More than 500 escaped an immigration detention centre in the country’s north early on Wednesday, but some were killed as they tried to cross a highway.
Rohingya refugees, who escaped from a Malaysian Immigration detention
centre on Wednesday, squat on the verge after being rearrested by police
[Royal Malaysia Police via AFP]
Malaysia set up roadblocks and deployed the police, immigration and volunteer security services after more than 500 mostly Muslim Rohingya refugees fled a temporary immigration detention centre in the country’s north.
Eschatological or “end-times” narratives have become increasingly popular among Malaysian Muslims.
Economic uncertainty and a fractured political landscape may be triggering a new wave of Islamic resurgence in Muslim-majority Malaysia. In the 1970s and 1980s, various strains of Islamist discourse penetrated civil society and the already identity-based political scene. During that period, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) declared the ruling United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) kafir, while the latter co-opted the Islamist youth activist Anwar Ibrahim into its ranks and expanded the country’s religious bureaucracy.
At least 100 people, mostly women and children, on board a wooden vessel said to be taking on water denied refuge.
A boat carries Rohingya people stranded at sea off Indonesia [Aditya Setiawan via Reuters]
Dozens of Rohingya refugees who were intercepted after their boat ran into trouble off the coast of Indonesia’s Aceh province were being sent into Malaysian waters, authorities said.
At least 100 people, mostly women and children, on board a wooden vessel said to be taking on water were denied refuge in Indonesia and instead pushed into the neighbouring Southeast Asian country.
Makassar, in Indonesia’s South Sulawesi province, is home to thousands of refugees and asylum seekers – but legally, all are just ‘transiting’
Dwindling resettlement quotas in third countries mean some have been waiting to leave for a decade or more, as they battle with illness and depression
Reyas Alam visit the grave of Haji Mohd Shiraj, a Rohingya refugee who died in Makassar while waiting to be resettled. Photo: Eko Rusdianto
The number of people fleeing wars, violence, persecution and human rights violations rose for the ninth year in 2020 despite the pandemic, according to the United Nations’ refugee agency. About 20.7 million people are considered refugees under the UNHCR’s mandate. On World Refugee Day, This Week in Asia looks at the plight of Rohingya communities seeking temporary refuge in Indonesia and India.
A general view of the Rohingya settlement here near Bandar Baru Sentul June 13, 2021. ― Picture by Hari Anggara
KUALA LUMPUR, June 16 — As the National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (NIP) picks up speed around the country, one group of people are not even sure when they will get vaccinated.
The Rohingyas — a minority group of Myanmar Muslims once described by United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as “one of, if not the, most discriminated people in the world” — are refugees who have been in Malaysia since the 1970s but the biggest influx came in 2017 after the military crackdown in Myanmar.
JUNE 14 — I read with distress and alarm the heightened publicity attacks against the Rohingya and other migrants by Home Minister Datuk Seri Hamzah Zainuddin and Immigration Director-General Datuk Khairul Dzaimee Daud.
Distress because the Rohingya as a group have been subjected to persecution and suffered genocide at the hands of the Myanmar military, and alarm because of the vitriol against a defenceless people.
In August 2017, more than 742,000 Rohingya fled Bangladesh seeking refuge from the Myanmarese regime’s pogrom. Many perished along the way. The refugees who made it to Bangladesh have been sheltered mainly in the camps in Cox’s Bazar and Teknaf. With this massive influx of refugees adding to an older generation of Rohingya who had fled Myanmar into Bangladesh decades earlier, the numbers soon mushroomed to more than a million Rohingya refugees, squeezed into a crowded and underdeveloped border region of Bangladesh.
Rohingya who illegally entered Thailand and were bound for Malaysia, sit in a house in Bangkok, Jan. 3, 2021.
[Handout from Thailand's Immigration Bureau via AFP]
Rights groups in Malaysia are incensed by an illustration posted on social media by government agencies that shows armed security officials and navy ships surrounding a boat, with a caption that says, “Rohingya migrants, your arrival is not welcome.”
Posts of the illustration prepared by the National Task Force were taken down from the Immigration Department’s Twitter feed and the border agency’s Facebook page, after rights watchdog Amnesty International issued a harsh statement against the illustration.
A recent Chinese embassy statement referring to coup architect Min Aung Hlaing as the ‘leader of Myanmar’ is among the exchanges decried by the shadow National Unity Government
But analysts say while there are concerns over Beijing’s actions, they should not be over-interpreted – and Asean’s next moves could play a significant role in how the regime is perceived
China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi (right) bumps elbows with junta representative Wunna Maung Lwin at a June 8 meeting marking the 30th anniversary of formal relations between China and Asean. Photo: Xinhua
Recent formal interactions between Myanmar’s junta and officials from China have raised questions about whether the generals who staged February’s coup are garnering international recognition as the Southeast Asian nation’s legitimate executive authority.
Police rescued 24 Rohingyas -- 14 female, five male, and five children -- from Teknaf upazila of Cox's Bazar while being trafficked to Malaysia.
The law enforcers also arrested four alleged human traffickers -- Md Ali Chand, Nurul Amin, Rashida Begum, and Razia Begum -- during two separate drives in Borodail Jahajpura and Jaliaghata villages yesterday (Monday), Md Hafizur Rahman, officer-in-charge of Model Police Station, told The Daily Star.
Maslina Abu Hassan and her son Muhammad Ridwan at the Suhakam office.
KUALA LUMPUR: Fearful of threats and intimidation, Rohingya refugee Zafar Ahmad Abdul Ghani has not stepped out of his house for twelve months.
His family received threatening text messages, his wife’s car tyres were slashed recently, and they live in constant worry every day – and the wife is now seeking a meeting with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to help protect her family.
It began in April last year when hateful remarks and threats against Rohingya refugees flooded Facebook and Twitter, in the wake of fake news that an activist from the community demanded that they be granted citizenship.
Coastguards rescued 30 Rohingya people from drifting boat on 27 April, 2021.Collected
Bangladesh Coast Guard on Tuesday rescued 30 Rohingyas from a boat drifting in the Bay of Bengal near Teknaf of Cox's Bazar while making a trip from Bangladesh to Malaysia.
According to the coast guard, the rescued Rohingyas are residents of refugee camps in Ukhiya and Teknaf of Cox’s Bazar.
Among the Rohingya people, five were children, five men and 20 women.
Till 1:00pm, the rescued people were kept under the coast guard custody at Baharchhar in Teknaf upazia. They were being handed over to the police at the time.
The refugees would be sent to an island facility named Bhashan Char. (AP pic)
COX’S BAZAR: The Bangladesh coastguard on Tuesday rescued 30 Rohingya refugees adrift in the Bay of Bengal for two days after they were attacked by pirates, an official said.
About a million Rohingya refugees live in sprawling camps in southeast Bangladesh, having fled repression in Myanmar.
Many pay often-unscrupulous traffickers to put them on dangerous sea journeys to Southeast Asian countries – in this case Malaysia, home to a sizable Rohingya diaspora.
The Daily Star Our Correspondent, Cox’s Bazar April 28, 2021
Photo Star
Bangladesh Coast Guard members yesterday rescued 30 Rohingyas, who were trying to go to Malaysia illegally by a trawler through the Bay of Bengal, in Cox's Bazar's Teknaf.
The Rohingyas include 10 women and five children. They were residents of
The coastguards also seized the trawler.
Quoting the refugees, Amirul Haque, an official of Coast Guard's media wing, told reporters that around 50 Rohingyas boarded the trawler from the beaches in Teknaf and Ukhia upazilas on April 22.
The trawler illegally started for Malaysia on Monday night and at one stage, the trawler driver shouted that robbers had been chasing them and anchored it on Boro Dail beach yesterday morning.
(CNN)Noor Kayas fled the refugee camp without telling anyone at home.
At sea the next morning, the teenager used a satellite phone to call her mother, Gule Jaan, 43, to say she was heading for Malaysia on a small wooden boat, packed with 87 Rohingya refugees, including 65 women and girls.
Some were fleeing what their families say is the increased risk of sexual assault and rape during the pandemic in the sprawling refugee camps of Cox's Bazar, in Bangladesh, home to more than 1 million displaced people.
Bloc's extraordinary Myanmar crisis meeting on April 24 could be the last diplomatic chance to prevent a regional catastrophe
Milk Tea Alliance Indonesia in action during Solidarity for the Myanmar People in front of the ASEAN Secretariat building in Jakarta on March 12,2021. Photo: DasrilRoszandi / NurPhoto via AFP
SINGAPORE – When Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders meet in Jakarta to discuss the worsening political crisis in Myanmar on April 24, it will mark the first time that the regional organization holds a highest-level meeting to address a specific situation of concern involving one of its members.
Non-interference in domestic affairs has traditionally been one of ASEAN’s basic operating principles, along with decision-making by consensus. As such, Saturday’s summit is seen as a test of the grouping’s code of constraint as regional leaders find themselves under mounting pressure to engineer a workable, face-saving resolution before the crisis spirals further out of control.
PETALING JAYA: It has been a year since the wave of hate speech and threats against the Rohingya community in Malaysia started. However, human rights activists say the hostility remains unresolved.
Rights activist John Quinley of Fortify Rights, who has documented abuses against the Rohingya in Myanmar, Bangladesh, Malaysia and India, said the current situation against the community remains a cause for concern.
“Since the Covid-19 pandemic, anti-refugee sentiment in Malaysia has increased,” he told FMT.
Apart from hateful remarks on media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, Quinley said, Rohingya refugees also received death threats and verbal abuse.
“Prominent Rohingya activists have gone into hiding out of well-founded fears of violence,” he said.
In April last year, social media users flooded Facebook and Twitter with hateful remarks and threats against Rohingya refugees in the wake of fake news that an activist from the community demanded that they be granted citizenship.
The fake news, attributed to Zafar Ahmad Abdul Ghani, who heads the Myanmar Ethnic Rohingya Human Rights Organisation Malaysia (Merhrom), came following reports that Malaysian authorities had blocked a boat carrying starving Rohingya refugees from landing.
Zafar denied that he demanded citizenship for the refugees but his clarification failed to quell the hostility towards the community.
File picture shows Rohingya refugees wearing protective masks keep a social distance while waiting to receive goods from volunteers, during the movement control order due to the outbreak of the coronavirus, in Kuala Lumpur, April 7, 2020. — Reuters pic
KUALA LUMPUR, April 19 — The issue of Rohingya have to be dealt properly under the current situation in Myanmar to avoid further influx of refugees into Malaysia and neighbouring countries, said Foreign Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Hussein.
“In Malaysia, we have 200,000 Rohingyas...can you imagine if the situation in Myanmar worsens and we have influx of more Rohingyas into our shores.
Bangladesh hopes Malaysia will play an instrumental role to move the issue of Rohingya refugees forward within ASEAN and help achieve a durable solution to the crisis.
Bangladesh High Commissioner to Malaysia Golam Sarwar said Malaysia was one of the countries that immediately responded to Bangladesh's call for assistance during the early weeks of the Rohingya crisis in 2017, reports Malaysian news agency Bernama.
When it comes to foreign relations, Malaysia seems to be throwing itself into drama a lot recently. There’s that crapstorm when our Foreign Minister Hishamuddin Hussein allegedly referred to China as ‘big brother’ earlier this month, although he had later clarified that he was referring to China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi personally. While that whole drama was going on, another sorta faux pas had happened right after that, and it kind of flew under the radar.
Bangladesh High Commissioner to Malaysia Md Golam Sarwar said Malaysia was one of the countries that had immediately responded to Bangladesh’s call for assistance during the early weeks of the Rohingya crisis in 2017. — Reuters pic
KUALA LUMPUR, April 13 — Bangladesh hopes Malaysia would play an instrumental role to move the issue of Rohingya refugees forward within Asean and help Bangladesh achieve a durable solution to this crisis.
