npr: This week, Bangladesh had planned to start sending Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar. Now the d
npr: This week, Bangladesh had planned to start sending Rohingya refugees back to Myanmar. Now the deal has been postponed because of logistical problems. The refugees themselves have opposed the plan. “They’ll kill us,” says Sonah Meah, 30. “If I go, they’ll kill me.” Sitting on a straw mat in his shelter in the Hakimpara refugee camp, Meah says he was tortured and left for dead by the Myanmar military in August of last year. He says soldiers accused him of being part of an armed group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army — a charge he denies. The soldiers knocked several of his teeth out, he says, and repeatedly beat him unconscious. NPR can’t independently confirm his story but it is similar to the accounts of other Rohingya who say they were attacked by members of the Myanmar army. Meah is one of the more than 650,000 Rohingya who have fled Myanmar since the military launched what it calls cleanup operations against “terrorists” five months ago. Myanmar doesn’t consider the Rohingya to be citizens even though members of this Muslim group have lived in the country for generations. The Muslim minority are treated as illegal immigrants and have faced waves of violence and harassment by government forces, pro-government mobs and Buddhist extremists. Last fall, the United Nations denounced the attacks as a “textbook case of ethnic cleansing.” The Refugees Who Don’t Want To Go Home … Yet Photos: Allison Joyce for NPR -- source link
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