By Press TV
Police said the boat
carrying the refugees from Myanmar capsized in the Bay of Bengal near a fishing
village in a coastal Bangladeshi district early Monday morning.
Local police
official Sheikh Ashrafuzzaman said villagers had recovered at least 5 of the
dead bodies.
Ashrafuzzaman said
according to the survivors, up to 65 people were on board the boat.
Nearly 200 Rohingya
refugees are reported to have drowned since late August while trying to reach
Bangladesh through the Tanf river separating the two countries.
Over half-a-million
Rohingya Muslims have arrived in Bangladesh in the last seven weeks from
Myanmar’s western Rakhine State. They are fleeing a government-backed military
crackdown, which began on August 25 after a series of attacks on army and
police posts in the state.
Human rights groups
and those who have managed to take refuge in Bangladesh have reported
indiscriminate acts of violence against Rakhine-based Muslims, including random
shootings, rape and arson attacks.
The world body has
censured the crackdown as an ethnic cleansing campaign against Myanmar’s
minority Muslim group.
Over the weekend,
the UN said over the weekend that 537,000 Rohingya refugees had arrived in
Bangladesh.
AFP quoted local
border guard spokesman Major Iqbal Ahmed as saying Monday that another 12,000
have entered in the last 24 hours.
Bangladesh has
allocated 3,000 acres (1,214 hectares) of forest land to create the world’s
largest refugee camp for the new arrivals as well as those already in the
country.
Witnesses said Monday
that many of the refugees that crossed the border were suffering injuries.
“We couldn’t step
out of the house for the last month because the military were looting people,”
said a refugee. “They started firing on the village. So we escaped into another
village.”
He said that the
situation is getting worse day by day, “so we started moving towards
Bangladesh. Before we left, I went back near my village to see my house, and
the entire village was burnt down.”
The new refugee
group also recounted how they suffered starvation at home as the army shut down
Rakhine food markets and restricted aid deliveries.
Myanmar’s de facto
leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been criticized for inaction over the atrocities
against the Muslim community, which is considered by the United Nations as the
“most persecuted minority group in the world.”
Meanwhile, the
European Union and the US are considering targeted sanctions against the
government in Myanmar, which refuses to grant citizenship to its Rohingya
Muslims and brands them as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.
EU foreign ministers,
who are scheduled to discuss the crisis later in the day, said in a draft joint
statement that the EU “will suspend invitations to the commander-in-chief of
the Myanmar/Burma armed forces and other senior military officers.”
The Myanmarese government,
however, says the exodus of Rohingya Muslims is being “exaggerated.”
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