But after a crackdown on the international smuggling routes that once offered a dangerous — but viable — escape route, she now sees no way out.

“We have no idea how many years we will have to live like this,” the 40-year-old widow told AFP inside the tiny bamboo hut she shares with her son, tugging nervously at her purple headscarf.

“Our lives are worse than animals… we are human only in name.”

Deadly sectarian riots in 2012 drove more than 120,000 Rohingya into the camps in Rakhine State, where they live in ramshackle homes and are deprived of adequate food, schools and doctors.

For years human traffickers cashed in on the group’s desperation, ferrying thousands of Rohingya across the Andaman Sea to countries like Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.

The journeys were defined by danger: from rickety boats on high seas to abuse and even death at the hands of the gangs, who held many victims for ransom in jungle camps on the Thai-Malaysia border.

That route was shuttered by Thailand’s junta in 2015 and few boats have left the camps since, according to residents, aid workers and migration experts.

The move may have spared Hla Hla Sein death at sea or abuse at the hands of smugglers, but it also cut off a way out of a painful limbo.

While a Bangkok court rules Wednesday on the fate of more than 100 people arrested for running the trafficking network, she will spend another day distributing food rations in the camp.

‘Ready to die’

Hla Hla Sein and her son had tried to escape to Malaysia before the crackdown, but their boat was so overcrowded it started to sink a few hours into the journey, forcing the captain to turn back.

It was only after they returned to shore that she found out the smugglers had planned to sell them as slaves at their destination.

“I was ready to die at sea as we have nothing in this country,” she said. “Our children cannot get education, even I cannot work. I thought dying would be better.”

Buddhist-majority Myanmar has long been chastised for its treatment of the Rohingya, a group of more than a million Muslims whose rights and freedoms have been successively stripped away since the early 1980s.

Over the past five years almost 170,000 have fled the country, according to the UN’s refugee agency, leaving many families split across borders.

“It’s impossible to go to Malaysia by boat nowadays,” said a Rohingya camp leader, asking not to be named. “We do not want people to die at sea.”

Recently, a new outburst of violence in northern Rakhine pushed more than 70,000 Rohingyas across Myanmar’s northwestern border to Bangladesh.

But Bangladesh plays an unwilling host to the minority and traffickers there are believed to now be smuggling Rohingya by road and air as far afield as Saudi Arabia, India, Nepal and Pakistan.

For those left behind in Myanmar’s camps, escape is no longer an option.

“We are suffering,” said Hla Hla Sein. “We are not supposed to stay like this forever.”

Myanmar’s Martyr’s Day is observed on July 19 to commemorate country’s nine independence heroes, including General Aung San, who was assassinated on July 19, 1947.

Attending the ceremony included Myanmar military commander-in-chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, Phyu Phyu Thin, member of House of Representatives and HIV/AIDS activist, Chief Justice Tun Tun Oo, Chairman of the Lower House of Parliament Win Myint, Vice President Myint Swe, Chairman of the Upper House of the Parliament Mann Win Khaing Than and Military Chief Senior General Min Aung Hlaing.

During the ceremony, Myanmar guards of honour blow bugles in tribute to the late General Aung San and other leaders.

The Chinese-made Shaanxi Y8 military aircraft plunged into the Andaman Sea during a routine flight from the southern city of Myeik to the commercial hub, Yangon.

Navy ships and fishing boats battled strong monsoon swells in the following days to pull scores of bodies from the waves, most of them the wives and children of servicemen.

Recordings from the black box showed the plane went into a nose dive after icing built up on the wings and a sudden increase in crosswinds caused the engine to stall, state media said.

The plane lost contact with air traffic control roughly half an hour after takeoff from Myeik while flying at over 18,000 feet (5,486 metres), according to previous military statements.

“The accident occurred due to loss of control after experiencing adverse weather that caused the plane to stall… resulting in a nose dive,” state media said.

Investigators concluded the crash was “not from any act of sabotage, explosion or engine failure,” it added.

It is monsoon season in Myanmar but there were no reports of major stormy weather in the area at the time.

Gerry Soejatman, an independent aviation expert based in Jakarta, said storms high up in the atmosphere that are not visible from the ground can cause ice to form on wings or in engine intakes.

But he added that normally pilots would use a weather radar to avoid such clouds.

“If it is storm clouds, this begs the question, why did they fly into it?” he told AFP.

The black box data were analysed by the investigators from Myanmar and Australia, which has steered the hunt for wreckage from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

Its last known location before it went missing in March 2014 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board was several hundred miles north of where the Myanmar military plane crashed.

The accident is the latest long line of crashes among the military’s fleet.

A five-strong crew died when an air force plane burst into flames soon after taking off from the capital Naypyidaw in February last year.

Three army officers were also killed in June when their Mi-2 helicopter crashed into a hillside and burst into flames in south-central Bago.

A Republican drive in the Senate to come up with a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act fell apart Monday when two more Republican senators came out against their party’s legislation.

That made for a total of four holdouts — the party has 52 seats in the 100-member legislature — and effectively doomed the legislation.

The collapse is a stinging blow to Trump and Republicans who have vowed for seven years that they would quickly dump former president Barack Obama’s signature health care reform as soon as they could.

“We were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans. Most Republicans were loyal, terrific and worked really hard. We will return!” Trump said in a tweet Tuesday morning.

“As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan. Stay tuned!,” he added.

Actually, Trump has consistently advocated repealing and replacing Obamacare at the same time, rather than doing it in stages, and has said it could be done quickly.

The bodies were found lying near each other in the Diablerets massif in southern Switzerland, along with backpacks, a bottle, a book and a watch, according to Le Matin daily.

The head of the Glacier 3000 ski resort, Bernard Tschannen, told Le Matin that the bodies were found last Thursday.

“It was a man and a woman wearing clothes from the last (world) war”, Tschannen was quoted as saying. “The ice preserved them perfectly and their belongings were intact”.

Tschannen told the paper that the couple had likely fallen into a crevasse.

A DNA search has been planned to definitively establish their identities, but Le Matin quoted Marceline Dumoulin as saying she believed the remains were of her parents, who went missing on August 15, 1942.

Marcelin Dumoulin, a 40-year-old shoemaker at the time, and his wife Francine, a schoolteacher aged 37, had left their village of Chandolin to graze their cattle in the mountainside.

Searches were carried out for more than two months but ultimately the seven orphans — five boys and two girls — were placed in foster homes.

“We spent our whole lives searching for them, without stopping. We never thought we’d be able to give them the funeral they deserved,” Marceline Dumoulin, who was four when her parents went missing, told Le Matin.

The Regensburger Domspatzen (“Cathedral Sparrows”), a 1,000-year-old cathedral choir in Bavaria, was in 2010 dragged into the massive sexual abuse scandal plaguing the Catholic Church in recent years.

Many victims remembered their time in the choir school as “the worst time of their lives, marked by fear, violence and helplessness”, said lawyer Ulrich Weber, who was commissioned by the diocese to look into the cases.

Presenting his final report on abuses between 1945 and the early 1990s, Weber said he had uncovered 67 cases of sexual abuse and 500 cases of other physical violence, with some former singers having fallen victim to both.

This more than doubled the 231 reported abuse cases he had uncovered through interviews by January 2016, when he said victims had spoken of rape, sexual assaults, severe beatings and food deprivation.

Weber pointed to a “culture of silence” and placed part of the blame for the situation on the school’s former choir master Georg Ratzinger, the elder brother of former pope Benedict.

As head of the choir from 1964 to 1994, Georg Ratzinger could be “blamed for looking the other way and failing to intervene”, said Weber.

Georg Ratzinger, 93, has denied knowledge and said that the alleged sexual abuse was “never discussed” while he ran the choir.

Weber said the attacks were concentrated in the primary section of the boarding school in the town of Regensburg.

He said that 49 alleged perpetrators had been identified, but that they were not expected to face criminal charges as the alleged crimes took place too long ago.

The victims are now expected to receive 20,000 euros ($23,000) each in compensation.

The German scandal is one of several to have rocked the Catholic Church in recent years, notably in Ireland where one priest admitted sexually abusing more than 100 children.

Several German institutions have also been engulfed by the scandal, including an elite Jesuit school in Berlin which had admitted to systematic sexual abuse of pupils by two priests in the 1970s and 1980s.

About a dozen wildfires had broken out late Sunday in the villages surrounding Split, a popular tourist destination, but firefighters managed to control the blaze on the outskirts of Croatia’s second largest city.

Late Monday the fire spread to the suburbs of Split where a shopping centre had to be evacuated and several cars were burned.

The city waste dump caught fire, while the town was covered with thick black smoke, but the blaze was put under control overnight.

“It seems that the worst is behind us … Split has been saved,” mayor Andro Krstulovic Opara told HRT state-run television.

Local media reports however said some parts of Split were without electricity or water on Tuesday as Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic arrived to take stock of the situation.

According to initial estimates some 4,500 hectares (11,120 acres) of land, mostly pine forests, bushes and olive groves, were destroyed. Houses were burned but there were no casualties.

In neighbouring Montenegro, where the forest fires forced the evacuation of more than a hundred campers on the Lustica peninsula, the situation was slightly better Tuesday.

Fires however were still active in several municipalities further inland but were all under control, an interior ministry statement said.

The cause of the fires in the two countries at the height of the summer tourist season is still not known.

In Italy, authorities said a blaze in a pine forest at a popular park outside Rome, now under control, was deliberately set and that a suspect has been arrested.

But fires continue burn in southern Italy in parts of the Calabria region and in the outskirts of Naples where one person died on Monday after falling off his roof where he went to look at how the forest fire was progressing not far from his home.

Winds, high temperatures and dry conditions prompted fires to break out the past several days in southern France and the Mediterranean island of Corsica.

More than 450 firefighters were still battling a forest fire at Castagniera, north of Nice, which has destroyed some 100 hectares but appears not to be spreading further, authorities said.

On Monday fire swept through around 200 hectares of scrubland near Bonifacio in southern Corsica.

On Europe’s Atlantic coast nearly 1,400 firefighters supported by water-bombing planes and helicopters have battled three major blazes in northern Portugal since Sunday.

Civil protection authorities say firefighters have managed to mostly bring the fires under control and the weather on Tuesday was cooperating as temperatures dropped from 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) to 30 C.

Last month Portugal battled a giant fire in the central region that raged for five days, killing 64 people and injuring more than 250, with many trapped in their cars by the flames.

Following the tragedy, experts said Portugal is likely to see more massive forest fires because the country is highly exposed to global warming’s climate-altering impacts.

Last week foreign media were given partial access to the isolated wedge of the northwestern state for the first time since security forces launched a months-long operation to root out militants who attacked border police posts.

The UN wants to establish if that campaign amounted to ethnic cleansing after accounts of mass rape, killing and arson emerged from Rohingya who fled to neighbouring Bangladesh.

For those left behind in the rattan-walled frontier villages the violence and insecurity is unrelenting, locals told reporters, under the watch of Myanmar border forces who steered the visit.

“Our husbands are on the run. They left us because they are afraid of border guard police,” one Rohingya woman told AFP, requesting anonymity for safety reasons.

“They burned our house. We have no home and nothing to eat. Our husbands are hiding somewhere.”

The large-scale military operation has abated but the area remains in lockdown, with sporadic killings by military patrols still intent on rooting out “terrorists”.

The UN believes hundreds may have died in what may be the bloodiest chapter of Buddhist-majority Myanmar’s years-long persecution of the Rohingya Muslims.

The minority are widely reviled as illegal migrants from Bangladesh, although many Rohingya families say their ancestors have lived in the area for generations.

Now a new peril has emerged: scores of local men have been abducted and murdered by unknown gangs of knife-wielding men, with state media reporting they are dressed in black and often wearing masks.

Authorities say the assassins are targeting leaders from the Muslim minority and anyone perceived to be a state collaborator. They blame Rohingya militants for the murders.

International Crisis Group analyst Richard Horsey says some 60 people may have been targeted in a “systematic” campaign “to take out Muslims who are in some way connected to, or perceived to be connected to, authorities”.

Mysterious killings

In an area stained by mistrust and rumour it is unclear who is behind the attacks — and the fear is intensifying in the face of almost daily reports of killings.

Earlier this month unidentified men dragged father-of-six Atthu Suwan from the bed he was sharing with his wife in Maung Hnama village.

They stabbed the 44-year-old, who occasionally worked as a translator for local officials, and carried his body into the darkness, his family and friends told reporters on the government-run press trip.

“I haven’t even been able to eat since they took my son,” his elderly mother Moeyeyan Khatu said, her face etched with sadness.

On Monday state media reported his body had been found abandoned in a nearby creek.

“We are fearful it (the killings) will happen again,” his neighbour, 67-year-old Hanumyar, told AFP.

The government blames the attacks on the self-styled Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a newly formed Rohingya militant group.

The group denies any involvment, instead accusing the military in statements issued through an unverified Twitter account.

They do however claim the raids on police border posts last October.

The raids sparked the months-long “clearance operation” by the military which sent more than 70,000 fleeing into Bangladesh.

Rohingya escapees shared harrowing accounts of security officers  slaughtering babies, burning people alive and gang-raping women — abuses UN investigators said may amount to crimes against humanity.

The army denies the claims and says its response was proportionate in the face of terrorist interlopers.

But the crackdown sparked global opprobrium and the UN has commissioned a fact-finding mission to probe the violence.

Rock and a hard place

Myanmar has refused to cooperate with the probe, denying the investigators visas.

Unable to leave because of travel restrictions and abject poverty, Rohingya villagers say they are trapped between an oppressive state and vengeful militants.

Adding to the climate of fear, death threats and fatwas (Islamic religious rulings) have circulated on social media aimed at anyone who dares to stand against the militants, according to several analysts and Rohingya sources.

On the media visit, officials sought to play down the military’s campaign — and the murders.

Police Brigadier General San Lwin, chief of Rakhine’s state police, said some of the killings might relate to “personal grudges” and not militancy.

But locals say they are now frightened to take official posts in case they too become targets.

A 35-year-old Muslim man, recently appointed as a household head in Tinmay village, said his predecessor was killed in April after talking to local reporters.

“I do not sleep at home,” he added, requesting anonymity. “I sleep at a police outpost with security.”//AFP

Duterte imposed military rule for 60 days in the Mindanao region, home to 20 million people, on May 23 when gunmen waving black IS flags occupied Marawi city, triggering clashes that have killed more than 500 people.

But with scores of militants holding out against government forces, Duterte met with lawmakers late Monday and asked them to extend the law when it lapses on Saturday, spokesman Ernesto Abella said.

The country’s constitution allows the president to impose martial law for up to 60 days, enabling him to “call out the armed forces to prevent or suppress lawless violence, invasion or rebellion”.

Beyond two months, the president can extend it “for a period to be determined by the Congress”.

Duterte’s allies dominate Congress, and House of Representatives Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez said Tuesday he saw no obstacle to approving the president’s request.

In May, Duterte said he had made the move to stamp out an attempt by militants, including foreign fighters, to establish an IS caliphate on Philippine territory.

“He also explained clearly his fear that terrorism might slowly spread throughout Mindanao and eventually the country,” Senator Sherwin Gatchalian, who attended the meeting with Duterte on Monday, told AFP.

Duterte told the legislators 600 buildings had yet to be cleared of bombs or armed men, Senator Joseph Victor Ejercito told AFP.

Security forces have been conducting a US-backed offensive to root out the gunmen, using air strikes and artillery fire.

On Tuesday, US Ambassador to Manila Sung Kim said his government would give the Philippine military two Cessna planes to be used in Marawi.

“We are deeply concerned about the security situation in Marawi,” Kim told ABS-CBN television.

“The Marawi situation is clearly a very difficult situation for the Philippines so we are going to do everything possible to support the (armed forces).”