India to deport seven Rohingya refugees amid UN condemnation
Indian police have sent seven Rohingya Muslim refugees to the border to be deported after they fled violence and persecution in Myanmar.
Senior police officer Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta said on Wednesday that the seven men had been incarcerated since 2012 for illegal entry and would be deported Thursday.
"The seven Myanmarese men will be deported tomorrow," Bhaskar Jyoti Mahanta said.
Myanmar’s Rakhine has been the scene of communal violence since 2012. Many Muslims have been killed while tens of thousands have been forced to flee as a result of attacks by Buddhists. The refugees largely live in camps in dire conditions.
Last year, Myanmar’s armed forces, backed by Buddhist extremist mobs, launched a state-sponsored crackdown campaign against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine, using a series of attacks on military posts by gunmen they linked to Rohingya as a pretext.
The crackdown, described by UN rights officials as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing, forced over 700,000 Rohingya to flee to neighboring Bangladesh, where they are camped in overcrowded refugee centers in dire living conditions.
Rohingya Muslims, who have lived in Rakhine State for many generations, are denied citizenship and branded illegal immigrants who hail from Bangladesh, by Myanmarese officials.
An estimated 40,000 Rohingya live in India after having fled violence in Rakhine.
The deportation of the seven men is the first such move against the community, known by the United Nations as the “most persecuted minority group in the world.”
A UN human rights official slammed the forcible return of the Rohingya as a violation of international law.
"The Indian government has an international legal obligation to fully acknowledge the institutionalized discrimination, persecution, hate and gross human rights violations these people have faced in their country of origin and provide them the necessary protection," the UN's Special Rapporteur on racism, Tendayi Achiume, said in a statement.
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