Point of No Return: Erasing the Rohingya
ASIA-UPDATES ON MYANMAR ROHINGYA GENOCIDE, 24 Dec 2018
18 Dec 2018 – Having fled waves of violence, more than 900,000 members of Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority now languish in refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh. A Reuters investigation has found the Myanmar government is taking steps that threaten to make the purge of the Rohingya permanent.
Myanmar’s leaders are promising to bring home hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims who fled a brutal military crackdown. But the government, led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, is taking steps that make their return increasingly unlikely.
The areas where the Rohingya lived in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State before the army ousted them are being dramatically transformed. The northern reaches of this region were once a Muslim-majority enclave in the overwhelmingly Buddhist nation.
Hundreds of new houses are now being built in villages where the Rohingya resided, satellite images show. Many of these villages were burned, then flattened and scraped by bulldozers. The new homes are being occupied mainly by Buddhists, some from other parts of Rakhine. The security forces are also building new facilities in these areas.
This is the village of Inn Din in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State. Rohingya Muslims and Buddhist villagers were once neighbors here. The brown houses belonged to the Rohingya.
In August 2017, all 6,000 Rohingya residents fled a brutal army campaign. Their houses were burned to the ground and then bulldozed, erasing any remnant of their lives there.
Now, red-roofed security buildings have been constructed where the Muslim houses stood. New homes have also sprung up – but not for the Rohingya. The new inhabitants are Buddhists, largely from other parts of Rakhine.
A Rohingya refugee stands on a makeshift bridge in Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh.
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