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’s barbaric security forces and allied mobs that started on August 25, after a handful of Rohingya rebels carried out a retaliation against government forces.
The inhuman operation 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 non-combatants, adding to a death toll that even in early estimates is high into the hundreds, and is likely vastly worse.
“There are no more villages left, none at all,” said Rashed Ahmed, a 46-year-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 by the end of last week, dwarfs previous outflows of refugees to Bangladesh in such a short time period. Friday’s influx alone was the single largest movement of Rohingya here in more than a generation, according to the UN office in Dhaka.
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. And civilians who have stayed on the trail are running toward conditions so grim that they constitute a second humanitarian catastrophe.
They face another round of gunfire from Myanmar’s border guards, and miles of treacherous hill trails and flood-swollen streams and mud fields ahead before they reach crowded camps without enough food or medical help. Dozens were killed when their boats overturned, leaving the bodies of women and children washed up on river banks.
Tens of thousands more Rohingya are waiting for the Bangladeshi border force to allow them to enter. Still more are moving north from the Rohingya-dominated districts of Rakhine state. And the violence there continues. “It breaks all records of inhumanity,” said a member of the Border Guard Bangladesh named Anamul, stationed at the Kutupalong Rohingya refugee camp. “I have never seen anything like this.”
Here, in the forests of Rezu Amtali near the border with Myanmar, dozens of Rohingya told stories that were horrifying in their content and consistency. After militants from the Arakan Ro-hingya Salvation Army attacked police posts and an army base on August 25, killing more than a dozen, the Myanmar military began torching entire villages with helicopters and petrol bombs, aided by Buddhist vigilantes from the ethnic Rakhine group, those fleeing the violence said.
Person after person along the trail into Bangladesh told of how the security forces cordoned off Rohingya villages as the fire rained down, and then shot and stabbed civilians. Children were not exempt.
Mizanur Rahman recalled how on August 25, he had been working in a rice paddy in his village, known in Rohingya as Ton Bazar, in Myanmar’s Buthidaung Township, when helicopters roared into the sky above him.
“Immediately, I had fear in my heart,” he said. His wife came running out of their house with their infant son, less than a month old. They escaped to a nearby forest and watched as the choppers’ weapons engulfed the village in flames. Myanmar security forces descended, and the sound of gunfire reached the forest.
Rahman’s extended family fled the next day, but not before seeing his brother’s body lying on the ground, along with seven others. Three days later, as they climbed a hill near the border with Bangladesh, Rahman’s mother was shot dead by a Myanmar border guard.
His wife’s postpartum bleeding has increased so much that she can no longer walk or produce milk for their infant son. The baby, cradled in Rahman’s arms, looked skeletal, parched skin pinched at his joints. Other refugees took turns gently touching the baby’s feet to check if he was still alive.
The Myanmar military said on Friday that nearly 400 people had been killed in the violence that has swept across northern Rakhine since August 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. Myanmar officials, however, have given no specific accounting of civilian Rohingya deaths.
Suu Kyi govt's shocking stance
The Myanmar government claims Rohingya “militants” have torched their own homes in a bid for international sympathy. And the military maintains its current operations in Rakhine are designed at rooting out “extremist terrorists.”
There are, clearly, combatants on the Rohingya side. State media have reported that more than 50 clashes have broken out between the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and Myanmar security forces over the past week. That has further complicated life for civilians trying to flee.
Fortify Rights, a human-rights group based in Bangkok, interviewed villagers remaining in Maungdaw township who said ARSA was forcing men and boys to stay and fight. The refugees flowing into Bangladesh have been predominantly women and children, leading to speculation as to where the men are.
What the survivors are fleeing into is no haven. Bangladesh is itself poor, overcrowded and waterlogged, and has been reluctant to take on more displaced Rohingya.
An urgent humanitarian disaster is brewing here in a country hard-pressed to feed itself, much less a new influx of refugees that one Bangladeshi official estimated could soon surpass 100,000 people.
For now, the Border Guard Bangladesh is mostly turning a blind eye and allowing the Rohingya to stream across the border.
An international response to the crisis has started. On Wednesday, Britain arranged for a closed-door meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the Rohingya emergency. The civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi has faced mounting global criticism for refusing to acknowledge the magnitude of the military offensive on civilian Rohingya populations.
On Tuesday, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, rejected allegations from Suu Kyi’s administration that international aid organisations were somehow complicit in aiding Rohingya militants.
The UN set up a special commission this year to investigate another military onslaught that caused 85,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh over the course of a few weeks, following an ARSA attack on police posts in October. But Suu Kyi’s government has barred the UN team from entering Myanmar.
In an open letter to Suu Kyi, nearly a dozen of her fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates labelled October’s military offensive “a human tragedy amounting to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”
“Some international experts have warned of the potential for genocide,” said the letter, signed by Desmond Tutu and Malala Yousufzai, among others. “It has all the hallmarks of recent past tragedies: Rwanda, Darfur, Bosnia, Kosovo.”
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