Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/DHAKA: Mohammed Ismail said four of his relatives were killed by shooters at the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh between April and October last year.
He recalls the September night when he said he almost met the same fate: masked men abducted him, cut off parts of his left arm and leg, and dumped him in the canal.
“They repeatedly asked me why I gave their personal information to the police,” Mohammed Ismail, seated on the plastic mat with his left limbs covered in the white bandage and cloth, told Reuters at Kutupalong refugee camp. “I kept telling them I did not know anything about them and had not provided any information.”
Bleak Future Push Rohingya
Earlier, Bangladeshi police dismissed allegations of abusing Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazaar following Human Rights Watch called on officials to probe reports of wrongful arrests and harassment by security forces at camps.
In a report published earlier this week, Human Rights Watch said that safety standards in Cox’s Bazaar refugee settlements had declined under the oversight of the Police Battalion, which took over the security of the camps in 2020.
The global rights body said it had interviewed many Rohingya in 2022 and analyzed police reports documenting cases of “serious abuse by APBn officials,” including detention, violence, on “apparently fabricated grounds,” and demanding bribes in exchange for release.
The APBn officials rejected the report of the HRW and said that the global rights group did not take their point of view in the report.
UNHCR said that data from UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, show that about 348 Rohingya are thought to have died at sea in 2022, including in the possible sinking late the previous year of a boat carrying 180 people, making it one of the deadliest years in 2014. Some 3,545 Rohingya made and attempted the crossing of the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea to Southeast Asian countries the previous year, up from about 700 in 2021.
Ismail said that he believes insurgents targeted him and his relatives, aged between 26 and 40 after his cousins rejected repeated approaches over the preceding three or four years to join the militant outfit, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army.
The militant group has fought against Myanmar’s security forces, and some Rohingya say it has recruited fighters, often through coercion, in the Bangladesh camps.
