posted by | Leave a comment
month, the United Nations’ top human-rights official called Myanmar’s ongoing military campaign against its Rohingya Muslim minority a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” Since August, nearly half of the country’s 1.1 million Rohingya have fled into neighboring Bangladesh in the face of attacks by Myanmar’s military and Buddhist villagers.Rohingya have starved to death and drowned during the journey and have been trampled by elephants after crossing the border into what they thought would be safety.
Huddled with wide-eyed children, they occupied every available space — in little knots along the streets, in large groups on grassy knolls between rice fields.
“Every single day, I saw someone dying, or someone being buried,” Saman said.
On Monday, thousands of Rohingya who made it across the river into Bangladesh were held in a rice field overnight, prohibited, by overwhelmed Bangladeshi border-patrol members, from continuing on toward the refugee camps several miles up the road.
Young children with blank eyes carried even younger siblings.
"Oh Allah, Oh Allah," one family moaned as they waded Tuesday through the chin-high waters of the Naf River dividing the two countries.