Muslims head for the border as army opens fire

MYANMAR: Myanmar security forces fired on fleeing civilians as thousands of people tried to escape continued fighting between the army and militant members of a persecuted Muslim minority.

According to official figures, at least 98 people have died, including 80 militants and 12 soldiers or police, since armed members of the Rohingya ethnic group launched co-ordinated attacks on police and army posts in the far west of Myanmar.

The authorities reported that 4000 non-Muslims, most of them Buddhists, were evacuated from the remote Rakhine State. Some of the thousands of Rohingya attempting to escape in the other direction into neighbouring Bangladesh have been shot and killed close to the border.

Reporters and aid workers on the Bangladeshi side of the Naf river, which divides the countries, said they heard rifles and mortars being fired from the Myanmar shore as Rohingya attempted to cross on Saturday.

Bangladeshi media reported that at least one man died of bullet wounds after reaching the town of Chittagong, close to the Myanmar border. More than 12 others were being treated for gunshot wounds in hospitals in the area.

One injured survivor, Moktar Hossain, said civilian Buddhist militias and Burmese security forces were attacking Rohingya villages in reprisal for the attacks on Friday by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA).

‘‘Police and army are shooting indiscriminately at whoever comes to their sight,’’ he told the news website BD News 24. ‘‘No one can survive there. They are killing everyone they see.’’ He said that he had been separated from his wife, baby son and parents and did not know their fate.

Another man, Mohammad Zafar, 70, said: ‘‘They fired so close [to me] that I cannot hear anything now. They came with rods and sticks to drive us to the border yelling, ‘Bengali bastards!’ ‘‘ Many Myanmar people refuse to accept the word Rohingya, the name used by more than a million stateless Muslims who survive precariously in Rakhine. Many have lived in Myanmar for generations but officially they are treated as illegal Bengali immigrants and denied citizenship, welfare, and free movement.

Since 2012, attacks on their communities by local Buddhists have driven hundreds of thousands of Rohingya into internal refugee camps in Burma and across the border into Bangladesh.

Local leaders have warned that the displaced and alienated population was vulnerable to the lure of violence and last October the previously unknown ARSA attacked border posts, killing police and seizing guns and ammunition. The response to those attacks by the Burmese army has been described by human rights organisations and UN agencies as ethnic cleansing.

Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel peace laureate and Burmese leader, has refused to condemn the violence against the Rohingya. The Times