A perilous journey in search of safety

Burma’s Rohingya Muslims, starving and exhausted, flee latest round of violence

TEKNAF, BANGLADESH— As far as the eye can see, they trudge through treacherously deep mud, across rice paddy fields and past rain-swollen creeks into Bangladesh.

Tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims, fleeing the latest round of violence to engulf their homes in Burma, have been walking for days or handing over their meagre savings to Burmese and Bangladeshi smugglers to escape what they describe as certain death.

Exhausted mothers clutched listless infants. Catatonically terrified children clung to bone-weary fathers. Young children with blank eyes carried even younger siblings.

The Rohingya Muslim ethnic minority from Burma’s western Rakhine state has faced systematic persecution at the hands of the Buddhist majority for decades. The military junta that ruled the nation for decades stripped them of their citizenship. The democratically elected government under the leadership of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Aung San Suu Kyi has looked the other way as they have since been pushed into squalid camps in their own hometowns and villages.

Fresh horror was unleashed on Aug. 25, when fighters of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army attacked government troops and prompted Burma soldiers to retaliate with “clearance operations” they say were aimed at flushing insurgents out from Rohingya villages.

Bangladesh, one of the world’s poorest countries, was already sheltering some 100,000 Rohingya refugees before another 123,000 flooded in after Aug. 25, according to the UN refugee agency’s latest estimate.

With aid groups unable to access violence-ridden areas of Burma, it’s unclear how many are left behind.

Some members of the Bangladeshi Border Guards, moved by the suffering around them, have interpreted the government’s silence about the refugee influx in recent days as approval for letting them in.

“This is a time to show humanity,” one paramilitary soldier said. Officials “haven’t said let them enter. But they haven’t said stop them either.”

K M ASAD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES Nearly 123,000 mostly Rohingya refugees have entered Bangladesh since a fresh upsurge of violence in Burma on Aug. 25, according to the UN.