About five lakh Rohingyas have already taken shelter in Bangladesh over the last two decades.
Advertisement
Nurul Amin said one of the boats capsized around 1:00am and the other around 7:00am. In total, 14 people survived, but “young children and those women couldn’t swim and they couldn’t be saved”, she said, looking over the bodies lined up on the beach.
At least 400 Rohingya men, women and children have lost their lives in the fresh wave of state-sanctioned violence in Myanmar.
Hundreds of Rohingyas are still stranded at the Naf river along the border with Bangladesh.
“We are seeing lots of makeshifts tents and shelters on the side of the road – every available space is being occupied”, UNHCR regional spokeswoman Vivian Tan told the BBC.
“We’re hearing burning, burning, burning and it seems to be spreading from south to the north”.
Numerous victims are quite traumatised, added Sahany. Ms Tan said border controls appeared to vary from place to place.
Thousands of desperate Muslims recently entered Bangladesh, fleeing from intensified crackdown on the minority by Buddhist mobs and security forces over recent attacks on police outposts.
The nationalist group also criticised the Kofi Annan commission’s final report on Rakhine and condemned the violence perpetrated by terrorists. As with reports involving attacks against the Rohinyga community, however, this information is very hard to verify as the affected area is in virtual lockdown.
Access to the area is blocked to foreign media so the ABC can not independently verify the video or the allegations.
The boats sank near the west beach of Subrang union of Shah Pori Dweep in Teknaf upazila of Cox’s Bazar, said Mohammad Main Uddin, officer-in-charge of Teknaf Police Station.
Haley condemned recent attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, but added “as Burmese security forces act to prevent further violence, they have a responsibility to adhere to worldwide humanitarian law, which includes refraining from attacking innocent civilians and humanitarian workers”.
Monitors say that fleeing Rohingya are reporting that the army and ethnic Rakhine Buddhist vigilantes have unleashed a campaign of arson aimed at driving the Muslim population out.
The Rohingya, a Muslim minority in the predominantly Buddhist Myanmar, are considered some of the most persecuted people in the world.
Rakhine has also been under a military siege since October 2016, when the government used a purported deadly militant attack on border guards back then as a pretext to enforce the siege.
In October a year ago, Rohingya militants attacked several security checkpoints and killed scores of police officers.
Advertisement
Muslim countries need to take action to stop the persecution of the Rohingya community in Myanmar, says the director of the Center for Muslims Affairs.
