370,000 Rohingya refugees have fled crisis
Many arriving in Bangladesh tell stories of the horrors they’ve witnessed in Burma
DHAKA, BANGLADESH— The number of Rohingya refugees fleeing a military crackdown in Burma has now topped 370,000, a crisis that the United Nations human rights chief called “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”
Hundreds of thousands of the longpersecuted ethnic minority continued to stream into Bangladesh via land and rickety boats this week, arriving exhausted, dehydrated and recounting tales of nightmarish horrors at the hands of the Burma military, including friends and neighbours shot dead and homes torched before their eyes.
“It seems they wanted us to leave the country,” said Nurjahan, an elderly Rohingya woman who escaped her burning village 10 days ago and ended up camped by the side of the road, unsure of where to go.
Speaking in Geneva on Tuesday, the International Organization for Migration put the number fleeing Burma at 370,000 but admitted that it could go much higher.
“Clearly the estimates have been bypassed several times over,” spokesperson Leonard Doyle said. “I’m reluctant to give a number but obviously people fear that it could go much higher.”
As refugees continue to inundate the area, ferry operators are charging about $122 for a river crossing — far out of the reach of many of them.
Relief efforts have been rapidly overwhelmed, with stocks of food, temporary shelter kits and other supplies running low. Prices of vegetables, bamboo and plastic sheeting used to make shelters are soaring.
With camps full, many of the Rohingya refugees like Nurjahan have simply sat down on the roadside.
On Tuesday, Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina visited the camps in the Cox’s Bazar area of the country, which has sheltered thousands of the stateless Rohingya refugees since an exodus in the 1990s. Her foreign minister has accused Burma of committing “genocide.”
International condemnation of Burma’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, has intensified, along with repeated calls for her Nobel Peace Prize, which she won in 1991 as a result for her long fight democracy in Myanmar, to be rescinded — something the Nobel committee has said will not happen.
On Monday, the White House issued a statement condemning the attacks and ensuing violence, saying that it was “deeply troubled” by the ongoing crisis and “alarmed” by “allegations of human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings, burning of villages, massacres, and rape, by security forces and by civilians acting with these forces’ consent.”
Burma’s more than one million Rohingya Muslims are essentially stateless and the government considers them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
The exodus began Aug. 25 after an insurgent group of Rohingya militants called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked dozens of police outposts as well as an army camp, killing 12 and igniting days of violent retribution.
In addition to torching hundreds of villages and killing civilians, Amnesty International and other human rights groups have accused the Burma military of planting landmines at the border, based on the wounds suffered by some of those escaping.