\n Tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh staged demonstrations on Sunday demanding repatriation back to Myanmar, where they fled a brutal military crackdown five years ago.\n<\/p>\n
\n 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.\n<\/p>\n
\n Their increasingly restrictive host country has banned them from holding rallies since they staged a massive 100,000-strong protest in August 2019.\n<\/p>\n
\n But authorities allowed several groups of Rohingya to hold simultaneous \"Go Home\" marches and rallies ahead of World Refugee Day on Monday.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"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.\n<\/p>\n
\n 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.\n<\/p>\n
\n 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.\n<\/p>\n
\n A Bangladesh foreign ministry official told AFP that during the meeting Dhaka pressed Naypyidaw for the repatriation of Rohingya refugees to start this year.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"We are hopeful the repatriation will start after the monsoon this year at least in a limited scale,\" he said on condition of anonymity.\n<\/p>\n
\n Police said thousands of refugees, including young children, joined the marches and rallies, standing on roads and alleys with placards that read \"Enough is Enough! Let's Go Home\".\n<\/p>\n
\n \"Over 10,000 Rohingya took part in the rally in the camps under my jurisdiction,\" police official Naimul Haque told AFP, referring to Kutupalong, the largest refugee settlement in the world.\n<\/p>\n
\n Police and organisers said more than 1,000 Rohingya took part in each of the rallies in at least 29 camps.\n<\/p>\n
\n Authorities deployed extra security in the camps to prevent any violence, Haque said, adding that the demonstrations \"passed off peacefully\".\n<\/p>\n
\n - No guarantees -\n<\/p>\n
\n Previous repatriation attempts have failed, with Rohingya refusing to go home until Myanmar gives the largely Muslim minority guarantees of rights and security.\n<\/p>\n
\n With a dialect similar to that spoken in Chittagong in southeast Bangladesh, the Rohingya are seen by many in Myanmar as \"illegal immigrants\", a characterisation the community does not agree with.\n<\/p>\n
\n Rohingya leaders say they want to go back to their original villages in the Rakhine state of Myanmar, not to camps that Myanmar's government has built for internally displaced people.\n<\/p>\n
\n Refugee Rahmat Ullah, 69, said he wants to go back home.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"We are Rohingya, not Bengalis. We want repatriation with full rights restored,\" he told AFP.\n<\/p>\n
\n Young refugee Mohammad Haris said he does not want to \"die a refugee\".\n<\/p>\n
\n \"I want my rights. I want to go home where I can study and think of a future,\" he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Tens of thousands of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh staged demonstrations on Sunday demanding 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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-102283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n