Bangladesh is now home to almost 1 million Rohingya refugees

Burma is also known as Myanmar

Before this situation, I had noticed that Buddhists seldom if ever were responsible for large scale violence.

By Max Bearak October 25, 2017

Wednesday marks the two-month anniversary of attacks in Burma, carried out by a small band of Rohingya militants, that triggered a massive and indiscriminate retaliation from the Burmese military and the exodus of most of the Muslim minority ethnic group from the country.

Some 604,000 people, mostly Rohingya, have fled to neighboring Bangladesh since Aug. 25, where they have joined more than 300,000 who fled in earlier waves of ethnic violence over the past three decades. With thousands still crossing the border each day, the total number of Rohingya refugees is expected to cross the 1 million mark in the coming days or weeks.

Roughly half a million Rohingya are thought to still be in Burma, where many live in camps for displaced people. Human rights organizations have documented the wholesale incineration of Rohingya villages across three townships (akin to counties) of Burma's Rakhine State, where the majority of Rohingya once lived. In interviews in Bangladesh refugee camps and over the phone while still in Burma, Rohingya have offered searing testimony of extensive crimes against humanity carried out by the Burmese military.

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On Wednesday, Reuters reported a new version of a story that has been repeated numerous times over the past two months: Aid workers were hounded away from a camp for displaced Rohingya by people from the local Buddhist majority.

“The simple fact here is that lifesaving aid is being blocked from reaching vulnerable people who desperately need it, including children and the elderly,” Pierre Peron, spokesman for the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Burma, told Reuters.

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The Burmese government has warned in the past that it will only allow those Rohingya with proof of land ownership in Burma to return — documents that most Rohingya do not have, or lost in the chaos of the crackdown.

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Reports in Burmese state media seem to indicate that the Burmese government plans on appropriating land vacated by the Rohingya and may even harvest unattended crops.

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Most of the 604,000 new arrivals in Bangladesh are children, thousands of whom are unaccompanied. Many are acutely malnourished.

On Monday, at an international conference in Geneva, international donors pledged around $340 million to the United Nations-led response. The U.N. had asked for about $100 million more than that. Doctors Without Borders has called the camps in Bangladesh a “time bomb ticking toward a full-blown health crisis” as sanitation and medical services and distribution of clean water have struggled to keep up with refugee arrivals.

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Bangladesh is already the world's most densely populated large country. It is also one of the poorest. The government and civil society have nevertheless provided a massive amount of aid. The long-term viability of the camps in Bangladesh relies on continued international support, however, and the presence of nearly 1 million penniless refugees in southeastern Bangladesh is straining what was already very underdeveloped public services such as roads and hospitals.