Word: arakan
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...tale of one survivor has emerged that, if accurate, paints a picture of a dehumanizing odyssey, portraying the actions of surrounding governments in horrific tones. The man's name is Muzaffar, and his testimony was obtained over cell phone from his place of temporary detention in India by the Arakan Project, a Bangkok-based group advocating the rights of these boat people. Muzaffar's account appears to amplify other published reports - except in greater detail. He said Thai security forces first forcibly detained him and hundreds of other refugees offshore and then towed them back into international waters...
These refugees were subjected to such treatment partly because few will defend them. Muzaffar, whose full name is being withheld by the Arakan Project, is a member of the Rohingya community, a Muslim ethnic group living in abysmal conditions on the margins of Burma and Bangladesh. Some 800,000 Rohingya, who look South Asian, remain in western Burma, where they are denied citizenship and most rights by the military-run government; about 200,000 eke out an existence in squalid refugee camps across the border in Bangladesh. A scattered, quiet diaspora scratches at the fringe of society in countries...
Muzaffar was part of the most recent exodus. According to the transcript of his interview with the Arakan Project, Muzaffar claimed that after he and his companions had sailed for 12 days in a contingent of two boats, the Thai navy picked them up and moved them to a barren isle off the Thai mainland - NGO sources suspect this is Koh Sai Daeng, or Red Sand Island - alongside Rohingya detainees captured from other refugee expeditions. They were 412 in total. For eight days, Muzaffar said, they were kept in the open and given little more than "two mouthfuls of rice...
...this time they also tied the legs of some people and threw four of them into the sea." Those people, he said, drowned. The rest of the refugees, mostly Rohingya, boarded the barge. It had no motor or sail. According to Zaw Win, another Rohingya detainee interviewed by the Arakan Project, the Thais gave the refugees four bags of rice and two drums of water, a woefully insufficient supply for over 400 people with nowhere to go. Then they allegedly cut the rope between the barge and the navy ship and left...
...circulating speeches by bin Laden and Mullah Masood Azhar, a Pakistani militant leader. But it has big plans, says the HUJI source: "The dream is to create a larger Islamic land than the territorial limits of Bangladesh to include Muslim areas of Assam, north Bengal and Burma's Arakan province." That dream, if Islamic terrorists are allowed to continue their operations in Bangladesh, could be a nightmare for the rest of the region...