Word: rohingya
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These refugees were subjected to such treatment partly because few will defend them. Muzaffar, whose full name is being withheld by the Arakan Project, is a member of the Rohingya community, a Muslim ethnic group living in abysmal conditions on the margins of Burma and Bangladesh. Some 800,000 Rohingya, who look South Asian, remain in western Burma, where they are denied citizenship and most rights by the military-run government; about 200,000 eke out an existence in squalid refugee camps across the border in Bangladesh. A scattered, quiet diaspora scratches at the fringe of society in countries...
Over many desperate years, they have tried to flee to the comparatively richer climes of Southeast Asia. Waves of Rohingya migrants routinely take to the sea from the marshlands and jungle of eastern Bangladesh, often with the help of people smugglers who charge extortionate rates for their services. One report says Thai authorities alone picked up 4,886 Rohingya in an unspecified period from...
...Muzaffar claimed that after he and his companions had sailed for 12 days in a contingent of two boats, the Thai navy picked them up and moved them to a barren isle off the Thai mainland - NGO sources suspect this is Koh Sai Daeng, or Red Sand Island - alongside Rohingya detainees captured from other refugee expeditions. They were 412 in total. For eight days, Muzaffar said, they were kept in the open and given little more than "two mouthfuls of rice" per meal. Thai soldiers, he said, "beat us up whenever they felt like...
...still refused to move," Muzaffar said. "Our hands were already tied on the Navy ship, but this time they also tied the legs of some people and threw four of them into the sea." Those people, he said, drowned. The rest of the refugees, mostly Rohingya, boarded the barge. It had no motor or sail. According to Zaw Win, another Rohingya detainee interviewed by the Arakan Project, the Thais gave the refugees four bags of rice and two drums of water, a woefully insufficient supply for over 400 people with nowhere to go. Then they allegedly cut the rope between...
Other reports from around the region suggest that Muzaffar's experience was not an isolated incident. A Jan. 14 story in the Jakarta Post said 193 Rohingya were rescued by Acehnese fishermen on Jan. 7 and are now being housed at an Indonesian naval base. The refugees there claim Thai marines also cut them adrift after destroying the engines on their boats, and they managed to stay afloat by erecting sails made of plastic tarpaulin. Survivors from a second wave of refugees "pushed back" from Thailand - a contingent of some 580 - have also made their way to India's Andaman...