Desperate Rohingya flee from Myanmar
Ethnic minority struck in attacks
The New York Times
REZU AMTALI, Bangladesh — They stumble down muddy ravines and flooded creeks through miles of hills and jungle in Bangladesh, and thousands more come each day, in a line stretching to the monsoon-darkened horizon.
Some are gaunt and spent, starving and carrying listless and dehydrated babies, with many miles to go before they reach any refugee camp.
They are tens of thousands of Rohingya, who arrive bearing accounts of massacre at the hands of the Myanmar security forces and allied mobs that started on Aug. 25, after Rohingya militants staged attacks against government forces.
The retaliation that followed was carried out in methodical assaults on villages, with helicopters raining down fire on civilians and front-line troops cutting off families’ escape. The villagers’ accounts all portray indiscriminate attacks against fleeing noncombatants, adding to a deathtoll that even in early estimates is high into the hundreds, and is likely vastlyworse.
“There are no more villages left, none at all,” said Rashed Ahmed, a 46year-old farmer from a hamlet in Myanmar’s Maungdaw Township. He had been walking for four days. “There are no more people left, either,” he said. “It is all gone.”
The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic minority who live in Myanmar’s far western Rakhine state. Most were stripped of their citizenship by the military junta that used to rule Myanmar, and they have suffered decades of repression under the country’s Buddhist majority, including killings and mass rape, according to the United Nations. A new armed resistance is giving the military more reasons to oppress them.
But the past week’s exodus of civilians caught in the middle, which the United Nations said had reached nearly 76,000 Saturday, dwarfs previous outflows of refugees to Bangladesh in such a short time period.
The dying is not yet done. Some of the Rohingya militants have persuaded or coerced men and boys to stay behind and keep up the fight.
Tens of thousands more Rohingya are waiting for the Bangladeshi border force to allow them enter. Still more are moving north from the Rohingya-dominated districts of Rakhine state. And the violence there continues.
The Myanmar military said Friday that nearly 400 people had been killed in the violence that has swept across northern Rakhine since Aug. 25. Of that death toll, 370 people were identified as Rohingya fighters. Fourteen civilians, including four ethnic Rakhine and seven Hindus, were also reported killed.
An international response to the crisis has started. On Wednesday, Britain arranged for a closed-door meeting of the U.N. Security Council to discuss the Rohingya emergency.
On Tuesday, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, rejected allegations from Suu Kyi’s administration that international aid organizations were somehow complicit in aiding Rohingya militants.