13 more trafficked Rohingya jailed in Myanmar

13 more trafficked Rohingya jailed in Myanmar

4 underage Rohingya ordered to spend 2 years at training school after charged with illegally entering Yangon

By Kyaw Ye Lynn

YANGON, Myanmar (AA) - A Myanmar court has handed two-year jail sentences to 13 Rohingya Muslims who were charged with illegally entering Yangon in an effort to get to Malaysia utilizing human trafficking rings, according to police Monday.

The Muslim ethnic group has been unable to move freely since a 1982 law removed their citizenship rights and confined them to designated areas, many of them internally displaced persons camps in western Rakhine State.

traffickedOn Monday, a court in North Okalapa Township sentenced the 13 Rohingya men to two years in jail with hard labor while four underage Rohingya were ordered to spend two years at a training school for boys on the outskirts of commercial capital Yangon.

“The judge ordered them to serve the jail sentence in Insein Central Prison in Yangon,” Myo Thu, a local police officer, told Anadolu Agency by phone.

The 17 were among 22 Rohingya arrested by police last month in separate raids in Yangon on human trafficking rings.

Five of them were sentenced Oct. 29 to two years in jail with hard labor by a court in Tarmwe Township of Yangon.

All 22 were charged for “illegal intrusion” according to the Residents of Burma Registration Act of 1949.

The men had traveled from the impoverished state of Rakhine to Yangon, where police said they were being temporarily sheltered before being smuggled to Malaysia.

Each had paid 1.1 million Kyats (more than $850) to human traffickers to smuggle them from Rakhine to Yangon over land through Magway town -- located around 520 kilometers (323 miles) northwest of the former capital.

They were reportedly arrested while awaiting money from their families to pay traffickers extra to smuggle them to Malaysia through Thailand.

Police have said that two suspected traffickers were arrested Oct. 25 in Rakhine, while three others remain at large.

Rohingya have been fleeing Myanmar in droves since mid-2012 after communal violence broke out in Rakhine between ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya -- described by the United Nations as among the most persecuted minority groups worldwide.

The violence left around 57 Muslims and 31 Buddhists dead, some 100,000 people displaced in camps and more than 2,500 houses razed -- most of which belonged to Rohingya.

For years, members of the minority have been using Thailand as a transit point to enter Muslim Malaysia and beyond.

A law passed in Myanmar in 1982 denied Rohingya -- many of whom have lived in Myanmar for generations -- citizenship, making them stateless, removing their freedom of movement, access to education and services, and allowing for arbitrary confiscation of property.

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