58 Myanmar border guards take refuge in Bangladesh

At least 58 soldiers of Myanmar’s paramilitary Border Guard Police (BGP) have taken refuge in Bangladesh, fleeing their outposts amid reports of heavy gunfights between the government troops and the rebels in the junta-run country.

"Fifty-eight BGP personnel took shelter in Bangladesh throughout the day [Sunday] since the predawn hours. Fourteen of them crossed the border with bullet wounds and are being treated at different hospitals, including health facilities in Rohingya camps,” said an official familiar with the development.

He added that the paramilitary soldiers were kept under their counterparts Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) custody in Cox’s Bazar, while the weapons they carried with them were deposited with the BGB.

The official said many of the soldiers came to Bangladeshi territory in combat uniforms and with weapons, while others were in their plainclothes, leaving their arms back home.

BSS obtained the photograph of the last BGP soldier who crossed the border in barefoot and plainclothes carrying his rifle while the 14 others were in their combat uniform.

“The BGB informed the development to their Myanmar counterparts,” said the official, preferring anonymity.

Dhaka, meanwhile, expressed concerns as the skirmishes on its borders with Myanmar were affecting Bangladesh's frontlines, with Road Transport Minister and Awami League General Secretary Obaidul Quader seeking Chinese intervention to deescalate the conflict in view of Beijing’s close contacts with Burmese authorities.

“The internal war is their (Myanmar’s) domestic concern. But when the sound of gunfights is heard on the border, it naturally creates panic in the public mind. We, therefore, expected Beijing’s intervention,” Quader told newsmen after his meeting with the Chinese envoy.

Officials earlier said 14 BGP personnel crossed the border in predawn hours through the Ghumdhum border, while a BGB spokesman in Dhaka thereafter asked journalists to await a media briefing on the development, but no official briefing was made until the evening.

The district administration of Bandarban, where the troubled frontier is located, closed five schools for security reasons, fearing mortar shells or stray bullets entering Bangladeshi territory as gunfights are underway on the other side of the border.

BGB asked local residents to stay indoors or move cautiously for safety while the skirmishes in the southern and northern parts of Tombru, also known by the same name in Myanmar, appeared to be the fiercest so far. Tombru is located in the Ghumdhum union of the Naikhongchhari upazila of Bandarban.

Officials said reports from other sides of the border suggested army helicopters were strafing rebel fighters, escalating concerns about massive casualties.

Residents in frontier villages, including local Union Parishad members, said sounds of gunfights on the Myanmar side of the border on Saturday night and Sunday panicked residents in villages in the frontier.

A BSS reporter said the reported skirmishes between the government troops and the rebel Arakan Army frightened residents in several frontier Bangladesh villages as several mortar shells and bullets landed inside Bangladesh in the past several days, though no casualties were reported.

“In two such latest incidents on Saturday night, a bullet smashed the windshield of a battery-run three-wheeler and a mortar shell hit a village house in the Tombru area of the Ghumdhum border, but no one was wounded,” a member of the local union council, the lowest local government tier, told reporters.

Bangladesh earlier ordered an extra security vigil on the border with Myanmar in view of the gunfights between the Myanmar military and the insurgent Arakan Army, which is active in the bordering Rakhine region of the country.

International media reports suggest several more insurgent groups, some forming alliances among them, are confronting the government army in several parts of Myanmar.

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

Bangladesh won praise for handling 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.