[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index ][Thread Index ]

Burma junta forces Muslim exodus



Burma junta forces Muslim exodus

>From the Asian Age (New Delhi)
April 25, 2000

Dhaka, April 24: Ethnic cleansing in Burma's west is once again forcing
thousands of people to flee the country to neighbouring Bangladesh,
according to an International Federation of Human Rights report.

Several hundred thousand Muslim minority Rohingyas had fled to
Bangladesh over the past two decades as the Burmese government
increasingly subjected them to forced labour, denied them citizenship
rights and restricted their movements, the report said.

Tens of thousands of Rohingyas are once again leaving Burma, forced by
the slow, steady ethnic cleansing at work in Arakan (province)," said
the report obtained by Reuters on Monday.

"With no rights in Burma, they settle clandestinely in Bangladesh to
flee from the terror and utter precariousness imposed by the Burmese
Junta," it said.

Bangladesh and Burma share a 175 km border. The report said the
Rohingyas, unlike similar groups in 1978 and 1991, were not granted
refugee status once in Bangladesh and the UN High Commission for
Refugees did not recognise them either.

"They have no legal existence: neither citizen of a country that rejects
them, nor citizens of a country that does not want them," it said. "In
order to satisfy the government the UNHCR has given up the principle of
voluntary repatriation." (Reuters)