"During the past year the problems of international refugees have received much coverage in the world press -most of it devoted to the Vietnamese "boat people" arriving on the shores of Malaysia and other Southeast Asian nations. Another refugee movement of almost equal magnitude in the area, however, has received little attention: the 200,000 Muslim refugees from Burma in Bangladesh. Some press coverage appeared in May and June, 1978, when tens of thousands of the Muslim minority community were pouring into Bangladesh from neighboring Burma. And the signing of an agreement between the two governments on July 9th, allowing the refugees to return, merited short articles in many papers. But from then on there was virtually no news for six and a half months until January 26, 1979, when the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva announced to the press that since June 1, 1978, more than 10,000 of the Burmese refugees had died in the Bangladesh camps. Between late March and mid-July, 1978, approximately 200,000 of the estimated 1,400,000 Bengali Muslims (called Rohingyas) living in the state of Arakan in north-western Burma fled into nearby Bangladesh. The roots of this mass exodus can evidently be traced to increased immigration from Bangladesh in recent years into this isolated area somewhat tenuously controlled by the central government of the Union of Burma, and to the apparent growth of a movement for the autonomy or independence of the Arakan among both the Buddhists and the Muslims of the area. While some of the Buddhist community wanted independence for the Arakan state, they were also afraid of absorption into Bangladesh..."