Malaysia starts sending thousands of refugees back to Myanmar

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1:14Hello and welcome to NewsHour from the BBC World Service. Coming to you live from London, I'm Rajini Vaidyanathan. In about 30 minutes from now, we'll hear about the attack by more than 100 Israeli settlers on a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank. We'll speak to our correspondent in the region. But first, they've been described by the UN as the most persecuted minority in the world. Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, one of Southeast Asia's most repressive nations, have faced years on the move. First, fleeing persecution from the military junta, then destitution in camps in neighbouring Bangladesh, to Malaysia, where many built new lives, which they're now being forced to leave.

2:03Today, the Malaysian government began deporting nearly 1 ,500 refugees as part of a repatriation programme, which could see as many as 5 ,000 returned. The United Nations is concerned, so are human rights groups, who fear that people will be sent back to the very regime they fled in 2017. Back then, the Myanmar military and police began a brutal crackdown on Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State, forcing them from their villages, as the BBC's Southeast Asia correspondent Jonathan Head reported back then. We've just arrived at this village, and as you can see from these fires, they've only just been lit.

2:44In fact, we bumped into the people who almost certainly lit them, carrying machetes, not wanting to talk, though one did admit, yes, they'd set these buildings alight, with the help of the police, the ethnic Rakhine. This was a Muslim village. Now, the government has claimed that all of the village destruction is at the hands of Muslim militants and Rohingya inhabitants. What we've seen here tells us a very different story, a story of ethnic cleansing, of driving Muslims out of this part of Myanmar. We still don't know the fate of the people who once lived here. They may be in Bangladesh. Well, it was in Bangladesh that around a million still live in camps near Cox's Bazaar when they crossed the border.

3:28I've been to those camps. Conditions are basic. Tiny huts with no natural light or ventilation, limited food rations and a stench in the air as sanitation is so poor. Well, the situation was so dire that tens of thousands used smugglers to go to Malaysia to get a fresh start. In a moment, we'll hear from one such refugee. But tensions between asylum seekers and the local population have grown in Malaysia, according to the government, which has now struck a deal with Myanmar's military rulers to send thousands of them back. Well, Jonathan Head, who we heard from earlier, joined me from Bangkok to explain more about the decision and the plans behind it.

4:04Well, they were announced by the Malaysian prime minister Anwar Ibrahim in the wake of a big hostile social media campaign that went viral in June and July of this year against Rohingya. There was a huge wave of public hostility, a change.org petition, more than 400 ,000 people signed it saying Rohingya should be chased out of the country before that was taken down. And the prime minister is responding to that. And he said, we need to negotiate with the military backed government in Malaysia. Malaysia doesn't recognize that government. He said we must negotiate. He's invited Myanmar's military ruler, Minon Line, to come to Malaysia.

4:42It's a big concession in order to negotiate it. And he said we need to start having an orderly return of these huge numbers of Myanmar and Rohingya people who've come to Malaysia. And this repatriation, which is being made very public, although it's not transparent, no independent agencies have been able to meet these returnees. But it's being made public to make a statement. We are now starting to send these people back. So it's the start of a repatriation process that Prime Minister Anwar says will continue to reduce the number of Myanmar asylum seekers, migrant workers and refugees who are living in Malaysia.

5:20And in some sense, a change of heart from the Malaysian government, because, of course, and we played some of your archive from 2017 of that mass exodus of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar into Bangladesh. Well, when some of those first went to Malaysia, they were welcomed, weren't they? Not exactly welcomed, because officially they were coming. They were all coming in without documents. The Malaysian Coast Guard and Navy tried to sort of block them from landing, but they always found ways through. A lot of them came overland through Thailand. There was a huge amount of trafficking. Lots of people were being kept in camps.

5:54It was a pretty brutal business. But once they got to Malaysia, there was official sympathy for them. There was a sense of Muslim solidarity, and that's felt in other Muslim neighbours like Indonesia as well. And they fitted in into Malay communities where they often did the most basic jobs, actually fulfilled an economic need and were able, because they're fellow Muslims, to fit in pretty easily. But the mood has really changed. It started during Covid. There was a lot of fear and panic in Malaysia. It was a very hard hit and people started blaming the Rohingyas. But I think as the Rohingya community has grown, particularly for lower income Malaysians, they're now being seen as a threat, as people who take their jobs, who compete for state resources.

6:40Remember, ethnic Malays in Malaysia generally at the bottom of the economic pile and are used to having the state look after them and support them. And they don't want these large numbers of income as sort of being a drain on that. And social media has played a very big part in this. But also Malaysian politics has become extremely fragmented ever since the monopoly on power of the old governing party, Amna, was broken eight years ago. And you've now got these unstable coalitions of different parties, some of them traditional adversaries, and they're all competing for public sentiment. And in that, there's this wave of hostility against Rohingyas and this demand that something must be done about immigrants, something we see in other countries as well.

7:23And it is almost a sea change in the mood in Malaysia towards Rohingyas, who are now seen as a problem rather than as victims who need help. And Jonathan, I've been speaking to one Rohingya man who left Myanmar for the camps in Bangladesh and then in 2020 made that risky journey to Malaysia in search of more opportunities. And let's have a listen to that interview. He began by describing that night that he fled Myanmar in 2017. It was happened at midnight. I was sleeping with my parents. Suddenly, we were hearing gunfire. We woke up and then we were seeing military shooting guns into our village and they were coming to us.

8:13And then after a few days, we had to leave our home. We had to leave our villages. Why? Because of the military and most of the Buddhists, they were targeted to kill, to burn our villages, our houses. I even saw children, so they were throwing the children into burning fire. And some elderly people, they couldn't leave the home. They also were in the burning fire. So then when we were crossing the border into Bangladesh, I saw lots of people dying in the water, you know, in the sea. So people were drowning as they crossed over the river as well as they were fleeing Myanmar. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were fleeing Myanmar.

9:03There were also the border guard, BGB, border guard police and military. They were still targeting the people, shooting the gun directly at us. Most of the people died. And how were your family? You were travelling in a group of people with your family. How did you all manage to get across the border safely with guns being pointed at you and, as you say, people being chased? One of our uncles took us away from the group. He took us into another border and then we could safely cross the border. So many of us remember those very striking images of August 2017, when there was that mass exodus of Rohingya, including, of course, your family crossing from Myanmar into Bangladesh.

9:51The next chapter in that story is that you ended up in the camps in Cox's Bazaar, which have now grown into one of the world's largest refugee camps. Just tell us about the conditions for you there and how long you were there until you then went to Malaysia. I was very young and very small. At the time, I was 12. 12 years old. So old enough to remember what was happening around you, but of course, not an adult. I used to feel like I was in the prison. You know why? In Myanmar, we could at least go outside, like out of our house, spend some more time freely, you know. But in the camp, it's totally like in the prison.

10:36I told to one of my aunties, why are we here? We better go back to Myanmar. Even though the Myanmar military went to kill us, I was in the camp until 2020. So you were in the camps for three years. How did you end up then leaving the camps? They're very restrictive in terms of movement. So how did you get to leave and go to Malaysia? What did your family have to do? I didn't come by boat. First I had to go to Myanmar, then Myanmar to Thailand. So Thailand to Malaysia. And what's life like in Malaysia? Why are you still there? I can say it's good for me. In 2024, I got admission in university in Malaysia.

11:22I'm able to fulfil myself. We have to live like a refugee and some people only hate us and they don't like us. So for me in Malaysia, my daily life is OK and I'm just living, I'm just studying, I'm just working. And so now what we're seeing in the news is that the Malaysian government has begun to repatriate around 5 ,000 asylum seekers to send them back to Myanmar. have you been put on any list or are you worried that you might be on the next wave of people who could be asked to go back? I have never been targeted by any Malaysian department but I have been worried especially they are targeting our Rohingya community.

12:13If Malaysia went to send back to Myanmar, the Rohingya people, they have to work with Myanmar concerning the way we have been demanding safety, dignity. It's not safe for us. Myanmar is actually the country we can call silent killer, silent killer. Jonathan, I just wanted to get your thoughts on that interview. I mean, what it tells us is a story of people who are displaced on a number of occasions. and face displacement again? Yeah, I mean, it's not for nothing they're called the most persecuted people on the planet. I mean, they have no home of their own. They're not accepted in Myanmar where they've lived.

12:58The conditions, as we know, in the camps in Cox's Bazaar are appalling. Obviously, the UN funding has collapsed. That's made it even tougher. But they're ridden with organised gangs and crime, with drug running, with violence. There's kidnapping for forced conscription into get sucked back into the civil war in Rakhine. It's no wonder people are willing to take terrible risks to flee. And the only country where they've really been able to make a living is Malaysia. And of course, because there are so many Rohingyas there, that provides networks that helps those who are freshly arrived. Some used to go to Indonesia for a while when they found it too difficult to get to Malaysia, but they're no longer welcome there either.

13:40In fact, they're not welcome anywhere. So the idea that Malaysia is now shutting the door on Rohingya's, which is what government statements would lead us to believe, that they no longer want Rohingya's there, is a huge blow for a people who quite literally have nowhere else to go. That's the BBC Southeast Asia correspondent Jonathan Head speaking to me earlier from Bangkok.

14:11Coming up on NewsHour, we hear from the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who spent 16 months in a Russian prison. He's been talking about the moment he was arrested. So I'm sitting with a source in a restaurant and a group of about half dozen men march in. But as they turned and approached the table, I see that they're wearing balaclavas. And at that moment, they told me that I was under arrest by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation. And it's at that moment that you realise immediately that something's really serious. I'll bring you that interview in about half an hour from now.

14:44Some of the other headlines we're watching this hour. And Israel's military says more than 100 settlers have attacked a village in the occupied West Bank where a Palestinian family had been trying to return home. Spain's government says it will ban evictions until 2030 as it tries to tackle a housing crisis which has caused widespread public anger. More on those stories coming up.

15:11This is Rajini Vaidyanarvan with NewsHour, coming to you live from the BBC. It's been just over a month since those devastating floods and landslides swept through the Nepal-Tibet border, killing at least 1 ,400 people, with around 6 ,000 still missing. And thousands of homes were wiped out, with local infrastructure also destroyed. Nepal is one of the most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. And as it tries to rebuild slowly, there are stark warnings about the impact of climate change on the Himalayas, as glaciers melt and the landscape becomes increasingly unstable. Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent reports from a thousand-year-old Nepali village, which now faces an existential threat from a melting glacier.

16:02In a thousand-year-old Buddhist monastery in the remote village of Halji, high in the Himalayas, a monk recites prayers to protect the community. It takes hours and is done daily. And in recent years, those prayers have been needed.

16:20There's three things that could happen at any time. First, there are these massive boulders which you see there in the valley. They fall from this side of the mountain and could hit the village at any time. Then over there to the south, there's been recent landslides just beyond the school in the Kanali River. If one comes down and blocks the river, it will flood the valley. And three, there is the threat from these glacial lakes in the mountains that might cause a flood at any time. So to live here is, in a way, to live in a state of constant fear. Paljo is the head man of Halji, a village of 70 stone houses at the mouth of a green valley.

17:01He gazes at the river that plunges down from 5 ,000 metre peaks and flows right past the village. High above, glaciers have melted, creating glacial lakes. When they burst, they can send a torrent of water and rock down the river valley. In 2011, parts of the village were swept away, and last year a neighbouring community got hit. They've seen the footage of the recent devastating floods in central Nepal and know something similar could happen here. Given all these dangers, why do you stay? What keeps you in Hauji? One is that we don't have the financial resources to move. And the second is the monastery.

17:41We rely on it. Because we don't get a lot of support from the state around here, if people get sick, need help, or even when there is a natural disaster, people just go and pray at the monastery. We believe that will save us. If you look at those mountain corridors, Halji or Limi Valley, none of them are safe now. Arun Shrestha is one of Nepal's top glaciologists. He says that as temperatures rise, the Himalayan landscape is changing and becoming more unstable. The recent Rasuwa floods, which killed thousands, are an example of what can happen. And it's not an isolated incident. Because of rapid melting, reduced cryosphere can also create disasters like glacier lake outburst flood, rock ice collapse, drops, avalanches of ice and snow, landslides.

18:34The frequency, magnitude of hazards are increasing. It's not just raswa, it's almost everywhere. As a result, the government in Nepal says it wants reparations for the impacts of climate change. Tashi Lazom is a 26-year-old climate activist who's now a prominent member of the governing party in Nepal. And she's from Halji. Now the floods are becoming recurring issues in the Himalayas, and now people distrust the landscape that they love so much. You know, you never know when you're going to get hit. Your very existence, your history, your identity, everything that you know of gets gone just like that, like you never exist.

19:14Climate crisis in a lot of countries is a thing of the future, but here in Nepal it is a thing of now. It is happening, it is reality, and it's a national emergency.

19:29Back in Hauji, the villagers know the dangers, but to leave is not just to give up a house. They're among the last speakers of the Limi K language, an archaic form of Tibetan. For some, like 65-year-old Chiring, leaving means abandoning a faith and a culture they've protected for 1 ,000 years.

19:54we've all been talking about the floods we grandmothers have decided that we will never leave so the only thing we can do is to try and be a better person than we were yesterday and pray at the monastery and do our rituals but we know that one day there will be a big flood a big landslide and that is how it will end for us

20:22That's Antonia Bollenbrook-Kent. You can hear more of her documentary Nepal in the Shadow of a Glacier on Assignment and the documentary podcast from the BBC World Service.

20:38At just 11 years old, Bodhana Sivanandan has made history by becoming the youngest ever female chess grandmaster. She secured that title as she represented England at the Chess Olympiad in Uzbekistan. Well, my colleague, NewsHour's Rebecca Kesby, spoke to her just as she landed in London, fresh from her win, as she was heading home in a taxi. So how does it feel to secure one of the highest honours in chess? I didn't really know that I got my final norm and I didn't realise I was the youngest to do so either. But I wanted to get there at some point at least. So, yeah, I was happy and now I feel like it's kind of sunk in a bit.

21:20What's extraordinary is, well, obviously that you're only 11, but also that you got into chess during Covid. Is that true? Tell us the story. Yeah, I got into chess during Covid because one of my dad's friends was going back to India and he had a few books and things to give to charity, but because everything was closed at the time, He gave all of that stuff to us and inside one of the bags I found a chess board and I really liked how the pieces looked, especially the knight and the queen. I wanted to use them as toys outside of chess. But then my dad told me that the next person who got the board wouldn't be able to play chess properly.

22:01So instead he taught me the basics and how to play and then I liked it. So from there I kept on playing. Wow, so you kind of got hooked at that point. and I guess it's one thing to be quite good at it and another to become an expert. How did you manage that? I think I kind of just kept going to tournaments and I enjoyed it as well. I had to learn a lot more about the game and still a lot more to learn now. And then I learned about concepts and things like that and then I kind of just searched up videos on YouTube and just found them and saw what I liked and didn't really mind too much about what I was watching.

22:43I just enjoyed it. And when you started getting really good, how challenging was it to find people to play against who were good enough to keep up with you? It's harder to find people, like, over the board, but now because there's, like, technology and online, you can also play online a bit. So, Badana, because of your tender age, just 11 years old, and your new brilliant success, there's quite a lot of media interest in you I think you're a bit of a star how are you going to manage that I mean I try and just kind of focus on the chess and then if I do good then obviously the media comes as well just taking it in your stride yeah well now what's your next challenge going to be?

23:32How do you top becoming the youngest ever woman grandmaster? I'm not sure what exactly is next or what. I don't think I have like a set aim. I just want to like keep playing tournaments and enjoying chess and see how far I can go. Impressive there. Just 11 years old, Badana Sivanandan speaking to my colleague Rebecca Kesby.

24:12It felt like everything I believed in was suddenly collapsing. This is the story of an Islamic boarding school in Indonesia with a dark secret. Of the school's head teacher. This was someone I respected above anyone else. and the investigation led by students he's trying to silence. If this is leaked to the media, I'll be destroyed. This is World of Secrets, catching my teacher. Listen on BBC.com, the BBC app or wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

24:47Welcome back to NewsHour. Let's turn now to the war in Ukraine, where Russian missile and drone attacks continue to disrupt life across the country with the capital Kyiv coming under heavy attack once again in the early hours of the day. Among that destruction is the impact the war is having on children and their education, with schooling often forced underground to bunkers or carried out remotely. To get a better understanding of that situation, this week we'll be getting a regular diary from one teacher, Lisa Tachenko. She's in the southern town of Zatoka. Let's have a listen to her diary today.

25:23Hello everyone, my name is Elisa Tkachenko. I am recording this voice message from a small town in the south of Ukraine called Zatoka. I'm a teacher and I work in two worlds. Online at the charity called Svitlo School and offline teaching biology at our local school in Zatoka. We are all just trying to make the kids' lives during the war feel at least a little bit normal. There are, of course, relatively quiet days when we can almost forget about the constant threat, at least for a moment. But it's really hard to explain how deeply, almost on the molecular level, forgive my biology, the war has come into the lives and education of our children.