Yangon, Myanmar | AFP | Bangladesh and Myanmar will start repatriating refugees in two months, Dhaka said Thursday, as global pressure mounts over a crisis that has forced more than half a million Rohingya to flee across the border. The United Nations says 620,000 Rohingya have arrived in Bangladesh since …
Read More »Suu Kyi meets Bangladesh minister over Rohingya repatriation
Yangon, Myanmar | AFP | Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi met with Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister Thursday to hammer out a deal to return hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who have fled violence in Rakhine state, as global pressure mounts over the refugee crisis. More than 620,000 people have poured into …
Read More »Pope to meet Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh
Vatican City, Holy See | AFP | Pope Francis will meet Rohingya Muslim refugees from Myanmar in Dhaka when he visits the Bangladeshi capital next week, a Vatican spokesman said Wednesday. Francis, who has repeatedly spoken out over the persecution of the religious minority by the Myanmar authorities, will meet a …
Read More »Desperate Rohingya use plastic rafts to flee Myanmar
Shah Porir Dwip, Bangladesh | AFP | Dozens of Rohingya refugees floated into Bangladesh on Wednesday on a raft fashioned from plastic jerrycans, as the persecuted Muslim minority continue to flee violence in Myanmar in droves, officials said. Bangladesh border guards spotted the makeshift raft overloaded with more than 50 …
Read More »Tillerson to visit crisis-hit Myanmar
Washington, United States | AFP | Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will go to Myanmar next week, the State Department said, becoming the most senior US official to visit since the start of the Rohingya crisis. Tillerson’s spokeswoman said he would visit Naypyidaw on November 15 for talks on the “humanitarian …
Read More »Ugandan MPs ask IPU to condemn Myanmar atrocities
St. Petersburg, Russia | THE INDEPENDENT | The Inter-Parliamentary Union must condemn the reported human rights atrocities committed against mostly Muslims in Myanmar before similar occurrences happen in other countries, Ugandan legislator Latif Ssebaggala has said. Ssebaggala (Ind., Kawempe North), making a contribution during the ongoing 137th Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) …
Read More »Pope to visit Myanmar as anti-Rohingya hatred seethes
Yangon, Myanmar | AFP | Pope Francis will push for peace during his visit to mainly-Buddhist Myanmar, a church official said Thursday, a trip that plunges the pontiff into the centre of a simmering religious conflict which has sparked an exodus of Muslim Rohingya. Myanmar’s western Rakhine state has been torn …
Read More »Bangladesh bans three charities from giving Rohingya aid
Dhaka, Bangladesh | AFP | Bangladesh has banned three Islamic charities from working with Rohingya refugees, a lawmaker said Thursday, amid concerns displaced Muslims in camps along its border could be radicalized. Mahjabeen Khaled, an MP from the ruling Awami League, said the international charities Muslim Aid and Islamic Relief, and …
Read More »UN battles mounting illness in Rohingya camps
Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh | AFP | Relief agencies on Tuesday fought to contain a diarrhoea outbreak around camps in Bangladesh where more than 500,000 Rohingya have taken shelter in the past five weeks. The United Nations said meanwhile it would seek $430 million to increase operations in the camps along the …
Read More »Fear of epidemic disaster as disease stalks Rohingya camps
Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh | AFP | Rashida Begum steers clear of the water pump near the reeking latrine shared by more than 100 families in a grim corner of Bangladesh that has grown into one of the world’s largest refugee settlements in just weeks. “The pump works, but the water stinks, …
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