ဘဂၤလားေဒရွ္ ႏိုင္ငံ ရွိ ဒုကၡသည္ စခန္း မ်ား တြင္ ခိုလႈံ ေနၾကသည့္ ရိုဟင္ဂ်ာ မြတ္ဆလင္ မ်ား က
ျမန္မာ့ ဒီမိုကေရစီ ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ေဒၚေအာင္ဆန္းစုၾကည္ ၏ အကူအညီ ကိုေတာင္းခံ လိုက္ၾက
သည္။

Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar living in refugee camps in Bangladesh
called on Wednesday for democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi to speak
up for them and help end their persecution.

Bangladesh, which shares a 200-kilometre (125-mile) border with Myanmar,
is home to an estimated 300,000 Rohingya refugees, about a tenth of whom
live in squalid conditions in UN-assisted camps.

Around 25 people have been killed and a further 41 wounded in five days of
unrest between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s Rakhine
state, a Myanmar official told AFP on Tuesday.

“Our appeal is to the UN, foreign nations, the Myanmar government and
especially to Suu Kyi,” Mohammad Islam, leader of Rohingya refugees
living in Nayapara camp in the Bangladesh border town of Teknaf, told AFP.

“Aung San Suu Kyi hasn’t done or said anything for us, yet the Rohingyas
including my parents campaigned for her in the 1990 elections. Like most
other Burmese people, she is silent about the rights of Rohingya,” he added.

In her first visit outside Myanmar in 24 years, Suu Kyi last month met thousands
of Myanmar refugees now living in a Thai border camp. She promised to try as
much as she could to help them return home, vowing not to forget them.

Islam said that while she had highlighted the plight of other Myanmar refugees,
mostly Karen people, there had been no words of hope for the Rohingya.

“We heard the relations between the government and Suu Kyi have mended
and there are now reforms sweeping the country. But for Rohingya, these changes
mean nothing,” Islam said.

Speaking a Bengali dialect similar to one in southeast Bangladesh, the Rohingya
have long been treated as “foreign” by the Myanmar government and many Burmese,
a situation activists say has fostered rifts with Rakhine’s Buddhists.

Islam said that reports were filtering into the camps of new clashes targeting
Rohingya people in Rakhine state.

He said that Buddhists and Myanmar security forces had besieged a mosque in
Maidanpara village south of the town of Maungdaw.

“Many people were killed,” he said.

In Sittwe, he claimed people had been confined to a cinema hall which was
then set ablaze.

“It is all part of a masterplan to eliminate Rohingya from Myanmar. Security
forces have joined hands with Rakhines in the slaughter,” he said.

The allegations could not be independently verified by AFP.

Suu Kyi left Myanmar on Wednesday on her first trip to Europe since 1988 to
formally accept the Nobel Peace Prize that thrust her into the global limelight
two decades ago.

“I would like to do my best for the interests of the people,” Suu Kyi told reporters
before her plane left Yangon airport.