of a child.

It is because of this preventable heartbreak that I decided to travel last fall to southern Bangladesh with MedGlobal, an organization that has established a maternity and birth center in Somitipara, a neighborhood in Cox's Bazar where the maternal mortality rate is 44% higher than the national average. I saw the immense challenges that Bangladeshi and Rohingya refugee mothers face daily, from lack of access to clean water and adequate nutrition to the trauma of being displaced from their homes and communities. It was both painful and inspiring to see the strength and resilience of these mothers as they fought to give their children a better life.

During my mission to Cox's Bazar, I was grateful to train two groups of local doctors and midwives using standard curriculum designed to strengthen their clinical skills and improve maternal mortality and morbidity. I witnessed the incredible need for this work, providing prenatal and obstetrical services to women who would otherwise deliver unattended without any services or safety net. Prior to arriving, I understood the importance of having more practitioners trained in lifesaving obstetrics in order to care for the high volume of refugees and internally displaced persons, and it was a blessing to witness the high-quality, empathetic care these women received at the clinic and its Mother's Club—which educates expectant mothers on sexual and reproductive health.

As a mother, I cannot imagine the pain and suffering these women endure when they cannot provide for their children's basic needs. But I am also inspired by their strength and courage in the face of adversity, and I am more committed than ever to working towards a future where every mother and child has access to the care and resources they need to thrive.

It is up to all of us to work towards a world where every mother and every child not only survives but can live a healthy and fulfilling life.

According to a recent report by the United Nations Maternal Mortality Estimation Inter-Agency Group, there were at least 3,700 maternal deaths in Bangladesh in 2020. Despite significant efforts to reduce under-five mortality rates and maternal mortality ratios in Bangladesh, considerable challenges remain: Half of all maternal deaths are caused by preventable conditions like hemorrhage, infection, high blood pressure, delivery complications, and unsafe abortion. Extremely young mothers are particularly vulnerable to complications such as obstetric fistula. Tragically, 14 newborns die every hour in Bangladesh, many occurring at home and without medical intervention.

Only 41% of the demand for maternal healthcare professionals is currently being met; access to skilled birth attendants and maternal care is limited in many parts of the country, with almost half of all births taking place at home without the help of professionals. Additionally, the lack of preparedness and availability of primary care, including union health and family welfare centers, has left thousands of mothers in rural and hard-to-reach areas without access to standard delivery care.

The situation is even more dire for Rohingya refugees, who have fled violence and persecution in Myanmar and are now living in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in refugee camps in Bangladesh. Many of these women have experienced traumatic events, including sexual violence, and desperately need maternal health services.

Ensuring access to maternal health services in Bangladesh is crucial for the immediate well-being of mothers and their children but also for the long-term prospects of the entire country. When mothers die, families are left without their primary caregiver, and children are deprived of the nurturing and guidance they need to grow and thrive. This can have a profound impact on the social and economic development of the entire community. Research has shown that investing in maternal health can have a multiplier effect, leading to improved education, greater economic opportunities, and a more prosperous and stable society.

While at the center, I had the privilege of meeting several mothers and their babies. It was heartwarming to see the joy on their faces as they held their newborns and gut-wrenching to realize the alternative had they not received adequate healthcare. It is important to recognize that the situation in Bangladesh is not unique. Around the world, millions of women do not have access to the essential maternal health services that can make all the difference between life and death for them and their babies. This is particularly true for refugees and vulnerable populations, who often face additional barriers to accessing healthcare.

As we celebrate Mother's Day, let us remember the strength and resilience of mothers around the world and recognize the importance of accessible maternal health services for regions in crisis and the significant role that maternal healthcare plays in driving sustainable economic and social growth. It is up to all of us to work towards a world where every mother and every child not only survives but can live a healthy and fulfilling life.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Dr. Sam Song.

As of late Saturday, Bangladeshi state media reported, the government had moved as many as 400,000 people into 1,030 cyclone shelters in Chittagong division, which covers Cox’s Bazar and other districts near Bangladesh’s southeastern border with Myanmar’s Rakhine state, where Cyclone Mocha is expected to make landfall on Sunday.

During a public event in Dhaka on Saturday, Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said that agencies including the Armed Police Battalion in Cox’s Bazar were ordered to stop any of the 1 million or so Rohingya sheltering at camps there from leaving those confines and spreading across the country.

“Law enforcers are on alert so that the Rohingya people cannot take advantage of the disaster to cross the barbed-wire fence. But if Cyclone Mocha hits the Bangladesh [areas] instead of Myanmar, the Rohingya people will be brought to a safe place,” Khan said in televised comments.

World Vision, a humanitarian group, had warned on Friday that the storm threatened the safety of thousands of children at the world’s largest refugee camp, situated in Cox’s Bazar.

“Cyclone Mocha is expected to bring heavy rain and flooding along the coasts of Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh, posing severe threat to the safety of children and communities in danger zones along coastal and low-lying areas,” the NGO said in a statement.

The cyclone is the most powerful and potentially dangerous sea-based storm seen in this corner of the Bay of Bengal in nearly two decades. On Saturday, India’s meteorological department said the weather system had intensified into an “extremely severe cyclonic storm.”

As of 12 p.m. Saturday (local time), the center of the storm was over the sea close to Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine, and packing winds of up to 231 kilometers per hour (143.5 miles per hour) as Mocha churned toward the low-lying coastal border areas between Myanmar and Bangladesh, according to the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT). Rakhine is expected to take a direct hit from the storm.

“According to the forecast by GDACS [Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System], tropical cyclone MOCHA can have a high humanitarian impact based on the maximum sustained wind speed, exposed population, and vulnerability,” UNOSAT said.  

In a press release, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR warned that Mocha could bring “significant rainfall with landslides and flooding of camps near the sea.”

The U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a separate bulletin on Saturday that the storm was forecast to generate wind speeds of up to 200 kilometers per hour (124.2 miles per hour) when it makes landfall on Sunday afternoon.

“Heavy rain and strong winds associated with the cyclone are expected to cause flooding across Rakhine, where many townships and displacement sites are in low-lying areas and highly prone to flooding,” OCHA said.

“Many communities are already moving to higher ground to designated evacuation centers or to safer areas staying with relatives,” the U.N. agency said.

In the Bangladeshi capital, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina said her government was preparing to safeguard the nation and its people from the storm, but that there might have to be shutoffs to the electricity and gas supply.

“Cyclone ‘Mocha’ is coming. We’ve kept ready the cyclone centers and taken all types of preparations to tackle it,” the state-run news agency Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha quoted Hasina as saying on Saturday. Her Awami League government faces a general election in late 2023 or early 2024.

In Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh’s meteorological agency raised the danger signal for the coming cyclone to 10, the most severe rating.

Meanwhile, Mohammad Mizanur Rahman, the country’s refugee relief and repatriation commissioner, confirmed that law enforcement agencies would prevent Rohingya from leaving the camps.

He said Rohingya would have to seek shelter at mosques, community centers and madrassas located within the sprawling refugee camps in the district.

“We have prepared some buildings including mosques and community halls as temporary cyclone shelters. About 20,000 Rohingya people would likely need cyclone shelters if there will be a landslide,” he said.

The Rohingya would face no risk from storm surges because their shelters are located in hilly areas, he added.

“As there are 1.2 million Rohingya, we have no capacity to evacuate them to [cyclone] shelters,” according to a statement issued on Saturday by Md. Enamur Rahman, Bangladesh’s state minister for disaster management and relief.

He did not give a reason and did not immediately respond to a follow-up phone call from BenarNews.

Nearly three-quarters of a million people who live in the camps fled to the Bangladesh side of the frontier with Myanmar after the Burmese military launched a brutal offensive in Rakhine, the homeland of the stateless Rohingya, in August 2017.

“Four and a half thousand volunteers are working under the leadership of the Refugee Relief and Repatriation Commissioner for the Rohingya people,” Enamur Rahman said.

“There is no risk of floods on the hills but rainfall can cause landslides. Keeping this fear in mind, I have asked the volunteers to be prepared,” the state minister said.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Ahammad Foyez for BenarNews.

Officials in Bangladesh and Myanmar are preparing Friday to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people as a tropical storm turbocharged by the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis strengthens in the Bay of Bengal.

Cyclone Mocha is forecast to intensify further before making landfall on Sunday between western Myanmar and the Bangladeshi city of Cox's Bazar, home to the world's largest refugee camp. Roughly 1 million Rohingya people forced to flee Myanmar amid the country's ongoing genocide against them live in the highly exposed district.

"This is a very, very scary storm," tweeted environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, pointing to its severity and current path.

"The government of Bangladesh needs to develop an inclusive evacuation plan."

The evacuation of more than 500,000 people from the Bangladeshi coast "is expected to start Saturday with 576 cyclone shelters ready to provide refuge to those who are moved from their homes," The Associated Pressreported, citing government administrator Muhammad Shaheen Imran.

Bangladesh, a delta nation with more than 160 million residents, is already prone to extreme weather disasters, and that's increasingly the case as the warming Indian Ocean generates more intense and longer-lasting cyclones as well as heavier rainfall.

The impoverished Rohingya refugees living in Cox's Bazar are especially vulnerable to the incoming storm, and it's unclear how many, if any, of them are included in the Bangladeshi government's evacuation plans.

United Nations Refugee Agency spokesperson Olga Sarrado toldReuters that preparations are underway for a partial evacuation of the camp, if necessary. The World Health Organization is also setting up nearly three dozen mobile medical teams and 40 ambulances, along with emergency surgery and cholera kits for the camp.

"Still reeling from a devastating fire in March that destroyed more than 2,600 shelters and critical infrastructure, over 850,000 refugees risk losing their homes and livelihoods," the International Rescue Committee (IRC) warned in a statement. "Strong wind, heavy rains, and subsequent flash floods and mudslides could destroy shelters, community centers, and health clinics, depriving thousands of essential services and humanitarian aid."

"In preparation, more than 3,000 Rohingya refugees have been trained to respond to flooding and mudslides," said the IRC, which is "scaling up its emergency response in Cox's Bazar." According to the organization: "Three mobile medical teams will be deployed to remote areas in the camps and communities to provide emergency medical treatment. Additionally, a mobile protection unit designed for emergency settings will offer protection services to vulnerable groups such as women, girls, the elderly, and those with disabilities."

IRC Bangladesh director Hasina Rahman lamented how "time and again, we have seen the devastating impact of extreme weather events in Cox’s Bazar. Since 2017, countless shelters, schools, health clinics, and safe spaces for survivors of gender-based violence have been decimated as a result of floods and mudslides, as well as preventable tragedies such as the fire in March this year."

"As a low-lying country with major cities in coastal areas, Bangladesh is particularly vulnerable to climate change, which makes annual weather events—such as cyclones—more intense and frequent," said Rahman. "The impacts—loss of life, destroyed crops, challenges to livelihoods, damage to homes and infrastructure—are often borne by the people and communities who have contributed least to the climate crisis: Bangladesh, for example, emits less than 1% of global CO2 emissions."

While a rapid and just clean energy transition and other far-reaching transformations are needed to mitigate the causes of global warming, developing nations like Bangladesh cannot "cope with continued weather shocks without support that addresses the effects of climate change, such as early warning systems, anticipatory action, improving infrastructure to protect against flooding, and investment into climate adaptation," Rahman noted.

"It is crucial to fortify shelters and critical infrastructure," Rahman continued. "This involves using durable construction materials to strengthen community facilities like child-friendly spaces, learning facilities, and mosques, which serve as safe points during emergencies."

"Additionally, the government of Bangladesh needs to develop an inclusive evacuation plan in collaboration with U.N. agencies, humanitarian organizations, and the refugee and host communities," she stressed. "The plan should prioritize access to emergency shelters, ensuring family unity, and the protection of vulnerable groups, including women, children, the elderly, and individuals with disabilities."

The U.N.'s International Organization for Migration (IOM) observed that "last year, the camps escaped devastation from the Bay of Bengal cyclone Sitrang, which killed 35 people, displaced over 20,000, and caused over $35 million in damages in other parts of the country."

Cyclone Mocha, the first to form in the bay this year, "strengthened Friday into the equivalent of a category 1 Atlantic hurricane and is moving north at 11 kilometers per hour (7 miles per hour)," CNNreported, citing the Joint Typhoon Warning Center. "The storm's winds could peak at 220 kph (137 mph)—equivalent to a category 4 Atlantic hurricane—just before making landfall on Sunday morning."

India's Meteorological Department on Friday projected that "a storm surge of up to 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) was likely to inundate low-lying coastal areas in the path of the cyclone at the time of landfall," including Cox's Bazar, the outlet noted.

To assist refugees and local host communities as they brace for Cyclone Mocha, IOM said that it "is strengthening camp infrastructure, preparing for medical emergencies, and supporting volunteers in cyclone preparedness."

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) also expressed "grave concerns" about the storm's potential impacts on "already vulnerable and displaced communities" in neighboring Myanmar, where a military junta rules.

"Of particular worry is the situation facing 232,100 people who are displaced across Rakhine. Many of the [internally displaced person] camps and sites in Rakhine are located in low-lying coastal areas susceptible to storm surge," said OCHA. "The suffering of more than a million displaced people and other communities in the northwest is also expected to worsen over the coming days as the ex-cyclone moves inland bringing heavy rain. Displaced people in the northwest are already living in precarious conditions in camps, displacement sites, or in forests often without proper shelter."

In May 2008, Cyclone Nargis inundated Myanmar, killing more than 138,000 people, uprooting 800,000, and affecting 2.4 million.

"Extreme weather hazards will occur more frequently due to climate change in the years ahead. The linkages between climate change, migration, and displacement are increasingly pressing worldwide," IOM pointed out. "To avert, mitigate, and address displacement linked to climate disasters and strengthen people's resilience," the U.N. agency urged policymakers around the world "to implement sustainable climate adaptation, preparedness, and disaster risk reduction measures."

Despite knowing that extracting and burning more coal, oil, and gas will exacerbate the deadly effects of the climate emergency, profit-hungry fossil fuel executives are still planning to expand drilling with the continued support of many governments.

While COP27 delegates agreed to establish a loss and damage fund—after failing to commit to phasing out the fossil fuels that are causing so much harm—previous efforts to ramp up climate aid from the Global North to the Global South have fallen far short of what's needed due to the stinginess of wealthy countries, especially the United States.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Kenny Stancil.

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.

Twenty Rohingya and seven Bangladeshi government officials traveled to Maungdaw township in northern Rakhine, where the Burmese junta had invited them to inspect preparations as part of a China-backed effort to repatriate a small portion of the 1 million Rohingya refugees sheltering in southeastern Bangladesh. 

The delegation boarded a boat in the morning to cross the Naf River that separates Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district from Rakhine, and returned on Friday evening.

Speaking to RFA-affiliated news service BenarNews when they got back, some Rohingya delegates expressed concern about temporary housing constructed in guarded camps. The group reached Maungdaw at around 10 a.m. and visited the Nagpura, Baulibazar and Kazirbil neighborhoods where Myanmar authorities have built makeshift camps with Chinese support.

“After many years, we got the chance to see our motherland. We visited Myanmar and we saw new camps there,” Rohingya Mohammad Selim told BenarNews. “We asked them – why the camps and for whom? They replied those were for us.”

Selim said the Rohingya want to return to their original homesteads, adding they did not find the camps to be safe.

About 740,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh from Rakhine following a Myanmar military crackdown against the Muslim-minority group in August 2017.

“We asked them what would happen to us if we do not get citizenship or if our safety is not guaranteed. In reply they said we must take national verification cards,” he said. “If we accept the card, it will mean that we are guests, but we are the residents, not guests.”

He said if Rohingya are not granted citizenship, they would not be able to own land in Myanmar.

“We have demanded that they return our homesteads and land. We will build our own houses on our land – unless we are given citizenship and our homesteads back, we will not return,” he said.

Another Rohingya, Abu Sufian, echoed Selim’s concerns.

“We visited many villages in Maungdaw. The Myanmar government built many IDP camps in the villages. In these circumstances, I do not see any possibility of returning there,” he told BenarNews, referring to camps for internally displaced persons.

Myanmar’s military council announced that 750 plots of land in 15 villages in the northern part of Maungdaw township had been prepared for the Rohingya repatriation. It announced that returnees were to be scrutinized and accepted before temporarily being placed in refugee camp for two months. 

Rohingya Subia Khatun, who fled to Cox’s Bazar following the military crackdown, said she visited her old village.

“My green village has been converted into a fortified camp. I feel bad to see the makeshift houses. We will not go to the camps – we want to live in our villages,” Khatun told BenarNews.

Repatriation efforts

In recent months, Myanmar has shown interest in repatriating some Rohingya under a small pilot project. 

A Myanmar delegation recently visited Teknaf in Bangladesh and identified more than 1,100 Rohingya for potential repatriation. 

According to the agreement between the two countries, repatriation must be safe, voluntary and dignified. No Rohingya can be sent back forcibly.

“The arrangement is not bad at all. The enclaves are not IDP camps,” Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, Bangladesh’s refugee relief and repatriation commissioner who led the delegation to Rakhine on Friday, told BenarNews. 

“The trip was for building the confidence of the Rohingya. A team from the Myanmar government is supposed to come to discuss issues, then we will decide about the repatriation.”

Aung Kyaw Moe, who advises Myanmar’s shadow National Unity Government (NUG) on Rohingya issues, questioned the military council’s repatriation efforts and said the refugees should focus on getting justice for the genocide they suffered.

Hundreds of Rohingya were killed by the military during clearance operations in 2017, forcing thousands to leave. The U.S. State Department has declared this is an act of genocide. 

“The military junta has never had a good intention or goodwill toward the Rohingya. Nor will they have any in the future,” he told RFA.

Aung Kyaw Moe said the Myanmar military had failed in persuading Rohingya to return.

“They tried many times in the past, too but they did not succeed because the Rohingya have firsthand experience of the junta’s genocide against them and its inhumane violation of human rights and crimes against humanity. That’s why they will never come back unless justice is served for them.”

Nay San Lwin, co-founder of the Rohingya Liberation Coalition, said China had a big role in the repatriation effort.

“The military cannot refuse China’s pressure. On the other hand, some of China’s largest investments are in Bangladesh, too,” he told RFA. “Both countries are under a lot of pressure from China, therefore, they are trying to make this repatriation project happen due to China’s pressure.”

Spokesmen for the Myanmar junta and Rakhine state did not respond to RFA requests for comment.

Kamran Reza Chowdhury for BenarNews in Dhaka contributed to this report.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Abdur Rahman for BenarNews and RFA Burmese.

On Friday, a delegation of 27 people, including 20 Rohingya from refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, is scheduled to visit Maungdaw in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, to assess preparations for the planned move this month of about 1,000 refugees.

Bangladesh’s refugee relief and repatriation commissioner said the trip would be a follow-on action to a visit in March by Burmese officials to verify the identities of the Rohingya who were part of a mass exodus who fled a brutal 2017 military crackdown against the stateless minority group.

“We are going to help the forcibly displaced people of Myanmar to assess whether the situation in Rakhine is favorable for return,” Mohammed Mizanur Rahman on Thusday told BenarNews, an RFA-afilliated online news service.

“Our plan is to start the repatriation by this month,” he said, insisting that Dhaka would not force any refugees to go back.

Despite its questionable role in this repatriation program, the United Nations refugee agency said in March that conditions in Rakhine state were not favorable for the safe return of 1,000 Rohingya.

Abul Kashem, a Rohingya leader from the Cox’s Bazar camp who is part of the delegation visiting Friday, told BenarNews that refugees were not interested in going back to camps in Myanmar.

“Once we go there, we can see whether the situation is conducive to return. We, the Rohingya people, want to return to our homesteads, but not to camps there,” he said.

Bangladesh diplomatic observers said the plan really is a “ploy” by Myanmar’s military rulers to stave off international pressure ahead of a hearing next month at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, in an application to the court by The Gambia that says Myanmar committed genocide against the Rohingya.

The United States in March 2021 declared as a genocide the Myanmar military’s 2017 deadly crackdown against Rohingya Muslims that killed thousands and forced nearly 740,000 people to flee across the border to neighboring Bangladesh.

Myanmar is “interested in starting repatriation, though on a limited scale,” said Faruk Khan, the chairman of the Bangladesh foreign ministry’s parliamentary watchdog committee.

“Myanmar has come to understand that they must take their people back. Otherwise, they would face more international sanctions and pressures,” he told BenarNews.

“China has also come to understand that the Rohingya crisis must be settled. So they have been using their influence over Myanmar. I would not say that all people would return in a year, but once the repatriation starts, gradually the pace would be faster,” he added, about the Beijing-backed plan.

A former foreign secretary, Md. Shahidul Haque, expressed skepticism about the repatriation move.

“The Rohingya refugees want to return to their original homesteads, while Myanmar says they must live at guarded camps for 120 days before going to their villages; a big question remains what freedom the Rohingya would get in Rakhine,” Haque told BenarNews.

“Myanmar is set to submit their counter-[argument] at the ICJ. Keeping this issue in mind, Myanmar has been showing interests in repatriation. They become active in repatriation before every ICJ hearings, and cut off communications afterwards.”

In March, Human Rights Watch urged Bangladesh to halt the repatriation plan. The prospect of durable returns has grown ever more distant since the February 2021 military coup in Myanmar, carried out by the same generals who orchestrated the 2017 mass atrocities, HRW said.

“Voluntary, safe, and dignified returns of Rohingya refugees to Myanmar are not possible while the military junta is carrying out massacres around the country and apartheid in Rakhine State,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for the watchdog group.

“Bangladesh authorities should stop deceiving these refugees to get them to engage with junta officials when it’s clear that Rohingya will only be able to return safely when rights-respecting rule is established.”

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kamran Reza Chowdhury and Abdur Rahman for BenarNews.

On Friday, a delegation of 27 people, including 20 Rohingya from refugee camps in southeastern Bangladesh, is scheduled to visit Maungdaw in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, to assess preparations for the planned move this month of about 1,000 refugees.

Bangladesh’s refugee relief and repatriation commissioner said the trip would be a follow-on action to a visit in March by Burmese officials to verify the identities of the Rohingya who were part of a mass exodus who fled a brutal 2017 military crackdown against the stateless minority group.

“We are going to help the forcibly displaced people of Myanmar to assess whether the situation in Rakhine is favorable for return,” Mohammed Mizanur Rahman told BenarNews on Thursday.

“Our plan is to start the repatriation by this month,” he said, insisting that Dhaka would not force any refugees to go back.

Despite its questionable role in this repatriation program, the United Nations refugee agency said in March that conditions in Rakhine state were not favorable for the safe return of 1,000 Rohingya.

Abul Kashem, a Rohingya leader from the Cox’s Bazar camp who is part of the delegation visiting Friday, told BenarNews that refugees were not interested in going back to camps in Myanmar.

“Once we go there, we can see whether the situation is conducive to return. We, the Rohingya people, want to return to our homesteads, but not to camps there,” he said.

Bangladesh diplomatic observers said the plan really is a “ploy” by Myanmar’s military rulers to stave off international pressure ahead of a hearing next month at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, in an application to the court by The Gambia that says Myanmar committed genocide against the Rohingya.

The United States in March 2021 declared as a genocide the Myanmar military’s 2017 deadly crackdown against Rohingya Muslims that killed thousands and forced nearly 740,000 people to flee across the border to neighboring Bangladesh.

Myanmar is “interested in starting repatriation, though on a limited scale,” said Faruk Khan, the chairman of the Bangladesh foreign ministry’s parliamentary watchdog committee.

“Myanmar has come to understand that they must take their people back. Otherwise, they would face more international sanctions and pressures,” he told BenarNews.

“China has also come to understand that the Rohingya crisis must be settled. So they have been using their influence over Myanmar. I would not say that all people would return in a year, but once the repatriation starts, gradually the pace would be faster,” he added, about the Beijing-backed plan.

A former foreign secretary, Md. Shahidul Haque, expressed skepticism about the repatriation move.

“The Rohingya refugees want to return to their original homesteads, while Myanmar says they must live at guarded camps for 120 days before going to their villages; a big question remains what freedom the Rohingya would get in Rakhine,” Haque told BenarNews.

“Myanmar is set to submit their counter-[argument] at the ICJ. Keeping this issue in mind, Myanmar has been showing interests in repatriation. They become active in repatriation before every ICJ hearings, and cut off communications afterwards.”

In March, Human Rights Watch urged Bangladesh to halt the repatriation plan. The prospect of durable returns has grown ever more distant since the February 2021 military coup in Myanmar, carried out by the same generals who orchestrated the 2017 mass atrocities, HRW said.

“Voluntary, safe, and dignified returns of Rohingya refugees to Myanmar are not possible while the military junta is carrying out massacres around the country and apartheid in Rakhine State,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director for the watchdog group.

“Bangladesh authorities should stop deceiving these refugees to get them to engage with junta officials when it’s clear that Rohingya will only be able to return safely when rights-respecting rule is established.”
BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news organization.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kamran Reza Chowdhury and Abdur Rahman.

A resident said a boat was seized when the arrests were made near the Gulf of Martaban in southeast Myanmar after brokers went to buy food in Chaungzon township. Authorities have sent 65 of the boat people to Mawlamyine Prison in Mon state to await trial, he said.

A lawyer representing the Rohingyas said the junta often regards such people as illegal immigrants, and that they would likely be charged with immigration law violations.

The four brokers, who were Buddhists from western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, were also arrested. Several Rohingya Muslim children were also on board, and were being cared for by local people, the resident said. 

A member of a local charity group from Chaungzon township said there have been similar arrests of Rohingya in the area in the past. Those arrested are normally sent to prison, the worker said.

“But I don’t know what will happen to them next,” the charity worker said. “I think they will be interrogated and some of them might be bailed out and the rest will go to prison.”

Latest group to try to reach Malaysia

More than 740,000 Rohingya fled Rakhine following a military crackdown on the ethnic group that started more than five years ago, and now live in refugee camps in Bangladesh. Of the more than 600,000 that remained in Rakhine, around 125,000 are living in displaced people’s camps in the state.

Every year, hundreds abandon the camps and take to the sea in small, poorly-provisioned boats to try to reach other countries, including Muslim majority countries like Malaysia and Indonesia.

According to statistics collected by Radio Free Asia, nearly 2,000 Rohingyas have been arrested on their way to Malaysia from refugee camps in Rakhine and Bangladesh from December 2021 to March 2023. 

The junta has sentenced nearly 500 of them to two to five years in prison under Myanmar’s immigration law. 

A Rohingya aid worker in Yangon, who did not want to be named for security reasons, told RFA that the Rohingya fleeing Rakhine know they could be arrested or killed on the way, but they are risking their lives to live freely.

“They are not allowed to go anywhere in that state,” the aid worker said. “They left risking their lives, as they know they would be free in a new land, if they escape, or they will just go back to their original lives of failure if they get caught. They have already anticipated that they could end up like this.” 

Rohingyas usually pay almost 8 million kyat (about U.S.$2,800) per person before they begin their journey to Malaysia from Rakhine, and some end up being abandoned by brokers along the way, he said.

RFA contacted the military junta spokesman for Mon state, Toe Win, but he didn’t immediately return the call.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Matt Reed and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Pro-junta media reported Thursday that returnees will be screened and accepted at the Taung Pyo Letwe and Ngar Khu Ya refugee camps in Maungdaw township as part of the pilot program, before they are sent to the Hla Pho Khaung interim camp for two months.

Afterwards, the returnees will be resettled in the planned villages, which will be fitted with basic infrastructure ahead of their arrival, reports said, citing junta chief for Rakhine state Htin Lin.

Rohingyas in Bangladesh have expressed their desire to return home to Myanmar – from which they fled amid military crackdown starting in 2017 – but are adamant that they will only do so if they can go back to their original locations and are guaranteed the right to citizenship, freedom of travel and equal rights with other ethnicities.

People “have a lot of doubts” about the intentions of the junta’s pilot program, said Khin Maung, director of the Rohingya Youth Association in Cox’s Bazar, where about 1 million refugees from the persecuted Rohingya minority live in squalid camps.

“If they are being honest to the refugees, they must resettle them in their original locations and give them equal rights as citizens,” he said.

“But they have not mentioned anything about such issues,” Khin Maung said. “That’s why I think they are only trying to implement their project to build a good international reputation for themselves.”

On Wednesday, a 17-member delegation from Myanmar led by the junta’s Rakhine State Immigration Minister Myo Aung returned from Bangladesh where it had been interviewing Rohingya families for the pilot program. Junta Deputy Minister of Information Major Gen. Zaw Min Tun said the pilot program could begin as early as mid-April, Agence France-Presse reported.

The junta said Thursday that it plans to accept another 5,000 returnees from 1,500 households if the pilot project is successfully implemented.

Attempts by RFA to contact junta officials about the pilot program went unanswered Friday.

Returning to conflict

The junta’s announcement that it will build new villages for returnees comes days after the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said its repatriation plan is “not conducive to the sustainable return of Rohingya refugees” according to the current unstable situations in Myanmar and in Rakhine state.

Myanmar is rife with conflict in the aftermath of the military’s Feb. 1, 2021 coup d’etat and is mired in a humanitarian crisis involving some 1.7 million people displaced by violence throughout the country, according to a recent estimate by the U.N.

Despite the UNHCR’s concerns over the pilot program, the UN refugee agency acknowledged in a statement earlier this week that it transported junta officials aboard unmarked UN boats to Bangladeshi refugee camps last week, a move that has been criticized as risky to humanitarian workers and a “serious breach” of U.N. neutrality.

According to the statistics collected by RFA, nearly 2,000 Rohingyas have been arrested on their way to Malaysia from refugee camps in Rakhine state and Bangladesh from December 2021 to March 2023. 

The junta has sentenced nearly 500 of them to two to five years in prison under Myanmar’s immigration law.

Rohingyas at the Thae Chaung Rohingya refugee camp in Rakhine's Sittwe township say they have no employment opportunities and rely on 500 kyats (U.S.$0.25) per person per day, supplied by the World Food Program.

Some 14,000 refugees have lived in the camp for more than a decade following ethnic violence in Rakhine state in 2012 and many have sold all of their possessions and risked their lives traveling to Malaysia and other Muslim majority countries in search of new opportunities. Some have died or disappeared during the journey, while others endure abuse at the hands of brokers or have been imprisoned along the way. 

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

A delegation from Myanmar arrived in the Bangladeshi border town of Teknaf on Wednesday to begin interviewing Rohingya in an effort to clear their return to Rakhine, from where they fled following a brutal 2017 military crackdown.

U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said it was not involved in this so-called pilot project.

“In UNHCR’s assessment, conditions in Rakhine State are currently not conducive to the sustainable return of Rohingya refugees, UNHCR spokeswoman Regina De La Portilla said in an email to BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated news service. “The process is being coordinated by authorities of the two countries.”

Rakhine, a state in western Myanmar bordering Bangladesh, was the site of months of intense fighting between Burmese junta forces and Arakan Army rebels. It is also the state where most of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya lived before the 2017 military crackdown.

The Myanmar military and the Arakan Army in November announced a ceasefire, but news reports have said returnees face a high risk of being hurt or killed by landmines and many areas of the state are in a shambles with no access to food and shelter.

UNHCR maintained that every refugee has a right to return to his or her home country “and some may choose to do so even under current conditions.”

Still, it added that any return to Myanmar “should be voluntary, in safety and dignity, and allow for sustainable reintegration in Myanmar.

“No refugee should be forced to return against his or her will,” UNHCR said.

Cox’s Bazar, a southeastern district in Bangladesh, houses about 1 million Rohingya, including about 740,000 who fled since August 2017.

Along with the U.N., activists and refugees themselves have expressed skepticism about the pilot project proposed in 2020, but has seemingly gained momentum in recent months.

On Wednesday, the 17-member Myanmar delegation which arrived in Teknaf, interviewed 90 Rohingya men and women listed for repatriation by Bangladesh. The purpose was to verify their identities and determine whether they lived in Rakhine state before fleeing to Bangladesh. The Myanmar delegation is scheduled to be in Teknaf for seven days.

Rohingya Khaled Hossain said he and his wife, Imtiaz, were questioned for three hours and asked to provide residency records.

“We handed them old records and photos. We want to go back to our country of origin. But we will only return when we will be given our civil rights and recognition as Rohingya community,” Hossain told BenarNews.

“We want the same citizenship status as Mogh [Rakhine Buddhists], Burmese and other communities. Apart from that, they must assure our security through the U.N. After that, we decide whether to return or not,” he said.

Khaled’s wife, Imtiaz, said four family members were interviewed.

“Maybe they’ll bring us back to Myanmar. But we seek peace,” she told BenarNews.

“We’d be willing to return to Myanmar if they provided the opportunity to live like the rest of the population. Otherwise, how do we return?”

‘China-pressure’

No Bangladesh or Myanmar junta official who spoke to BenarNews or Radio Free Asia (RFA), an affiliated news service, mentioned what the returnees’ citizenship status would be.

The Rohingya, whose ethnicity is not recognized by the government, have faced decades of discrimination in Myanmar and are effectively stateless, denied citizenship.

Myanmar authorities previously denied Rohingya freedom of movement, access to jobs, health care and education. Successive administrations have refused to call them “Rohingya” and instead use the term “Bengali.”

The 2017 atrocities against the Rohingya were committed during the tenure of the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi, who in December 2019 defended the military against allegations of genocide at the International Court of Justice.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner and one-time democracy icon languishes in prison – toppled by the same military in its 2021 coup.

Now, the Myanmar military is responding to China’s diplomatic coercion in promoting the pilot repatriation project, Nay San Lwin, an activist and co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition told RFA.

“The junta is implementing the repatriation program just to look good in the international community, as there was some China-pressure as well,” he said.

The returnees will likely end up staying in the centers for years, he said.

The project envisages bringing returnees through two reentry centers in Ngar Khu Ya and Hla Pho Khaung in Rakhine, according to a report last month in the junta-controlled state newspaper Myanmar Alinn.

Myanmar military officials gave tours of the centers to the heads of embassies from China, Bangladesh, India and eight ASEAN countries on March 8, Hla Thein, the junta’s attorney general and spokesman for Rakhine state, told RFA.

The returnees would receive assistance through education, livelihood and health programs at the two centers, he said, adding they would be accepted based on five points. The points include requiring a returnee to come back of his or her own volition.

China has mediated repatriation discussions between Bangladesh and Myanmar officials.

‘True good will’?

In addition to safety and Rohingya citizenship issues, there are other problems in repatriation, noted Bangladesh Foreign Minister A. K. Abdul Momen.

“The Chinese government had built new houses in some protected areas there for Rohingya. [But] They want to go to their original homes,” Momen told BenarNews.

“[T]he Myanmar authorities say their homesteads have been occupied by the Arakan Army. The places are unsafe. They cannot guarantee their return to their original homesteads,” said the minister, adding Bangladesh would not forcefully send refugees to Rakhine.

Additionally, the junta needs to say how many weeks or months returnees would have to stay in one of the two centers and where they would be sent afterward, said Khin Maung, director of the Rohingya Youth Association who lives in Cox’s Bazar.

“We are not sure if the military junta is implementing the repatriation program out of its true good will. A lot of things depend on that answer,” he told RFA.

Former Bangladesh Foreign Secretary Md. Touhid Hossain told BenarNews on Monday that the pilot project wasn’t a workable idea.

“A sustainable repatriation can only be achieved when the 1.1 million refugees would voluntarily return to Myanmar,” he said

“Settling the Rohingya crisis lies in Myanmar. The responsibility to improve the situation in Rakhine also goes on them. If they do so, the Rohingya would voluntarily return to their homeland.”

Abdur Rahman in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, and Kamran Reza Chowdhury in Dhaka contributed to this report. BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By BenarNews and RFA Burmese.

The project, a result of negotiations between Myanmar’s military junta, Bangladesh and China, would bring returnees through two reentry centers in Ngar Khu Ya and Hla Pho Khaung in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state. 

But the military junta is really just responding to China’s diplomatic coercion in promoting the pilot project, said Nay San Lwin, an activist and co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition. The returnees will likely end up staying in the centers for years, he said.

“The junta is implementing the repatriation program just to look good in the international community, as there was some China-pressure as well,” he said.

Other activists pointed to a lack of political stability in Myanmar, where a military junta has ruled since a coup d’etat in February 2021.

Rohingyas will only return if they can go back to their original locations and are guaranteed the right to citizenship, freedom of travel and equal rights with other ethnicities, a Rohingya living in Cox’s Bazar refugee camp said on condition of anonymity.

“We must get back the farms that we originally had. We must be placed back in our original location,” the source said. “We are ready to return if these requirements are met and if we are treated as equal citizens.”

‘True good will’

The camps in Cox’s Bazar, a southeastern district in Bangladesh that borders Myanmar, house about 1 million of Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya minority, including about 740,000 who fled following a military crackdown in Rakhine state since August 2017. Myanmar has in the past denied Rohingya freedom of movement, citizenship and access to jobs, health care and education.

Rohingyas sheltering in the camp told Radio Free Asia that they haven’t been notified of the pilot project.

The military junta needs to say how many weeks or months returnees would have to stay in one of the two centers, and where they would be sent afterward, said Khin Maung, director of the Rohingya Youth Association who lives in Cox’s Bazar. 

“We are not sure if the military junta is implementing the repatriation program out of its true good will,” he said. “A lot of things depend on that answer.”

When contacted about the program, the junta’s minister of immigration and manpower, Myint Kyaing, referred RFA to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The junta’s permanent secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Chan Aye, didn’t answer a phone call from RFA. 

Military officials gave a tour of the centers to the heads of embassies from ASEAN countries on March 8. Heads of embassies from China, India and Bangladesh also joined the tour.

The returnees would receive assistance through education, livelihood and health programs at the two centers, said Hla Thein, the junta’s attorney general and spokesman for Rakhine state.

Returnees will be accepted based on five points: He or she must have lived in Myanmar. He or she must be a returnee of his or her own volition. Family members who were forced to be separated must be certified by a Bangladeshi court. If a child is born in Bangladesh, both parents must prove that they have lived in Myanmar. The parents also must provide confirmation of this from a Bangladeshi court.

‘Not a sustainable initiative’

A junta readmission team will visit Bangladesh for more talks within a few days, Hla Thein told RFA on Tuesday. The Bangladesh Embassy in Yangon didn’t immediately respond to an email asking about the country’s role in the readmission program.

Bangladesh Foreign Minister A. K. Abdul Momen said the Chinese government has built new houses in some protected areas in Rakhine for the returnees. 

“But uncertainties loom, too,” he told BenarNews, an RFA-affiliated news service. “They want to go to their original homes. But the Myanmar authorities say their homesteads have been occupied by the Arakan Army. The places are unsafe.”

Mohammed Mizanur Rahman, Bangladesh’s refugee relief and repatriation commissioner, on Monday said the pilot project likely won’t happen for a while. 

“We have been in the process of verification of the Myanmar people. There are more stages of repatriation,” he said.

There were two attempts to re-admit the Rohingyas in 2018 and 2019, with 2,260 candidates designated to return in the first batch and 3,450 in the second batch. But no one returned under the agreement at the time with Bangladesh.

Former Bangladesh foreign secretary Md. Touhid Hossain told BenarNews on Monday that the pilot project wasn’t a workable idea.

“Repatriation through a pilot project is not a sustainable initiative,” he said. “A sustainable repatriation can only be achieved when the 1.1 million refugees would voluntarily return to Myanmar.”

“Settling the Rohingya crisis lies in Myanmar. The responsibility to improve the situation in Rakhine also goes on them. If they do so, the Rohingya would voluntarily return to their homeland,” he said.

Translated by Myo Min Aung. Edited by Matt Reed. BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

Lt. Col. Mohammad Tajul Chowdhury, who oversees fire service and civil defense in the region, said an investigative committee has been formed to look into the Balukhali camp fire, which also destroyed health, learning and relief centers, according to officials.

“The Rohingya camp issue is a very sensitive issue. There could be many reasons for the fire including gas leakage or sabotage, but we are not sure about it,” Chowdhury told BenarNews. “I can only tell you the cause of the fire when the investigation is over in the next several days.”

Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal told BenarNews that the government is investigating to determine if the fire camp was caused by arson, pointing to potential cases of sabotage at the 32 Rohingya camps in and around Cox’s Bazar.

The camps in Cox’s Bazar, a southeastern district bordering Myanmar, house about 1 million of that country’s persecuted Rohingya minority, including about 740,000 who fled following a military crackdown in the Rakhine state since August 2017.

Sunday’s fire came nearly two years after a March 22, 2021, blaze at the Balukhali camp killed at least 13 Rohingya, including six children, destroyed 10,000 houses and left 45,000 homeless.

In February, a defense ministry document claimed at least 222 fires broke out in the Rohingya camps in 2021 and 2022. The document obtained by BenarNews alleged 60 fires were caused by “sabotage,” while the reasons for 63 others were unknown.

The defense ministry document blamed the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) and nine other groups for the incidents of “sabotage.”

The Feb. 15 document said ARSA had been active in Ukhia, Balukhali, Palongkhali and Hwaikong camps while RSO was concentrated in Ukhia and Palongkhali.

ARSA, RSO and a third group, Islamic Mahaz are faith-based groups while the others were identified as criminal gangs, according to the document. Islamic Mahaz was concentrated in Hwaikong.

Alam, a Rohingya leader in Ukhia who asked to be identified by one name for security reasons, blamed ARSA for Sunday’s fire.

“They carried out the attack to take revenge on the RSO,” he told BenarNews.

Retired Maj. Gen. Abdur Rashid, a security analyst, echoed Alam’s statement that the fire could have been the result of a rivalry between the groups seeking to control territories in the camps.

 “Sometimes, RSO carries out arson attacks at the ARSA-dominated camps. In response, ARSA carries out counter attacks,” he told BenarNews. “The rivalry makes such attacks common and innocent Rohingya suffer.”

“What I think is the number of sabotages would be higher than the official figure. In most of the cases, the arsonists are not punished,” Rashid said. “We may see more such fire incidents at the camps in future.”

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated news service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kamran Reza Chowdhury and Sunil Barua for BenarNews.

The fighting last month between members of RSO and the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) insurgents left at least one person dead and forced hundreds of Rohingya refugees to flee the encampment.

The violence was the first known act of open fighting between the two militant groups, who both claim to support the Rohingya cause against the Myanmar military. It boiled over from tensions in a turf war in the sprawling refugee camps near the frontier between the neighboring countries. 

BenarNews obtained eye-witness testimonies and photographs of the slain person, Hamid Ullah, that suggest he was wearing a camouflage uniform emblazoned with an RSO insignia.

Founded in 1982, the RSO was the foremost Rohingya armed group fighting the Myanmar military before it went into a prolonged hibernation in the 2010s. ARSA filled that vacuum when it carried out a series of attacks against Myanmar’s border outposts, starting in 2016. These provoked a Burmese military crackdown that unleashed a huge exodus of Rohingya refugees into Bangladesh in 2017.

But as ARSA’s image within the Rohingya community faltered, RSO made a comeback after the Myanmar military coup in February 2021. Since then, the groups have traded barbs, with each trying to establish dominance in the Rohingya camps, culminating in the violence that flared up at the refugee settlement in the no-man’s land between the two borders on Jan. 18.

“We could not be a silent spectator but were compelled to suppress that terrorist gang who were extensively carrying out different criminal activities [...] in the Rohingya refugee camps [from] that zero-line camp,” the RSO said in a statement provided to BenarNews. 

Efforts to reach ARSA were unsuccessful. 

ARSA burst onto the scene after it attacked Myanmar’s border outposts in 2016 and 2017. The Myanmar military used those attacks to justify its brutal counter-insurgent offensive in August 2017 that forced about 740,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh.

The United Nations described the crackdown as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” and the United States eventually declared the atrocities and other abuses carried out by the Burmese security forces during the offensive as genocide.

Following the February 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar, the RSO resurfaced in Bangladesh that March.

An official with Bangladesh’s National Security Intelligence claimed that despite its sudden re-emergence, RSO has been active in the Chittagong Hill Tracts area in the southeast, and in neighboring Cox’s Bazar where many refugees have sheltered since the 2017 military clearance operation.

“RSO is not like ARSA,” he told BenarNews. “[RSO members] are all highly trained.”

The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was unauthorized to speak to reporters.

The border settlement in the no-man’s land – also known as “Zero Point” – is outside the purview of either Bangladesh or Myanmar, which allows Rohingya militants or criminals to use it as a sanctuary, according to Christina Fink, a professor at Georgetown University who is an expert on Myanmar.

“The reason for the fighting is that these two Rohingya armed groups are competing to gain control over the camp, and that’s because of its location,” Fink told Radio Free Asia’s Burmese service.

“And whoever has control of this piece of land can more easily make forays into Myanmar. More importantly, they can make money by taxing informal border trade.”

The brief episode of recent fighting followed an extraordinary escalation between Bangladeshi security forces and suspected ARSA members in the encampment along the border in November last year.

At the time, the Rapid Action Battalion, an elite Bangladeshi police unit, conducted a raid against “drug smugglers,” during which an intelligence officer with the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence (DGFI) was killed. Although Bangladeshi authorities initially blamed unspecified “drug smugglers” for the incident, DGFI later formally accused ARSA chief Ataullah Abu Amar Jununi and others of killing its official.

The government also withdrew the RAB commander who conducted the raid, which appeared to have violated international norms for respecting no-man’s land areas.

Shafiur Rahman, a Britain-based journalist and an influential Rohingya watcher, connected the “botched” November operation with the recent RSO-ARSA skirmish.

“Bangladesh could not risk becoming implicated in the situation again,” he wrote in a recent blog post. “Therefore, it is not surprising that many residents of ‘no-man’s land’ believe that while the January 18th attack was carried out by RSO, it must have had the approval of those in power.”

Ko Ko Linn, an RSO spokesperson, told BenarNews via WhatsApp, “We are very much thankful to the government and the people of Bangladesh for giving long-time shelter to our helpless community.”

“The government, the politicians, and the people are seeking goodness for our community. The government strongly stands for us with full sympathies,” he said.

Officials at Bangladesh’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a BenarNews request for comment about the country’s alleged backing of RSO.

Long hibernation

Throughout the 1980s and 90s, the RSO operated in the border areas of Bangladesh. And independent observers credited the support of successive Bangladeshi governments for the RSO’s growth. 

In 1991, Bertil Lintner, a Swedish journalist who extensively covered the Myanmar militant groups, reported about the presence of heavy artillery in RSO camps inside Bangladesh. 

In 1998, the group reportedly dissolved under an umbrella organization, the Arakan Rohingya National Organisation.

Some observers claimed that RSO built a strong rapport with the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), a Bangladeshi Muslim political party, and also suggested that some Rohingya militants tied with RSO had links with the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

But in Bangladesh, its ties with JeI proved crucial. 

Linter reported that an entity in Cox’s Bazar tied to a JeI-linked charity was RSO’s military headquarters and that JeI’s student cadres received training, too.

Bangladeshi press reports also suggest that RSO operatives easily blended into Cox’s Bazar’s local communities due to cultural similarities and helped build a robust political base in support of the JeI. 

When Bangladesh’s Awami League party returned to power in 2009, RSO faced a severe crackdown, primarily because of its deep ties with JeI, and subsequently faded into obscurity.

Meanwhile, Myanmar never stopped blaming RSO for any Rohingya-related violence in its territories. 

In October 2016, when Burmese border outposts first came under attack from what would later be known as ARSA, the Myanmar government initially blamed RSO. It took Myanmar some time to realize that ARSA and RSO were separate groups.

Filling the vacuum

In the years that followed the 2017 Burmese military offensive that drove nearly three-quarters of a million Rohingya into Bangladesh, ARSA built a solid base across Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar, where about a million refugees live. 

An array of observers, including Tom Andrews, the U.N. special rapporteur for Myanmar, accused ARSA of operating a ruthless reign of terror in the Bangladeshi camps.

ARSA denied the allegations and insisted that criminals were abusing its popularity, but the organization’s denials now bear scant, if any, credibility.

For its part, the Bangladesh government for years steadfastly denied that ARSA rebels had a foothold in the crowded and sprawling camps near the Myanmar frontier.

The government may have been worried that an acknowledgment would undermine its pressure campaign against Myanmar to take back its nationals, according to observers.

But things started to change when the Myanmar military staged a coup in early 2021. 

With the elected civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi gone overnight, Bangladesh saw little hope for Rohingya repatriation under a junta.

Meanwhile, opposition groups in Myanmar formed an alternative government in exile, known as the National Unity Government (NUG).

Its armed wing, the “People’s Army,” aimed to unite Myanmar’s many rebel groups and factions divided across ethnic and political lines. 

But even within Myanmar’s opposition factions, ARSA was deemed categorically unfit to join the People’s Army.

In that context, the RSO emerged from its prolonged hibernation in March 2021 when its social media pages popped up and published statements supporting the NUG.

Aung Kyaw Moe, the Rohingya Affairs advisor to the shadow National Unity Government (NUG), acknowledged the liaison with the RSO. 

“After the revolution, we met the RSO online,” he told RFA Burmese. “They said they were contributing to the revolution, but they didn’t.”

Several claims by RSO of high-profile attacks against Myanmar military or border guards were discredited by observers. 

“Like other Rohingya groups, RSO produces a lot of propaganda,” a long-time Western analyst, who was not authorized to speak to the press, told BenarNews.

“For example, in October last year, they claimed they had captured a Myanmar border guard post after a fight but it later turned out it was an abandoned post.”

Today, most Rohingyas see RSO as the lesser of the devils, while Rohingya diaspora figures publicly renounce ARSA.

“The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army is considered a ‘terrorist group’ by the majority of Rohingya,” Ro Nay San Lwin, a Europe-based Rohingya activist, told RFA Burmese. “We clearly said that we cannot accept the ARSA. Can the RSO work in an orderly manner? We will see.”

But it took the murder of Muhib Ullah, a famed Rohingya activist leader, in September 2021 for the Bangladesh government to crack down seriously against ARSA.

Muhib Ullah, a prominent civil society figure, had sought protection from the Bangladesh government after ARSA threatened him with death. After his murder at his office in one of the refugee camps, his family members publicly blamed the armed group. 

A police investigation later found that ARSA killed him because of his popularity within the camp. 

The murder put the Bangladesh government under enormous international pressure to improve safety and security in the camps. And as the government reshifted its focus on ARSA, other actors, including RSO, benefitted. 

But to the ordinary Rohingyas trapped in violence in the congested refugee camps, the armed resistance isn’t appealing.

“We face threats every day. You never know what will happen next,” Sayed Alam, a Rohingya refugee living in the Kutupalong camp, told RFA Burmese. “But we have minimal interests in armed organizations. We are more interested in returning home to our own country and having our work back.”

Radio Free Asia, a news service affiliated with BenarNews, contributed to this report. Abdur Rahman and Ahammad Foyez for BenarNews contributed to it from Cox’s Bazar and Dhaka, Bangladesh.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Nazmul Ahasan for BenarNews.

The 28 men and eight women – including some children – were from three townships in a state where the Rohingya have been persecuted by the military for years.

A local, who didn’t want to be named for security reasons, said the group gathered at a port in Sittwe city on Tuesday night, from where they planned to sail past Pauktaw township en route to Malaysia.

”Most of them leave for Malaysia from there, but they gather only in Sittwe,” the local said.

“They were arrested when the boat set sail. It’s not known yet whether the children were arrested.”

A post on the junta-controlled Rakhine Daily Facebook page confirmed that a case against the Rohingya will be filed, but did not specify the charges.

The lawyer handling the cases for the arrested Rohingya, said they were likely to be charged under the Immigration Department’s Recent Provisions Act and sentenced to between two and five years in prison.

More than 740,000 Rohingya fled Rakhine State following a military crackdown on the ethnic minority Muslim group that started five years ago, and now live in refugee camps in Bangladesh. Of the more than 600,000 that remained, around 125,000 are living in displaced people’s camps in Rakhine.

Every year, hundreds abandon the camps in both countries and take to the sea in small, poorly-provisioned boats to try to reach other countries, including Malaysia and Indonesia.

In December, two boats carrying more than 240 Rohingya arrived in Indonesia’s Aceh province in as many days. As many as 20 died at sea when food and water supplies ran short, according to NGOs, who said they sailed across the Andaman Sea, fleeing crowded camps in Bangladesh.

According to data compiled by RFA, a total of 1,856 Rohingya from camps in Rakhine state and Bangladesh were arrested in various parts of Myanmar between Dec. 2021, and Feb. 2, 2023. Of those, 466 were sentenced to between two and five years in prison under the immigration law.

Translated by RFA Burmese. Edited by Mike Firn.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The two armed groups engaged one another in a firefight with reports that Rohingya shelters were set ablaze in the no-man’s land along the frontier, causing hundreds to flee for safety into Bangladeshi territory in southeastern Bandarban district, refugees and officials said.

Apart from the report of the one slain Rohingya, at least two others were injured.   

“The camp has been burnt. People are unable to stay due to the gunshots. Now there’s smoke around,” Mohammad Rahim, who was among the uprooted refugees, told a BenarNews correspondent who visited the Tambru border area, where the fighting and arson were reported. 

Refugees said the violence lasted 12 hours, from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. 

“One person died. Many of us have been injured,” said Asma, a Rohingya girl.

“Some children were also injured. Our houses have been burnt,” she told BenarNews, weeping.

Md. Rahim, a resident of no-man’s land, said he fled to the Bangladesh side of the border to save his life.

“Suddenly, we saw our houses burning. The people could not stay there. The whole area was covered with smoke. Where will we go now?,” he said.

In Cox’s Bazar, a neighboring district, a Rohingya association leader said that no one knew as of yet who was responsible for setting fire to the shelters.

“[The fighting took place] far away from the refugee camps on the Bangladesh side. It is closer to the Myanmar side,” Khin Maung, founder of the Rohingya Youth Association, told the Burmese Service of Radio Free Asia (RFA), a news service affiliated with BenarNews.”

“Reports said the fighting broke out between ARSA and RSO,” he said, referring to the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization, both Rohingya militant groups.  

Photographs obtained by the BenarNews reporter on Wednesday in Tambru showed two injured men, including one dead man. Both had on camouflage shirts with a patch that bore RSO’s insignia.

According to Khin Maung, there were about 3,000 Rohingya refugees living in the camp in no-man’s land, and there were no more residents there after it was set on fire Wednesday. He said some refugees had fled to Myanmar while others had fled to Bangladesh. 

RFA could not independently confirm which group was responsible for the arson. 

In Dhaka, Bangladesh Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal said he had heard that ARSA rebels may have been involved in Wednesday’s violence near the Burmese border. 

“The fighting has happened on the Myanmar side of the no-man’s land. … One person is confirmed dead. The houses of some Rohingya living along the zero point [no-man’s land] of the frontier have been set on fire,” Khan told BenarNews.

“So far, we have come to know that ARSA could be involved in the fighting; they have different conflicting groups. They could have engaged in the fighting.”

The minister added that a handful of Rohingya entered Bangladesh territory to escape the clashes.

“We have taken them in our custody. The situation is under control. They will be sent back tomorrow,” said Khan.

Bangladesh police officials claimed, meanwhile, that the dead and injured Rohingya lived in the sprawling refugee camps of Cox’s Bazar, but they could not explain what these Rohingya were doing in no-man’s land.

The chief of Cox’s Bazar district police, Mahfuzul Islam, said the refugee who was killed, Hamid Ullah, was a resident of Kutupalong camp. Of the two injured Rohingya, one was a resident of the Jadimura camp in Teknaf, a sub-district of Cox’s Bazar, and the other was 12 years old, Islam said.

ARSA, or the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, is the militant group that launched deadly attacks on Burmese military and police outposts in Myanmar’s border state of Rakhine in August 2017.

Those attacks provoked a brutal military crackdown that forced some 740,000 people to seek shelter in southeastern Bangladesh, where they now live in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar.

Kamran Reza Chowdhury in Dhaka contributed to this report.

BenarNews is an RFA-affiliated new service.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Abdur Rahman.

The 57 men, 47 women and 12 children were arrested Dec. 20 from two motorboats near an island off Bogale township in the Ayeyarwady near Myanmar’s southern coast. According to a previous RFA report, at the time of their arrest they were waiting for other boats to take them to shore in Bogale, and they planned to set sail from there to Malaysia.

“The court has given out the prison sentences in two batches,” a lawyer who has been helping the detainees told RFA’s Burmese Service on condition of anonymity for security reasons.

Those who left the refugee camps in Bangladesh got five years while those who left from Rakhine state received two years. He was not sure how many of the detainees came from Bangladesh.

Residents in Bogale told RFA that the authorities plan to send the 12 children to Hnget Aw San Youth Rehabilitation Center and Twante Youth Correctional Center in the Yangon Region while all the adult Rohingya are to be sent to Ayeyarwady’s Pyapon prison.

Some of the detainees are ill and need medical treatment, a volunteer who is helping them told RFA on condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“Some have fevers. Some are infected with skin diseases. They are also in need of clothes,” the volunteer said.

According to the volunteer, another 100 Rohingya who were arrested in the region’s Pyapon, Kyaitlatt and Daedaye Townships are still awaiting trials. 

Once they serve their terms, authorities will return them to their place of origin, volunteers said.

A total of 237 Rohingya, 129 males and 108 females, serving prison terms in Insein Prison in Yangon Region were released under the military council’s amnesty on January 4, 2023.

A volunteer who is helping Rohingya in the Rakhine state city of Sittwe said family members of convicted Rohingya have difficulties visiting them in prison because they don’t have any documents to prove their citizenship and there are restrictions on their movement.

“When the Rohingya who fled Rakhine State get sent to prison, their family members totally lose contact with them,” the Sittwe volunteer said. 

“Although they are in Rakhine State, they are technically not citizens yet. So they cannot travel in the country,” he said, adding that a select few are wealthy enough to bribe the right officials to visit their family members. “But 99 out of 100 detained Rohingya are very poor and cannot afford that.”

RFA records show that between December 2021 and Jan. 6, 2023, a total of 1,816 Rohingya who fled refugee camps in Rakhine State and Bangladesh have been arrested in Myanmar and 387 of them got prison sentences of two to five years.

Advocates for the refugees say that they should be returned to their places of origin instead of being charged as criminals.

More than 740,000 Rohingya fled Rakhine state following a military crackdown on the ethnic minority Muslim group that started five years ago and live in refugee camps in Bangladesh. Of the more than 600,000 that remained around 125,000 are living in camps in Rakhine.

Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung. Written in English by Eugene Whong.

This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Burmese.

The rescue of hundreds of Rohingya refugees by fishers and local authorities in Indonesia's Aceh province was praised Tuesday as "an act of humanity" by United Nations officials, while relatives of around 180 Rohingya on another vessel that's been missing for weeks feared that all aboard had perished.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said that "Indonesia has helped to save 472 people in the past six weeks from four boats, showing its commitment and respect of basic humanitarian principles for people who face persecution and conflict."

"We feel like we got a new world today... We could see their faces again. It's really a moment of joy for all of us."

"UNHCR urges other states to follow this example. Many others did not act despite numerous pleas and appeals for help," the Geneva-based agency added. "States in the region must fulfill their legal obligations by saving people on boats in distress to avoid further misery and deaths."

Ann Maymann, the UNHCR representative in Indonesia, said in a statement that "we welcome this act of humanity by local communities and authorities in Indonesia."

"These actions help to save human lives from certain death, ending torturous ordeals for many desperate people," she added.

The Syndey Morning Heraldreports residents of Ladong, a fishing village in Aceh, rushed to help 58 Malaysia-bound Rohingya men who arrived Sunday in a rickety wooden boat, many of them severely dehydrated and starving.

The following day, 174 more starving Rohingya men, women, and children, were helped ashore by local authorities and fishers after more than a month at sea.

Mohammed Rezuwan Khan, whose 27-year-old sister Hatamonesa was aboard the boat with her 5-year-old daughter, told Pakistan's Arab News that "we feel like we got a new world today."

“We could see their faces again. It's really a moment of joy for all of us," he said of his family. Speaking of his sister, he added that "she thought that she would die in the voyage at sea."

Babar Baloch, the UNHCR regional spokesperson in Bangkok, stated that 26 people had died aboard the rescued vessel, which left Bangladesh a month ago.

"We were raising alarm about this boat in early December because we had information that it was in the regional waters at least at the end of November," he said. "So when we first got reports that it was somewhere near the coast of Thailand, we approached authorities asking them to help, then when it was moving towards Indonesia and Malaysia we did the same."

"After its engine failure and it was drifting in the sea, there were reports of this boat being spotted close to Indian waters and we approached and asked them as well and we were also in touch with authorities in Sri Lanka," Baloch continued.

"Currently as we speak, the only countries in the region that have acted are Indonesia, in big numbers, and Sri Lanka as well."

According to the BBC, the Indian navy appears to have towed the boat into Indonesian waters after giving its desperate passengers some food and water. The boat drifted for another six days before it was allowed to land.

"Currently as we speak, the only countries in the region that have acted are Indonesia, in big numbers, and Sri Lanka as well," Baloch said. "It is an act in support of humanity, there's no other way to describe it."

Relatives of around 180 other Rohingya who left Bangladesh on December 2 said Tuesday that they fear the overcrowded vessel has sunk in the Andaman Sea. Mohammad Noman, a resident of a Rohingya refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, toldThe Guardian that his sister was aboard the boat with her two daughters, who are 5 and 3 years old.

"Every day we called up the boat two or three times on the boatman's satellite phone to find out if my sister and her two daughters were all right. Since December 8, I have failed to get access to that phone," he said. "I know some other people in Cox's Bazar who made phone calls to the boat every day and stayed in contact with their relatives there. None of them has succeeded to reach the phone after December 8."

The captain of another vessel transporting Rohingya refugees said he saw the distressed boat swept up in stormy seas sometime during the second week of December.

"It was around 2:00 am when a strong wind began blowing and big waves surfaced on the sea. [Their] boat began swaying wildly, we could gauge from a flashlight they were pointing at us," he told The Guardian. "After some time, we could not see the flashlight anymore. We believe the boat drowned then."

More than a million Rohingya Muslims are crowded into squalid refugee camps in southern Bangladesh after having fled ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and other violence and repression in Rakhine state, Myanmar, which is ruled by a military dictatorship. Since 2020, thousands of Rohingya have fled the camps by sea.

Hundreds have died during the perilous journey. If the sinking of the boat with 180 aboard is confirmed, it would make 2022 the deadliest year for Rohingya at sea, according to UNHCR.

UNHCR's Baloch stressed that "countries and states in the region have international obligations to help desperate people."

"We have been calling on states to go after people smugglers and human traffickers as they are responsible for putting people on those death-trap boats, but victims have to be saved and saving human life is the most important act," he told the Morning Herald.

"The refugee issue and saving lives cannot just be left to one country, it has to be done collectively, together in the region," he added.

Tun Khin, a Rohingya activist and refugee who now heads the Burmese Rohingya Organization U.K., took aim at regional power Australia, which has been criticized for decades over its abuse of desperate seaborne asylum-seekers, nearly all of whom are sent to dirty, crowded offshore processing centers on Manus Island and Nauru to await their fate.

"Australia has too often set a shameful example for the region through its treatment of refugees," he told the Morning Herald.