Ethnic Cleansing In The Rohingya

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There are thousands of refugees entering Bangladesh every day. They cross the border of Myanmar where the state military has launched a violent offensive against an ethnic minority group called the Rohingya. Reports show that since August 2017 about four hundred thousand Rohingya men, women, and children have fled their homes in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Supposedly, the military has been killing and raping the Rohingya and has set their villages on fire. This has been proven from confirmed reports in May and September in 2017. Because Myanmar has refused access to human rights investigators, the situation has yet to be fully assessed. This event is seen to observers as a textbook example of ethnic cleansing./ The term ethnic cleansing has been…show more content…
Many have fled to Malaysia and Thailand, but most ended up in Bangladesh. The recent wave of violence is the latest in a pattern of discrimination that started over fifty years ago./ In 1962, Burma, now called Myanmar, was taken over by the military in a coup. The government got rid of the country’s constitution and created a military junta. Like many dictatorships, they promoted fierce nationalism based on the country’s Buddhist identity, and when they needed a common enemy to help unite the population the Rohingya were singled out as a threat. Tensions between Burmese Buddhist population and the Rohingya go back to the Second World War when each group supported opposing sides. The Muslim Rohingya sided with the British colonialists who ruled the country and the Buddhists mostly sided with the Japanese invaders hoping they would help end the British rule after the war. But even in modern Myanmar, the Rohingya minority continued to be an easy target./ Although their lineage can be traced back to fifteenth century Burma, the government has been forcing them out claiming that the Muslims are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.…show more content…
The Rohingya, with a population of about one million, were not on the list and became a stateless people. In 1991, Myanmar’s military launched another campaign called the “Operation clean and beautiful nation.” This time about two hundred fifty Rohingya fled to Bangladesh. Tensions continued to build against the Rohingya in the 2000s. Violence broke out in 2012 when four Muslim men were accused of raping and killing a Buddhist woman in the Rakhine State. Buddhist nationalist backed by security forces attacked Muslim neighborhoods, burned homes displacing tens of thousands of Rohingya again. Human Rights Watch deemed it an ethnic cleansing campaign. By this point the Rohingya were persecuted disenfranchised and stateless. In 2016, a Rohingya militant group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, emerged and coordinated small scale attacks on border police stations. An attack on August 25th 2017 left 12 police officers dead and sparked the current crisis against the Rohingya civilians. A brutal retaliation by the state security forces has led to about 400 deaths and the mass exodus of about four hundred thousand Rohingya to Bangladesh.
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