صراط عشق صراط عشق
A demonstration was staged by tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh demanding to go home. They demanded repatriation back to Myanmar, where they fled a brutal military crackdown five years ago.
Almost a million Rohingya are confined to bamboo and tarpaulin shacks in 34 squalid camps in southeast Bangladesh, with no work, poor sanitation and little access to education. Their increasingly restrictive host country has banned them from holding rallies since they staged a massive 100,000-strong protest in August 2019.
But authorities allowed several groups of Rohingya to hold simultaneous “Go Home” marches and rallies ahead of World Refugee Day on Monday (20 June 2022). “We don’t want to stay in the camps. Being refugees is not easy. It’s hell. Enough is enough. Let’s go home,” top Rohingya community leader Sayed Ullah said in a speech at one rally.
In 2018, investigators from a United Nations fact-finding mission into the killings and forced mass exodus of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar concluded that a criminal investigation and prosecution was warranted of top Myanmar generals for crimes against humanity and genocide.
Sunday’s demonstrations come after the foreign secretaries of Bangladesh and Myanmar last week held a meeting — their first in nearly three years — by video conference.
A Bangladesh foreign ministry official told AFP that during the meeting Dhaka pressed Naypyidaw for the repatriation of Rohingya refugees to start this year. “We are hopeful the repatriation will start after the monsoon this year at least in a limited scale,” he said on condition of anonymity.
