6,700 killed in 1st month of crackdown

BANGKOK: Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) estimates at least 6,700 Rohingya Muslims, including 730 children below age five, had met violent deaths there in the month after a military crackdown on their villages.

The campaign against the Rohingya, which began in late August, has been called “ethnic cleansing” by the US and the UN. Survivors who fled to neighbouring Bangladesh gave consistent accounts of executions, gang rapes and burned homes. But with Myanmar’s government blocking international access to the area of western Myanmar where the Rohingya once lived, estimates of the toll have been hard to ascertain.

MSF, the international medical charity, said nearly 70% of the victims it had tallied died of gunshot wounds and 9% were burned to death in their homes.

The group said that its mortality figure was almost certainly an underestimate. The estimate was a summary of findings from six surveys carried out last month with refugees who had fled Myanmar for neighboring Bangladesh.

Survey teams interviewed 2,434 households in settlements in Bangladesh and asked the head of each to provide the date, location and cause of death of family members who died from March to October 2017. Doctors Without Borders then performed a weighted analysis using the population estimates for each settlement where the surveys were conducted.

Satellite imagery collected by international human-rights groups shows how dozens of Rohingya villages were razed by fire in northern Rakhine state.

Ethnic Rakhine Buddhists have also been accused of participating in the bloodletting.

More than 645,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since late August, when deadly attacks on Myanmar security posts by Rohingya insurgents led to a brutal military response.

Fabrizio Carboni, head of the Red Cross delegation in Myanmar, recently spent three days in northern Rakhine. “I didn’t meet a single person who wasn’t afraid,” he said, of his talks with both Rohingya Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists.