Fleeing Rohingya Muslims watch as homes burn

Days after fleeing their village on the Myanmar side of the border fence, a group of Rohingya Muslims watched from just inside Bangladesh as yet another house went up in flames.

“You see this fire today,” said Farid Alam, one of the Rohingya who watched the fire burn from about 500 metres away. “That is my village.”

The villagers said they had escaped days ago, crossing into Bangladesh at the border point of Tumbru and joining thousands of other ethnic Rohingya huddling in the open in the district of Bandarban to escape recent violence in Buddhist-majority Myanmar.

When they crossed the border, they saw land mines that had been newly planted by Myanmar forces, Alam said.

Thousands of Rohingya are continuing to stream across the border, with UN officials and others demanding that Myanmar halt what they describe as a campaign of ethnic cleansing that has driven nearly 400,000 Rohingya to flee in the past three weeks.

That number includes an estimated 240,000 children, UNICEF said in Geneva on Friday.

“We had a big house, we are 10 people in the family, but they burned our home,” Alam said as he watched the other house

burning Friday. “My father was a village doctor, we had a medical store. We had land and cattle, all are gone.”

Ethnic Rohingya have long faced discrimination in Myanmar and are denied citizenship, even though many families have lived there for generations.

After a Rohingya insurgent group attacked police posts in Myanmar’s Rakhine state Aug. 25,

the military responded with “clearance operations.” Fleeing Rohingya say security forces shot indiscriminately, burned their homes and threatened them with death. The government says hundreds died, mostly Rohingya, and that 176 out of 471 Rohingya villages are now abandoned.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday described the violence against Rohingya

as “ethnic cleansing” — a term that describes an organized effort to rid an area of an ethnic group by displacement, deportation or killing.

Amnesty International said Thursday it has evidence of an “orchestrated campaign of systematic burnings” by Myanmar security forces targeting dozens of Rohingya villages over the last three weeks.

AP PHOTO Rohingya Muslims, who recently crossed over from Myanmar, carry food items across from Bangladesh’s border toward no man’s land where they have set up refugee camps in Tombru, Bangladesh.