Rohingya Muslims have for decades suffered from state-sanctioned
discrimination in Myanmar.
Attacks on the religious minority by Buddhist mobs in the
last three years have sparked one of the biggest exoduses of boat people since
the Vietnam War, sending 100,000 people fleeing, according to Chris Lewa,
director of the Arakan Project, which has monitored the movements of Rohingya
for more than a decade.
Last week, the UN's refugee agency said in a statement that
an estimated 25,000 Rohingyas and Bangladeshis boarded people smugglers' boats
in the first three months of 2015, twice as many in the same months of 2014.
"Based on survivor accounts, we estimate that 300
people died at sea in the first quarter of 2015 as a result of starvation,
dehydration and abuse by boat crews," the statement said.
In the past weeks dozens of corpses , believed to be of
Rohingya, were found in Thailand.
Not only Australia and the EU countries put migrants into detention. Malaysian
police say more than 1,000 migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh have been found
"illegally" trying to enter the country at the popular resort island
of Langkawi. "All the illegal immigrants that have been arrested will be
sent to detention centres," said Mohd Yusof Abdullah, commander of the
Langkawi marine police. The migrants were found in "very poor
condition," suffering from severe thirst and hunger. The migrants were
found a day after boats carrying about 500 members of Myanmar's long-persecuted
Rohingya community washed ashore in western Indonesia.
The world's inhumanity to refugees continues
ReplyDeleteIndonesian military has told Al Jazeera that they will send back any boat with Rohingya migrants entering its waters as a vessel carrying hundreds of migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh was turned away towards Malaysia.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/05/150512045951738.html