Bangladesh is to move to a camp at least 15,000 Rohingya refugees who have settled in a restive hill district near the border with Myanmar, a local official said Sunday.Most of the estimated half a million Rohingya who have arrived in southeastern Bangladesh over the last five weeks after fleeing violence in Myanmar are crammed into the camps that have sprung up on government land.But thousands of the mainly Muslim refugees have settled in the nearby district of Bandarban, part of the Chittag

More than 2,000 Rohingya have massed along Myanmar's coast this week after trekking from inland villages in Rakhine state to join the refugee exodus to Bangladesh, state media reported Saturday.They follow more than half a million fellow Rohingya who have emptied out of northern Rakhine in a single month, fleeing an army crackdown and communal violence the UN says amounts to "ethnic cleansing".The journey to Bangladesh is fraught with danger for the stateless Muslim minority, w

Rashida Begum steers clear of the water pump near the reeking latrine shared by more than 100 families in a grim corner of Bangladesh that has grown into one of the world's largest refugee settlements in just weeks."The pump works, but the water stinks, so we don't drink it," the Rohingya woman said in the squalid camp where her family of 11 has lived since fleeing Myanmar a fortnight ago.The UN has warned of a humanitarian "nightmare" unfolding in Bangladesh&#03

UN chief Antonio Guterres exhorted Myanmar's leaders to end the "nightmare" faced by Rohingya refugees fleeing an army campaign, after at least 19 people drowned with scores more feared dead when a boat carrying Rohingya families capsized off Bangladesh.

The United States accused Myanmar Thursday of the ethnic cleansing of minority Rohingya Muslims, saying the bloodshed in Rakhine state had shamed Aung Sang Suu Kyi's government.Speaking at a United Nations Security Council meeting, US Ambassador Nikki Haley pressed for members of Myanmar's military to face action from the global body in response to the violence and expressed sharp criticism of the civilian government.

Rohingya militants on Wednesday denied the Myanmar army's allegations that they had massacred scores of Hindu villagers, whose bodies soldiers displayed to the press after exhuming them from mass graves in northern Rakhine state.Major clashes between the army and the Muslim insurgents erupted last month, triggering a dire refugee crisis with nearly half a million Rohingya fleeing across the border to Bangladesh.An information war has followed, as Myanmar's government pushes back aga

The UN Security Council met behind closed doors on Tuesday to discuss the violence in Myanmar, moving to step up its response to the exodus of 480,000 Rohingya Muslims in what has been condemned as "ethnic cleansing."The meeting will set the stage for a public session of the top UN body on Thursday, during which UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is set to brief on the crisis and China, along with other council members, will deliver remarks.International alarm is growing over the

Malaysia has dissociated itself from the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Chairman’s statement regarding the conflict in Myanmar’s Rakhine state because it is a “misrepresentation of the reality of the situation.” In a rare turn of events, the current ASEAN Chairman and Philippine Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano broke the association’s silence on the issue when he issued a statement on Sunday at the side-lines of the ongoing UNGA (United Nations General Assembly) expressin

The World Health Organisation warned Monday of a growing cholera risk in the makeshift refugee camps in Bangladesh where more than 435,000 Rohingya Muslims have sought shelter from unrest in Myanmar.A month after the exodus began, those dispersed in some 68 camps and settlements along the border do not have safe drinking water and hygiene facilities, according to the WHO.The camps also face dire shortages of food and medicine in what has quickly become one of the world's largest refugee

Myanmar's army said Sunday it had discovered a mass grave containing the bodies of 28 Hindus, including women and children, in violence-wracked Rakhine state, blaming the killings on Muslim Rohingya militants.Thousands of Hindus have fled villages where they once lived alongside Muslims, alleging that they were targeted by militants whose August 25 raids plunged Rakhine into communal violence.The announcement could not be independently verified in an region where access has been tightly