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Bangladesh stops 30 Rohingya Muslims from leaving

Friday, 08 February 2019 4:48 PM [ Last Update: Friday, 08 February 2019 4:53 PM ]

This photograph, taken on October 15, 2018, shows people getting off a boat on Bhashan Char Island off the Bangladeshi coast, as it was being prepared for the relocation of Rohingya refugees living in the country’s south after fleeing violence in neighboring Myanmar. (By AFP)

Bangladeshi security forces have stopped 30 Rohingya refugees from heading to the more prosperous and Muslim-majority Malaysia, officials say.

Forces with the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) also arrested two suspected human smugglers during an operation in Cox’s Bazar district late Thursday, the officials said Friday.

About 740,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh since August 2017, when Myanmar’s armed forces, backed by Buddhist extremist mobs, intensified a crackdown that had already been underway against the Muslim community in Rakhine State in Myanmar. Since then, the refugees have been living in poor conditions in camps in Cox’s Bazar.

Bangladesh had already been home to some 300,000 Rohingya refugees, who had fled earlier bouts of violence in Rakhine.

The BGB arrested the 17 women, six children, and seven men on a beach near the coastal town of Teknaf, which borders Rakhine, before they could embark a boat.

Lieutenant Colonel Asadud Zaman Chowdhury told AFP that human traffickers operating in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar had lured the 30 people, who had paid some $1,000 each for “safe passage” to Malaysia.

He said the Rohingya would be sent back to the camps.

Thousands of Rohingya Muslims were killed, injured, arbitrarily arrested, or raped by Myanmarese soldiers and Buddhist mobs mainly between November 2016 and August 2017, when the surviving members of the community started fleeing to Bangladesh en masse.

The Rohingya Muslims, who have lived in Myanmar for generations, are denied citizenship and are branded illegal emigrants from Bangladesh, which likewise denies them citizenship.

Partly because of the poor conditions in the camps, and partly because of the prospect of repatriation to Myanmar, the Rohingya Muslims have occasionally attempted to flee Bangladesh.

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