Dhaka: Mohammad Hanif is still trying to piece together the night his life changed for ever. One minute he was sitting down for dinner with his family. The next a mob wielding long knives and nail-studded clubs had burst through the door. Within minutes, two family members were dead. Within days the clan was separated, destitute and in flight.
“They were our neighbours,” said 65-year-old Hanif of the attackers who killed his son and son-in-law. “They cut them down in front of my eyes hacked at them the way knives slice through cabbage. We ran for our lives.”
Hanif, his wife and two daughters made for the jetty where they knew a boat was tied.
“We waited for them. But as the mob came nearer, we had to leave. It’s been a month and I haven’t heard from them. Maybe they’re dead, maybe they’re lost.”
Such tales are familiar in the remote fishing villages of south-eastern Bangladesh, where thousands of ethnic Rohingya people, driven from their homes in neighbouring Burma, have been arriving since violence between the predominantly Buddhist Rakhine and the Rohingya — a Muslim minority with South Asian features — broke out in Arakan in early June.
Most refugees carry horrifying accounts of murder, arson and rape perpetrated by Rakhine mobs, they say, with direct support from the administration.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates 80,000 people have been displaced by the violence in Arakan.
Although both the Burmese and Bangladeshi governments say the violence has abated, fleeing refugees claim mass arrests and arson attacks aimed at driving out the Rohingyas continue.
Bangladeshi authorities have refused to accept the refugees and have pushed back boatloads of Rohingyas.
Last week, Dhaka ordered three international charities helping Rohingya refugees with food and medicine — France’s Doctors without Borders (MSF) and Action Against Hunger (ACF) as well as Britain’s Muslim Aid UK — to stop operations immediately, arguing that they were creating a “pull factor” for refugees.
On the run from the Bangladesh police and without any legitimate means of livelihood, Rohingyas face a bleak future on the Bangladesh side of the border. But that hasn’t prevented Shah Noor, 23, from the Akyab area of Arakan state, from making the perilous trip along the Bay of Bengal to Teknaf.
Noor, sheltering with a Bangladeshi fish trader he befriended two years ago, said he was sent to Bangladesh by his mother mid-July after police started rounding up young Rohingya men.
Much of northern Arakan state is a no-go area for journalists and independent observers. But the refugees’ claims are consistent with reports by human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that say security forces have targeted Muslim-inhabited areas following the riots. Rohingyas have been beaten, raped and killed by security forces and Rakhine Buddhists, according to Amnesty.
Burma declared a state of emergency on June 10, deploying troops to quell the unrest. But Human Rights Watch has accused the government of mounting a “brutal and biased police response”. Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said the international community had been “blinded by a romantic narrative of sweeping change” in Burma.
Rohingyas accuse the government of fomenting the massacre by urging Rakhines to kill the Rohingya “Kala” (blacks) an overtly racist strategy that turned neighbours into killers.
They point out that many of the victims of the riots died of gunshot wounds, though the rioters were mainly armed with machetes and clubs. “It was the government,” Shah Noor said quietly. “Without the military backing, the Moghs would never dare attack us. The government wants to drive us out.” On July 11, Burmese President Thein Sein suggested that the country could solve the problem by expelling all of its Rohingyas or by having the United Nations resettle them a proposal that a United Nations official quickly rejected.
Burma considers the Rohingya Muslims as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Bangladeshi officials say the geopolitical reality of the region makes that improbable.
