By Sunny Chiu
Over half a million Rohingya escaped their home country, Myanmar, into Bangladesh. The Rohingya are a Muslim ethnic group living mostly in the Rakhine state in Myanmar. Myanmar has an overwhelmingly Buddhist population and has systematically persecuted the Rohingya for decades by regarding them as illegal migrants from Bangladesh and restricting their citizenship rights.
The oppression and communal hatred between Rohingya and Buddhists in Rakhine exploded on August 25 when Rohingya insurgents attacked Myanmar’s military posts and killed 12 people. The army retaliated by targeting armed insurgents in small controlled areas of Rakhine. UN investigators reported that during these military operations, Rohingya women were gang-raped by soldiers and their babies were slaughtered. Refugees in Bangladesh have given accounts of arson, raids, and indiscriminate killings of civilians by military forces and Buddhist nations. The violence continues and the horrific stories of these tragic events spread as a narrative to scare more Rohingya families to leave.
Myanmar’s national security adviser, U Thaung Tun denied accusations, stating, “I can assure you that the leaders of Myanmar, who have been struggling so long for freedom and human rights, will never espouse policy of genocide or ethnic cleansing and that the government will do everything to prevent it.” Myanmar’s official answer to the accounts of the military’s mass burning of villages and murder of civilians is to insist that the Rohingya have been doing it to themselves, saying that the military does not kill Muslim civilians, but Muslim people kill their own Muslim people. However, the US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, stated, “We cannot be afraid to call the actions of the Burmese authorities what they appear to be: a brutal, sustained campaign to cleanse the country of an ethnic minority.”
