Four Rohingya refugees were killed in a shootout between two insurgent groups in Bangladesh, police said on Wednesday, marking a further deterioration in security in the country’s crowded camps.
Local police chief Shamim Hossain told AFP that there was an hour-long shootout between the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO) on Tuesday evening.
“Four Rohingya refugees were killed and two Rohingya were seriously injured,” he added. Neither group immediately commented on the shooting.
Rival armed groups clash in refugee camps that they use for drug and human trafficking.
Bangladesh is home to around a million Rohingya, including around 750,000 members of this stateless Muslim minority who fled the Burmese army’s repressive campaign in 2017 and are now the subject of an investigation into “acts of genocide” at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Rohingya refugees live in a labyrinth of unsanitary and overcrowded camps in Bangladesh, where they are not allowed to work and rely almost entirely on meager food aid to survive.
Since the beginning of the year, the RSO has been challenging the larger and more established ARSA for control of the camps, which has been accompanied by a crackdown by Bangladeshi security forces against the ARSA.
Violence is the order of the day in refugee camps. Police say more than 60 Rohingya, including women and children, have been killed in clashes at camps in Bangladesh this year.
The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said on Sunday it was “concerned about the continued deterioration of security conditions in the camps”.
Malnutrition is widespread there too, according to the United Nations food agency, whose funding deficit has forced it to cut aid rations by a third this year.
The Rohingya who remain in Burma face severe persecution from authorities, who deny them citizenship and access to health care.
Since mid-November, more than 1,000 members of this minority have fled their camps in Bangladesh to reach Aceh province by sea, marking the largest migration of Rohingyas towards Indonesia since 2015, according to UNHCR.
Still, the UNHCR estimates that nearly 350 Rohingya died or went missing last year attempting these crossings.