18 Rohingyas have been arrested in Bangladesh for leaving India due to pressure

Dhaka, May 12 (EFE) .- Bangladesh police have arrested 18 members of a discriminatory Rohingya minority accused of illegally entering the country from neighboring India due to hostility from locals.

The four families, who have so far lived in various parts of India, have fled their homeland of attacks in Burma (Myanmar) and taken refuge, a police official from the northeastern district of Maulvibazar told Rabiul Haq Efe.

“When we saw them, they were waiting at the Maulvi Bazaar bus stop this morning to go to Cox’s Bazar,” he explained, adding that most of the Rohingya refugee camps in southern Bangladesh were concentrated.

According to the source, the families did not know each other beforehand but started traveling together during their journey to seek asylum in Bangladesh.

“Three families said they live in different parts of Jammu and Kashmir (northern India) and could not say which state a woman lives in. We assumed she was somewhere (northeast) in Assam because it cost her 200. It costs about $ 2.3 to get here by bus (about $ 2.3).” Said Hugh.

Police further said that one family came to India from Bangladesh in 2012 and another family fled to a neighboring country in 2017 during the evacuation following a campaign of persecution and violence by the Burmese military.

The woman, who lives in Assam, arrived in India two to three months ago.

Hostility in India

Hugh pointed out that although the areas where they lived and the years they came to the Asian country were different, all four families decided to leave India due to the hostility of the local people.

“The Rohingyas told us that they had decided to leave India because the local people would not allow them to stay there. We have yet to decide whether to take them to court or send them to the Cox’s Bazar refugee camps,” he said.

In India, which shares a 1,634-kilometer border with Burma, there were an estimated 40,000 Rohingya in 2017, of whom about 18,000 were registered as refugees or asylum seekers by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 2019.

India was not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention and had no legal protection framework for them, and the country has repeatedly expressed its desire to deport members of this majority Muslim ethnic group.

Deportations and escape

In 2018, seven were deported with the approval of the Supreme Court, and hundreds of members of these minorities fled in 2019 for fear of returning to Burma, although by 2021 the highest Indian judicial body had stopped expelling more than 150 panel members. Rohingya refugees detained in Jammu and Kashmir.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has been accused of creating an environment of terror for the Rohingya, and persecuted minorities have often been accused of being discriminatory and a threat to India.

In one of the latest cases, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and opposition Aam Aadmi Party (AAM) blamed Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants for clashes between Hindus and Muslims in the capital last April.

According to the UNHCR, there are 926,561 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, 738,000 of whom have fled the country since August 2017 due to waves of violence unleashed in Burma, which the UN described as an example of genocide and possible genocide, crimes against humanity. By international courts. EFE

am-daa / mt / ig

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