20 April 2016•Update: 22 April 2016
YANGON, Myanmar
At least 18 people believed to belong to Muslim minorities in Myanmar have been killed after a boat capsized off western Rakhine state.
The Irrawaddy newspaper quoted a police officer Wednesday as saying that 19 people survived and 12 were missing after the accident occurred Tuesday as the boat was transporting residents of an internally displaced people’s camp to Rakhine’s capital Sittwe.
Sittwe-based Aye Khin Maung said that the 49 people on board were “Bengali” -- a term the government uses to refer to Rohingya to imply they are interlopers from Bangladesh -- heading to purchase supplies in preparation for the region’s rainy season.
An ethnic Kaman Muslim in the Thae Chaung camp, however, told the Irrawaddy that 22 bodies had been discovered and that the boat had been carrying 75 people -- most of them Kaman, a minority officially recognized as indigenous to Myanmar.
“Some people died on the way to the hospital because we had to ride almost one hour from Thae Chaung to Sittwe,” Hla Win said. “If we’d had emergency nursing care, we could have saved their lives.”
Officer Aye Khin Maung acknowledged that authorities suspected that the vessel had not been equipped with life jackets.
“As far as I know, there were no Kaman on the boat,” he insisted.
Rohingya have faced widespread persecution for decades, but their situation has become ever more perilous since 2012, when Buddhist rioters rampaged through villages in Sittwe, torching Rohingya houses and attacking people with machetes and other crude weapons.
Since then, around 140,000 Rohingya -- and some members of the Kaman community -- have been unable to return to their villages, confined to a swathe of land in squalid displacement camps, where they are often denied basic healthcare.
The Rohingya are denied citizenship under a 1982 law that has been widely condemned by rights groups, and were excluded from a general election Nov. 8 that saw Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy party come to power.
