50,000 Rohingya flee to BD from Myanmar

DHAKA: Some 50,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar, the foreign ministry in Dhaka said on Thursday, seeking shelter from a bloody crackdown by the army.

Bangladesh has stepped up patrols to try to stem the tide of refugees crossing the border since an eruption of unrest in Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine in early October.

The foreign ministry summoned Myanmar’s ambassador to express “deep concern at the continued influx” of tens of thousands of members of the stateless ethnic minority into its territory.

“We mentioned that around 50,000 Myanmar citizens took shelter into Bangladesh since 09 October 2016,” the ministry said in a statement.

Rakhine borders Bangladesh and is home to the Rohingya -- a Muslim minority group loathed by many of Myanmar’s Buddhist majority.

Dhaka also demanded early repatriation of all Burmese citizens who have been living in the Muslim-majority nation for years, including some 300,000 Rohingya -- most of them illegally.

A spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told AFP that at least 43,000 Rohingya have taken shelter in Bangladesh since October.

The vast majority of those who arrived took refuge in makeshift settlements, official refugee camps and villages in Bangladesh’s resort district of Cox’s Bazar.

Many of those interviewed by AFP told horrific stories of gang-rape, torture and murder at the hands of Myanmar security forces.

Myanmar has denied allegations of abuse but has banned foreign journalists and independent investigators from accessing the area.

Bangladesh’s government has been under pressure to open its border to the fleeing refugees, in a crisis which has been described as a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya.

But it has reinforced its border posts and deployed coastguard ships to prevent fresh arrivals.

In the past three months, its border guards have prevented hundreds of boats packed with thousands of Rohingya women and children from entering the country.

Rohingya residents and human rights groups accuse the military and border guard forces of raping Rohingya women, torching houses and killing civilians during operations there. The Myanmar government and military deny the accusations.

The violence is the most serious since hundreds were killed in communal clashes in Rakhine in 2012, and poses the biggest test yet for the eight-month-old administration of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. Many people in mainly Buddhist Myanmar regard the country’s 1.1 million Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

The Dhaka government summoned Myanmar’s ambassador on Wednesday to express concern at the situation.

“Despite our border guards’ sincere effort to prevent the influx, thousands of distressed Myanmar citizens including women, children and elderly people continue to cross border in to Bangladesh. Thousands more have been reported to be gathering at the border crossing,” a senior Bangladeshi Foreign Ministry official, Kamrul Ahsan, told Ambassador Myo Myint Than.

Ahsan asked Myanmar to help Bangladesh “ensure the integrity of its border” and protested against the “tendency in the Myanmar media...to implicate Bangladesh in the incidents in Myanmar.”