Lull seems to have hit Rohingya flight

Some say border area teems with those hiding

COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh — The massive exodus of Rohingya Muslims fleeing Myanmar to escape brutal persecution appears to have slowed, but several recent refugees say at least tens of thousands more are huddled near beaches or in forests waiting to escape.

Some Rohingya who have fled over the last week said Myanmar army soldiers were shooting at those trying to flee to Bangladesh. Others said thousands were stuck in Myanmar because most boatmen had made the crossing to safety themselves and soldiers had burned many of the boats that remained.

Over the last month, an estimated 430,000 Rohingya have arrived in Bangladesh as their homes and villages were set on fire by mobs of soldiers and Buddhist monks. They have brought with them accounts of soldiers spraying their villages with gunfire.

In the first three weeks of the latest convulsion of violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, tens of thousands of Rohingya poured into Bangladesh each day, walking for days through forests or taking rickety wooden boats on the rain-swollen Naf River.

Maj. Kazi Obaidur Reza of Border Guards Bangladesh, the paramilitary force that guards the nation’s borders, said it appeared that most of the villages in Rakhine state were vacant of their Rohingya Muslim residents.

The Myanmar army was repairing the broken barbed wire fencing across many parts of the border, he said, adding that the repair work suggested that there were no Rohingya Muslims left to flee.

Myanmar’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, said in a nationally televised speech last week that military operations in the troubled areas had ceased a few weeks ago. She also said that the “great majority” of Muslims in the conflict zone were still in their villages and that “more than 50 percent of their villages were intact.”

But Amnesty International said as recently as Friday that fresh fires continued in Rakhine and that satellite and video images showed smoke rising from Muslim villages.

Rohingya have faced persecution and discrimination in Buddhist-majority Myanmar for decades and are denied citizenship, even though they have lived there for generations.