DAMDAMIA (Bangladesh), May 8: Nearly 13,000 Myanmar Muslims who have been living illegally in Bangladesh over the last decade as unlisted refugees are fighting a grim battle against starvation and disease. “We are just waiting for death that will relieve us of all pains,” said Kala Miah, 75.

The refugees, who fled west Myanmar’s Muslim-majority Arakan state to escape alleged military persecution and find work, are living outside two official government refugee camps in the Cox’s Bazar district, 400 kilometres southeast of Dhaka.

Refugees in Damdamia, 80 km from the resort town of Cox’s Bazar, said they had no food except for some rice and wheat handed out by local charities every two or three months, and nothing to drink except rain water.

Three of the refugees have died of hunger in recent months, and hundreds more are suffering from starvation and diarrhoea, fever and skin diseases, they said.

Some 250,000 Rohingyas — as Myanmar Muslims are known — crossed into Bangladesh in early 1992 but most were repatriated by September the same year under supervision of the UN High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR).

Since then there have been little homeward movement while more Rohingyas have trickled in across the porous 320-km Bangladesh-Myanmar border.

More than 20,000 others now live in the two government camps at Kutupalong and Nayapara near Cox’s Bazar. Bangladeshi officials say most of the Rohingyas are economic refugees, and that Myanmar authorities were not keen to take them back.

“The repatriation process has been very slow over last many years though Yangon kept saying they will take the refugees back. But we are being continuously burdened to host the unwelcome guests,” said one official who asked not to be identified.

“The refugees deserve attention and care from both the Bangladesh government and international agencies because no one can deny they are human beings, too,” said Kazi Azizul Huq of the Centre for Development Studies.—Reuters