Burma’s armed forces arrested 54 ethnic Rohingya, including a pregnant woman and four children, who were travelling in a motorboat on the Toe River between the villages of Kywe Don and Ouk Htong in the Ayawaddy Region on 22 October.
A member of the Ayawaddy Myanmar Muslim Network said they left their impoverished villages in Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships in Rakhine State to seek work in other areas.
“They were born in Rakhine State, where it’s really difficult to find work to survive.”
According to local sources, they’re being held at Shwe Tawng Maw Jail in Maubin Township. A man close to the local government has told NMG they are holding 37 men, 13 women, 2 boys and 2 girls and the 4 people driving the watercraft.
A former immigration officer said that the Rohingya hire brokers to cross the land and water borders separating Rakhine State with Ayawaddy Region.
According to sources close to the police, around 600 Rohingya were arrested between April and September and 150 were imprisoned for two years for violating immigration laws.
In Burma, most of the Rohingya are denied citizenship and freedom of movement despite being born in the country. Before the military’s eviction campaigns of 2016-17 forced more than 740,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh and the 2015 crisis, about 1.4 million lived in Burma. A UN fact-finding mission has found that the 2017 operation in Rakhine State involved “genocidal acts”.
