Death toll of recent unrest in Myanmar reaches 98
Bangladesh detains and forcibly returns 70 members of the stateless Rohingya community to Myanmar. Witnesses at the Bangladesh-Myanmar border say they could hear gunfire from the Myanmar side.
The death toll from the violence that erupted on Friday with coordinated attacks by members of the Muslims Rohingya community in northwestern Rakhine state has climbed to 98, Myanmar’s government said on Sunday.
Those dead include some 80 alleged insurgents and 12 members of the security forces, it said.
The government said it has evacuated at least 4,000 non-Muslim villagers, as thousands more Rohingya Muslims sought to flee across the border to Bangladesh on Sunday.
Bracing for more violence, thousands of Rohingya - mostly women and children - were trying to forge the Naf river separating Myanmar and Bangladesh and the land border.
TRT World's Nafisa Latic has this report.
Gunfire near Bangladesh border
Witnesses at the border could hear gunfire from the Myanmar side on Sunday, which triggered a rush of the stateless Rohingya towards the no man’s land between the countries.
Around 2,000 people have been able to cross into Bangladesh since Friday, according to estimates by Rohingya refugees living in the makeshift camps in Bangladesh.
The violence marked a dramatic escalation of a conflict that has simmered in the region since last October, when a similar but much smaller Rohingya attack prompted a brutal military operation dogged by allegations of serious human rights abuses.
While the chaos and lack of access made detailed assessments difficult, experts said the latest attacks were so widespread they appeared to be more akin to a movement or an uprising, rather than an insurgent offensive.
One army source said the military was also struggling to differentiate.
“All the villagers become insurgents, what they’re doing is like a revolution,” said the source in Rakhine.
“They don’t care if they die or not. We can’t tell who of them are insurgents.”
Earlier on Thursday, a commission led by former UN chief Kofi Annan had called on Myanmar to scrap restrictions on movement and citizenship for its Rohingya minority.
A report released by the commission warned that failure to implement its recommendations could lead to more extremism and violence.
"Unless current challenges are addressed promptly, further radicalisation within both communities is a real risk," the report said, describing the Rohingya as "the single biggest stateless community in the world."
Bangladesh sends back 70 Rohingya
Bangladesh detained and forcibly returned 70 Rohingya migrants to Myanmar, police said Sunday.
The Bangladesh authorities acted just hours after Myanmarese troops on the other side of the border had opened fire on people fleeing the country.
Police intercepted the Rohingya late Saturday after they crossed the “zero line” border zone, where Myanmar soldiers earlier fired mortars and machine guns at villagers making the dangerous dash from the northern state of Rakhine into Bangladesh.
The villagers were caught roughly four kilometres inside Bangladeshi territory en route to a refugee camp in Kutupalong, where thousands of Rohingya already live in squalid conditions, said local police chief Abul Khaer.
“All 70 were detained and later pushed back to Myanmar by the border guards,” Khaer said.
Police said some of those detained had entered Bangladesh via the Ghumdhum border area - where the Myanmar forces unleashed the barrage of fire just hours earlier.
“They were pleading with us not to send them back to Myanmar,” said one policeman on condition of anonymity.
Years of persecution
Rakhine has become a hotbed of religious hatred focused on the stateless Rohingya Muslim minority, who are reviled and spurned as illegal immigrants in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.
Despite years of persecution, the Rohingya largely eschewed violence.
But in October a new militant group - the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) - attacked a string of Myanmar border posts, sparking a military crackdown that left scores dead and forced 87,000 people to flee to Bangladesh.
The latest violence erupted early on Friday as scores of men purportedly from ARSA, ambushed Myanmar police posts.
They used guns and homemade explosives in the attacks.
Remote villages along the border between Bangladesh and Myanmar have seen fierce fighting since then between suspected militants and Myanmar security forces.
The violence has forced thousands of Rohingya to flee towards Bangladesh.
But authorities there have refused to let most of them in, with thousands of people - mainly women and children - stranded along the border zone.
The Bangladeshi government has instructed local officials in Cox’s Bazar, the district bordering Myanmar that is home to several large refugee camps, not to allow any “illegal entry” by Rohingya, Abdur Rahman, a senior government official, said.
The impoverished country already hosts some 400,000 Rohingya refugees.