Facts about the evacuation of Rohingya people
Evacuation of the Rohingya people out of Bangladesh’s port city of Cox’s Bazaar to several Muslim countries as well as Thailand to seek a new pasture started more than two decades ago, according to information obtained by the Thai intelligence service.
However, it was believed that systematic evacuation with the involvement of human trafficking gangs began about six years ago and Rohingya people were smuggled out of Myanmar’s Arakan state and Cox’s Bazaar by boats. But the mass evacuation was triggered by deadly clashes between the Muslim Rohingya ethnic people and the Buddhist Myanmar people in Arakan resulting to hundreds of deaths in 2012.
Ever since, evacuation of the Rohingya people out of Arakan state and Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazaar by boats with the help of human trafficking gangs has continued endlessly especially during the off-monsoon season when journey by sea through the Bay of Bengal into the Andaman sea is relatively safe. Not only the Rohingya people, but also Bangladeshi people too joined the exodus to escape abject poverty at home in order to find a new life in faraway lands in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and elsewhere.
Information from the association of Rohingya people shows that there are now about 400,0000 Rohingya people in Saudi Arabia, between 800,000 to 1.5 million in Arakan state of Myanmar, 3000,000 in Bangladesh, 200,000 in Pakistan, 40,000 in Malaysia, 30,000 in India, about 1,200 in Indonesia, about 1,000 in the United States and Candada and about 100,000 in Thailand.
Thai intelligence sources said that at the international conference to discusss the Rohingya problem scheduled to take place in Bangkok on May 29, the Thai government would make clear to the forum that Rohingya people is not an exclusive problem of Thailand and that they are not war escapees but economic migrants seeking a new better life.
It is indeed a good news that the Myanmar government has, of late, decided to join the conference. But an official in the office of the Myanmar president said in a recent statement that Myanmar was ready to cooperate with the other countries to resolve the Rohingya problem based on human rights principle.
On May 20 after an emergency meeting between Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, both Malaysia and Indonesia have announced that they would grant temporary shelter to hundreds of Rohingya boat people drifting in the sea on the condition that the international community must cooperate with the two countries in repatriating the boat people back to their countries of origin within one year.