FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Hindu refugees ready to return to Rakhine 

Hindu refugees ready to return to Rakhine 

Rohingya reluctant to go back as militants claim new attack on Myanmar military 

Hindu refugees are prepared to return to Myanmar’s strife-torn Rakhine State even as a Rohingya Muslim militant group claimed responsibility for a new round of violence over the weekend.
A militant attack on a military engineering regiment in Rakhine’s Maungdaw township injured five soldiers, including one in serious condition. 
The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) said via Twitter yesterday that it had ambushed the army vehicle in retaliation for the mistreatment of, and atrocities against, the Rohingya community in Myanmar.
The ARSA statement said the Myanmar army “continues to commit heinous crimes”, besieging Rohingya villages, starving the population and denying it access to medical care.
The insurgent ARSA launched a series of attacks last August, prompting a tough reaction and a “clearance operation” from the Myanmar military. 
The operation, which the United Nations said contained elements of ethnic cleansing, forced more than 650,000 people from Rakhine to Bangladesh.
Bangladesh wanted the refugees to start returning to Myanmar by the end of this month under a controversial agreement between the two nations.
The vast majority are Rohingya Muslims who have faced decades of persecution in Myanmar, which sees them as illegal immigrants, even though many have lived there for generations. They say they would rather stay in squalid camps in Bangladesh than return to the scene of the violence they had fled.
But a small community of Hindus who lived alongside the Rohingya in Myanmar’s Rakhine state and were caught up in the turmoil say they do want to return.
Hindu farmer Surodhon Pal has packed his bags, eager to return to Myanmar after fleeing for Bangladesh during a wave of violence last year, but he is in a tiny minority. Most of the refugees are terrified of going home.
“We want security and we want food. If the authorities can give us those assurances we’ll happily go back,” Pal, 55, told AFP.
“The Bangladeshi government and the UN looked after us well but now we have prepared our bags and are ready to return to our country.”
Last month Dhaka sent a list of 100,000 refugees to Myanmar authorities for repatriation after the two governments signed an agreement in November for the process to begin on January 23.
But rights groups and the United Nations say no one should be repatriated against their will and, so far, only about 500 Hindu refugees have expressed a willingness to go.

Massacre by masked men
Modhuram Pal, a 35-year-old community leader, said about 50 Hindus had already returned to Rakhine, where they were welcomed by Myanmar security forces.
Hindus who fled the area have told AFP that masked men stormed their community and hacked victims to death with machetes before dumping them into freshly-dug pits.
Myanmar’s military alleges the ARSA carried out the massacre on August 25, the same day the rebel group staged deadly raids on police posts that sparked a military backlash. At least 45 bodies have been found in mass graves. The ARSA has denied the allegations, saying it does not target civilians. But Pal and his fellow Hindu refugees say they will only go back if they are rehoused away from their former villages in Rakhine.
Monubala, a Hindu woman who like many of the refugees goes by one name, told AFP that masked men dressed in black had attacked her village near Kha Maung Seik, where the massacre occurred.
“I left my home, including my chickens, ducks, goats and all my property, and came to Bangladesh to save my life,” she said.
Doctors without Borders estimates that thousands were killed in the violence that hit Rakhine in late August.
People around the world have been shocked by consistent accounts by Rohingya refugees of security forces and ethnic Rakhine Buddhist mobs driving them out of their homes with bullets, rape and arson.
Although the influx has slowed, hundreds of Rohingya are still crossing into Bangladesh, now home to around a million refugees.
Rights groups say the crackdown was the culmination of years of persecution and discrimination against the Muslim group in mainly Buddhist Myanmar, where they are effectively stateless and denigrated as outsiders.

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