Southeast Asian states turned away Rohingya refugee boats during Ramadan 2020.

Evidence

In May 2020, three wooden boats carrying hundreds of Rohingya refugees floated between the Bay of Bengal and the Andaman Sea. The refugees floated there, back and forth with the winds, during the holy month of Ramadan. Their numbers shrank after they were turned away from port after port, with scores of children, elders, and others meeting death as the boats drifted. Those boats, for tens of thousands, would become hearses for the departed. And for those still living, or barely alive, vessels where death and breath blurred into a morbid whole. For the Rohingya, one of the “world’s most persecuted ethnic minorities,” the tides of genocide seem to rise higher as time passes. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 677