[caption id="attachment_192378" align="alignnone" width="1200"] UNHCR staff member Maria del Pilar Pena assists thousands of refugees from Myanmar helping admit them to Bangladesh after spending up to four days stranded near the border.
Bangladesh border guards reported that over 6,800 refugees had passed through Anjuman Para border village in Cox's Bazar district. Thousands more are said to be on their way from Myanmar.
The most vulnerable refugees were bussed to a transit centre near Kutupalong camp where UNHCR and out partners provided food, water, medical checks and temporary shelter. On Thursday some families moved into UNHCR tents while others slept under covered shelters.
Other new arrivals are hosted in Kutupalong refugee camp, spending the night in existing structures and buildings in the camp. ; As an estimated 600,000 Rohingya sought safety in Bangladesh between late-August and October 2017, UNHCR began work on an extension site next to the long-established Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar. Whole families, young mothers and unaccompanied minors were among those fleeing for their lives since fighting reignited in Myanmar. They came by boat or walked barefoot for days, wading through vast rice fields. They left most of their possessions behind. Large groups crossed into south-eastern Bangladesh hungry, in poor physical condition and in need of life-saving support. By mid-September, the Bangladeshi Government allocated some 2,000 acres of land on which family tents and temporary communal shelters were erected to shelter new arrivals. UNHCR site planners estimate that these will be sufficient to house 150,000 people.[/caption] Not safe for Rohingya to return to Myanmar The UN’s independent investigator on Myanmar says it's not safe for hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who fled to Bangladesh to return because Myanmar has failed to dismantle its "system of persecution" of Rohingyas. Yanghee Lee said in a report to the General Assembly circulated Friday that living conditions for the remaining Rohingya in northern Rakihine state "remain dreadful," AP news. The Rohingya can’t leave their villages and earn a living, she said, making them dependent on humanitarian aid whose access “has been so heavily diminished that their basic means for survival has been affected." "While this situation persists, it is not safe or sustainable for refugees to return," said the U.N. special rapporteur appointed by the Geneva-based Human Rights Council. Lee also expressed concern that a household-counting exercise in Rohingya villages "is an effort to erase the Rohingya from administrative records and make their return less possible." She said the government's requirement that any refugee who returns must be issued "a national verification card" is not a solution to citizenship for the Rohingya. Rohingya Muslims demand that Myanmar give them citizenship, safety, and their own land and homes they left behind. The Buddhist-majority nation has refused to recognize Rohingya as citizens or even as one of its ethnic groups, rendering them stateless. More than 700,000 Rohingya fled across the border to Bangladesh after Myanmar's military began a harsh counterinsurgency campaign against them in August 2017 in response to an insurgent attack. The campaign, which has been called ethnic cleansing, involved mass rapes, killings and burning of Rohingya homes. Lee said there are nearly 913,000 Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar in Bangladesh, near the Myanmar border, including thousands who fled before 2017 and about 1,100 who arrived between January and July. Lee said she "continues to receive reports of beatings and killings and the burning of houses and rice stores." Myanmar's government and military have consistently denied carrying out human rights violations. They say military operations in Myanmar's Rakhine state were justified in response to attacks by Rohingya insurgents. Lee said the government's conflict with the Arakan Army, a guerrilla force from the Buddhist ethnic group seeking autonomy for Rakhine, is also affecting the remaining Rohingya in northern Rakhine. In April, possibly dozens of Rohingya were killed when government helicopters fired on them while they were collecting firewood in south Buthidaung, she said. The U.N. says 128,000 Rohingya are languishing in camps in northern Rakhine, which the government says it plans to close. Lee said she's distressed that families living there who are unable to register with the government aren't receiving food. She said the government is constructing housing for internally displaced people without lifting restrictions on their movement which means the Rohinga will remain "effectively detained." While the government has presented this as part of the implementation of recommendations by the Advisory Commission on Rakhine headed by the late U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan, Lee said those recommendations called for the Rohingya to be able to move freely and return home. Therefore, she said, it doesn't appear that closure of the camps will improve their lives. Lee urged U.N. member nations to impose sanctions on companies owned by Myanmar's military and to impose sanctions on the six senior military commanders and their family members identified by the independent international fact-finding mission on Myanmar as being "most responsible for the serious violations that have occurred since 2011." On other issues, the special rapporteur raised serious questions about the construction of major hydropower projects in Chin and Rakhine states, and the impact of dams on ethnic minority villages. She noted that the independent mission said the government "is making a concerted effort to fundamentally alter the landscape of northern Rakhine state in the name of development." Lee also sharply criticized the government's suspension of mobile internet services on June 21 in parts of Rakhine and Chin to more than a million people, saying the government "has failed to justify the blanket shutdown as being necessary." She said the shutdown, in the context of the conflict between the government and the Arakan Army, is impacting a huge population's rights to food, safety, health, education, shelter and livelihood, and "is likely to amount to collective punishment" in violation of international law.