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‘Suu Kyi hasn’t done or said anything for us. Like most other Burmese people, she is silent about our rights’

TEKNAF, Bangladesh: 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 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 49 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 Muslims 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.

Meanwhile, a baby girl taken across a border river at night to escape violence in Myanmar was discovered alone in a boat on Wednesday by Bangladeshi guards who have turned back hundreds of refugees.

The six-week-old infant was handed to a Bangladeshi family who said she was in poor health but that they would look after her in the absence of her parents.

“Our river patrol team intercepted the boat at 2:00 am,” said Major Shafiqur Rahman, who is in charge of the Bangladesh operation to send back boatloads of Rohingya trying to flee from unrest in Myanmar by crossing the river Naf.

“They searched inside and found this Rohingya girl aged about one and a half months,” Rahman told AFP by telephone. “The boat looked empty. It was a miracle but the baby looked frail. “We have handed her to a couple who accepted her willingly.”

Since Monday, Bangladesh river patrol teams have turned back 16 boats carrying more than 660 Rohingya, most of them women and children, fleeing sectarian violence in Myanmar that officials said has killed around 49 people.

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