The Myanmar Navy on Monday seized a boat carrying Rohingya Muslims and arrested all 228 refugees on board. It was the latest foiled attempt by members of the persecuted Muslim minority community to flee the country.
Images broadcast by state television showed people huddled together on the floor of a long wooden boat, with several veiled women clutching small children. According to a report by state television MRTV, those detained in waters near Sittwe in northwestern Myanmar included 33 children and as well as five boat workers. The detainees were handed over to the police and the immigration authorities.
Myanmar’s military government did not immediately comment on the situation but a local government official confirmed the incident without providing further details.
The Rohingya Muslims, a highly persecuted community that mainly resides in Myanmar and Bangladesh, have taken many perilous journeys across the sea in recent years. In 2020, at least 32 Rohingya died on a ship that drifted for weeks after it failed to reach Malaysia.
While the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar has been ongoing since the 1970s, the Tatmadaw’s ethnic cleansing campaign peaked in August 2017, when the military drove the Rohingya out of the Rakhine state by torching almost 300 villages and killing at least 10,000. Since then, the Muslim community has been largely confined to refugee camps, with little access to education, healthcare, or jobs, and heavy restrictions on their movement.
As a result, around one million Rohingya have sought refuge in neighbouring countries like Bangladesh. However, for decades now, both Bangladesh and Myanmar have refused to acknowledge them as citizens and each insists that they are “illegal immigrants” of the other, effectively rendering them stateless.
Currently, around 1.1 million persecuted Rohingyas are being sheltered in Bangladesh. Bangladesh has long been hoping to begin the repatriation of several Rohingya Muslims, most of whom entered Bangladesh in the aftermath of a deadly attack, which the United Nations (UN) said had “genocidal intent”. Even though the Myanmar government had previously signed a repatriation agreement with Bangladesh under mounting international pressure, the process has not taken flight yet.
The February 1 military coup in the country has worsened violence against the community and prompted several Rohingya families to flee to neighbouring countries, often by taking life-threatening routes. Earlier this year, the Tatmadaw rejected a United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) resolution calling for reconciliation with its persecuted Rohingya minority and criticised it for being based on “one-sided allegations.”