A spokesperson for the Myanmar government has denied reports that at least 340 Rohingya Muslims from Rakhine state have been deported from Bangladesh in the past few weeks.
Radio Free Asia quoted Lt. Col. Imran Ullah Sarker, head of the nation’s border guard, as saying that the latest group of about 20 members of the minority, closely tied in language and religion to Bangladesh’s dominant Bengali population, were turned back on Wednesday after trying to enter the country illegally.
“Over the last 20 days, we caught illegal Myanmar nationals, photographed them and sent 340 back to their homeland,” he said.
But Zaw Htay, spokesperson for the President’s Office in Myanmar, denied the report in a Facebook post on Friday.
Rohingya have been migrating to Bangladesh for decades, but numbers increased after clashes with the Buddhist population in Rakhine state in 2012.
About 29,000 are believed to be living in official camps on the Bangladeshi side of the border, with another 200,000 confined to unofficial camps and hundreds of thousands more in Myanmar. Unwanted by both countries, they are effectively stateless.
“This is very unusual that the Myanmar border police have allowed Rohingyas in,” former Bangladeshi ambassador Ashfaqur Rahmna told RFA.
“The Myanmar border guard allows the Rohingya Muslims to go out of the Buddhist- majority Myanmar, but they had been very tough on repatriation as they [label] the Muslim minority as ‘illegal Bangladeshis’ or ‘illegal Chittagonians.”
After almost four years confined to fetid internal displacement and villages by the former semi-civilian government, which regarded them as ‘Bengali’, many Rohingya hope Myanmar’s new administration will improve their fortunes.
This week, at least 21 were killed when their ferry sank on a daytrip from an IDP camp to a market in Sittwe, the Rakhine state capital.
