Rohingya refugees refuse repatriation to Myanmar as persecution fears continue
“Once we see that our relatives in Myanmar have gotten full citizenship rights,” said one community leader, “no one will have to force us to go back.”
When Dil Mohammad found out that he was on a list of 2,000 Rohingya refugees to be sent back to Myanmar, he drank a bottle of rat poison. His wife forced him to vomit and rushed him to the nearby Doctors Without Borders hospital.
“It’s better to die in Bangladesh, where I would get a proper Islamic burial, than be killed in Myanmar for being Muslim,” he said. “God will forgive my act of suicide because he knows our pain.”
Some 700,000 Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority from northern Rakhine state across the border in Myanmar, have flooded into refugee camps in Bangladesh since August 2017. A United Nations report released weeks later detailed how Rohingya villages were razed and civilians were raped and killed in an organized and systematic way “by the Myanmar security forces often in concert with armed Rakhine Buddhist individuals.”
