Arakan News Agency
Bangladesh’s government complained Friday about an influx of Rohingya Muslims from neighboring Myanmar, following reports that hundreds have crossed the border as they flee killings and the burning of homes in Arakan state.
Border-police officials from both countries met Friday in the southeastern Bangladeshi district of Cox’s Bazar to discuss the situation along their shared frontier, while Dhaka summoned Myanmar’s ambassador to lodge a complaint about the violence in Arakan – a western state in predominantly Buddhist Myanmar where the Rohingya minority is concentrated.
“[We have] raised our deep concern at the situation in Arakan state. We have urged them to improve the situation there for the Rohingyas to return to their homes,” Bangladeshi Additional Foreign Secretary Kamrul Ahsan told reporters after summoning Myanmar Ambassador U Myo Myint Ahasan to his ministry.
Ahsan said he handed the envoy a diplomatic letter conveying Bangladesh’s concern about the new influx of Rohingya Muslims into Teknaf and Ukhia, two sub-districts in Cox’s Bazar.
“We have told them that [Rohingya] are sneaking into Bangladesh,” Col. Khandker Farid Hasan, the southeast commander of Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB), told reporters in Cox’s Bazar after a meeting with a 31-member delegation representing Myanmar’s frontier police.
“They informed us that they were also aware of this. We, the two parties, discussed ways to stop such illegal entry,” he said, noting that the two sides had agreed to cooperate in sharing information about cross-border movements of Rohingya.
The ambassador and members of the border-guard delegation from Myanmar did not talk to Bangladeshi media afterward.
The comments by Bangladeshi officials were the government’s first admission that Rohingya had succeeded in crossing into southeastern Bangladesh amid a crackdown by Myanmar authorities that followed the early October killings of nine Myanmar police officers during attacks on border posts in Arakan’s Maungdaw township.
At least 400 Rohingya people have been killed and more than 30,000 displaced by the violence in Arakan, the worst outbreak since hundreds were killed in inter-communal violence in 2012, which caused thousands of Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh, Reuters reported Wednesday.
Last week, Bangladeshi officials said they had sealed the border and pushed back hundreds of Rohingya who were seeking refuge in Bangladesh.
On Wednesday, Abdul Majid, the officer-in-charge of police in Teknaf, told BenarNews that the border guard and coast guard had transferred 70 Rohingya and four human smugglers into police custody after they were caught crossing the frontier.
