Eid marked a year after crisis began
Nearly one million Rohingya Muslims marked Eid ul-Adha on Wednesday in the world’s largest refugee camp, almost a year to the day since a brutal military crackdown drove the persecuted minority from Myanmar in huge numbers.
Prayers were offered in makeshift mosques across southern Bangladesh to celebrate the Islamic festival of sacrifice.
For many refugees, this Eid ul-Adha is the first since their violent expulsion from western Myanmar a year ago in a campaign of orchestrated violence likened by United States and United Nations officials to ethnic cleansing.
Myanmar’s military, backed by armed Buddhist militias, began sweeping through Rohingya villages in August 2017 just days before Eid celebrations got underway.
Muslims traditionally sacrifice animals for the threeday Eid ul-Adha feast, a tribute to the prophet Abraham slaughtering a lamb after
COX’SBAZAR:
God spared Ishmael, his son.
Those able to make the sacrifice known as qurbani will consume some of the meat and give the rest to the poor unable to buy food.
In Cox’s Bazar near the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, where squalid camps host generations of Rohingya refugees who were expelled from western Myanmar, there is much need, and little to go around.
Cows, goats and sheep flooded local markets catering to the displaced Muslims in the lead up to Eid.
Some better-off families pooled whatever cash they could muster to make the Islamic sacrifice, buying shares in a cow or goat.
But for most refugees, such luxuries are wildly beyond their means.
Barred from legally working, and surviving hand to mouth on charity, this Eid has for many been overshadowed by the misery in Bangladesh. AFP