7 more BGP men take refuge in Bangladesh

Seven more soldiers of Myanmar’s paramilitary Border Guard Police (BGP) have taken refuge in Bangladesh, fleeing their posts amid reports of heavy gunfights between the government troops and the rebel resistance fighters in the junta-run country.

Till now, 113 BGP members have taken refuge in Bangladesh, Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) BGB spokesperson Shariful Islam confirmed. 

Residents in several frontier Bangladesh villages moved to safety amid skirmishes between the government troops and the rebel Arakan Army. Several mortar shells and bullets landed inside Bangladesh in the past three days and two people have died so far. One of them is a Bangladeshi woman and the other a Rohingya man.

Bangladesh’s border with Myanmar stretches 271.0 kilometres (168.4 miles), from the tri-point with India in the north to the Bay of Bengal in the south.

Bangladesh played a critical role when over a million Muslim minority Rohingyas fled their home in Rakhine and took refuge in Bangladesh to evade persecution, particularly after a 2017 army crackdown but the current crisis visibly has little to do with the Rohingyas.

Bangladesh won praises for the handling of the world’s biggest refugee crisis while Dhaka repeatedly sought their repatriation to their homeland in Rakhine saying the Rohingyas were causing economic, social, security and environmental problems.

The issue is now the subject of a United Nations genocide investigation at the International Court of Justice.

/KN/