Cox’s Bazar (Bangladesh): The Rohingya refugee crisis is worsening daily as new arrivals from Myanmar join more than 410,000 from the Muslim minority who have fled to Bangladesh since late August, overwhelming camps short of food, water and shelter.
Here are five key dates in the crisis so far:
August 25 - Fierce riposte to militant attacks
Early on August 25, hundreds of Rohinyga militants stage coordinated attacks on 30 police posts in Myanmar’s westernmost state of Rakhine. At least 12 police are killed.
The Myanmar army hits back fast and hard with “clearance operations” in Rohingya villages. It says it is trying to flush out insurgents from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army.
But witnesses tell of Rohingya civilians being massacred in retaliation, with mortars and machine guns fired at villagers fleeing to the Bangladesh border.
The crackdown sparks an exodus from Rohingya villages, which are soon burning so fiercely the flames and smoke are visible from Bangladesh.
September 5 - Refugee storm hits Bangladesh
Within 11 days of the attacks, more than 120,000 Rohingya have flooded into Bangladesh, overwhelming the handful of ill-equipped refugee camps around Cox’s Bazar.
Many arrive desperate for food and water after walking for more than a week over hills and through dense jungle. Some need urgent treatment for bullet wounds and machete gashes.
Bangladesh already houses at least 300,000 Rohingya in camps near the border. The fresh influx creates a dire shortage of food, clean water and shelter.
September 6 - Suu Kyi denounces ‘iceberg of disinformation’
Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, under increasing international pressure, says a “huge iceberg of misinformation” is distorting the global picture of events in Rakhine.
In her first comments since the August 25 attacks, Suu Kyi says fake news is “calculated to create a lot of problems between different communities” and to promote “the interest of the terrorists”.
But fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates Malala Yousafzai and Desmond Tutu criticise Suu Kyi. Hundreds of thousands sign a Change.org petition demanding the Nobel committee withdraw her award but it refuses.
September 11 - Violence amounts to ethnic cleansing, UN says
As the crisis worsens, UN human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein says Myanmar’s systematic attacks bear the hallmarks of a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
Rights groups warn of a final push by the army and Buddhist mobs to drive the stateless Rohingya from Myanmar for good.
Landmines claim more victims, with three Rohingya killed in a blast while fleeing Myanmar.
September 16 - Rohingya exodus tops 400,000
The UN declares that more than 400,000 refugees have arrived in Bangladesh since August 25 - more than a third of the total Rohingya population of 1.1 million living in Rakhine.
Conditions at the camps become unbearable as numbers swell to breaking point. Women and children are badly injured in stampedes for food, water and clothes as aid agencies warn the crisis risks getting out of control.
Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina departs for the UN to plead for global help in coping with the Rohingya deluge.
Suu Kyi speech disappoints
Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and de facto leader of Myanmar, stood before a room of government officials and foreign dignitaries on Tuesday to at last, after weeks of international urging, address the plight of the country’s Rohingya ethnic minority.
But those who expected San Suu Kyi to deliver an eloquent requiem for an oppressed people were disappointed.
In her speech, delivered in crisp English and often directly inviting foreign listeners to “join us” in addressing Myanmar’s problems, she steadfastly refused to criticize the Myanmar military, which has been accused of a vast campaign of killing, rape and village burning.
“The security forces have been instructed to adhere strictly to the code of conduct in carrying out security operations, to exercise all due restraint and to take full measures to avoid collateral damage and the harming of innocent civilians,” she said.
As she spoke, more than 400,000 Rohingya, a Muslim minority long repressed by Myanmar’s Buddhist majority, were fleeing a military massacre that the United Nations has called a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” The lucky ones are suffering in makeshift camps in Bangladesh where there is not nearly enough food or medical aid.
A stark satellite analysis by Human Rights Watch shows that at least 210 of their villages have been burned to the ground since the offensive began on Aug. 25. Bangladeshi officials say that land mines had been planted on Myanmar’s side of the border, where the Rohingya are fleeing.
But Suu Kyi, asking why the world did not acknowledge the progress made in her country, boasted that Muslims living in the violence-torn area had ample access to health care and radio broadcasts.
It was a remarkable parroting of the language of the generals who locked her up for the better part of two decades, and in the process made a political legend of her: the regal prisoner of conscience who vanquished the military with no weapons but her principles.
Officials in Suu Kyi’s government have accused the Rohingya, who have suffered decades of persecution and have been mostly stripped of their citizenship, of faking rape and torching their own houses in a bid to hijack international public opinion. She has done nothing to correct the record.
A Facebook page associated with her office suggested that international aid groups were colluding with Rohingya militants, whose attack on Myanmar police posts and an army base precipitated the fierce military counteroffensive. In a statement, her government labeled the insurgent strikes “brutal acts of terrorism.”
It has been a stunning reversal for Suu Kyi, 72, who was once celebrated among the likes of Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa. The 1991 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to her for her “nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights.”
During her address, made from a vast convention center in Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s capital, Suu Kyi tried to evoke a program of grand goals including democratic transition, peace, stability and development.
But she also cautioned that the country’s long experience with authoritarian rule, as well as seven decades of ethnic conflict in Myanmar’s frontier lands, have frayed national unity.
“People expect us to overcome all these challenges in as short a time as possible,” she said, noting that her civilian government only took office last year. “Eighteen months is a very short time in which to expect us to meet and overcome all the challenges that we are facing.”
But there were worrisome signs from the moment she entered a power-sharing agreement with the military after her National League for Democracy won 2015 elections.
Myanmar’s generals - who ruled the country for nearly half a century and turned a resource-rich land once known as Burma into an economic failure - stage-managed every facet of the political transition. The Tatmadaw, as the Myanmar Army is known, made sure to keep the most important levers of power for itself.
It also effectively relegated Suu Kyi to the post of state counselor by designing a Constitution that kept her from the presidency.
“It’s always a dance with the generals,” said U Win Htein, an NLD party elder. “She needs to be very quick on her feet.”
Win Htein, a former military officer who served alongside some of the Tatmadaw’s highest-ranking generals, warned that Suu Kyi had to placate an army with a history of pushing aside civilian leaders under the pretext of defending national sovereignty.
“The army, they are watching her every word,” he said. “One misstep on the Muslim issue, and they can make their move.”
Yet even before the compromises that accompanied her ascension to power, Suu Kyi was already distancing herself from the hopes invested in her by the international community.
“Let me be clear that I would like to be seen as a politician, not some human rights icon,” she said in an interview shortly after her release from house arrest in 2010.
Such a recasting of her role has disappointed Suu Kyi’s fellow Nobel Peace Prize laureates. In an open letter, Desmond Tutu, the South African former archbishop, advised his “dearly beloved younger sister” that “if the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep.”
Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi social entrepreneur and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, was even more pointed.
“She should not have received a Nobel Peace Prize if she says, sorry, I’m a politician, and the norms of democracy don’t suit me,” he said in a telephone interview with The New York Times. “The whole world stood by her for decades, but today she has become the mirror image of Aung San Suu Kyi by destroying human rights and denying citizenship to the Rohingya.”
“All we can do,” he said, “is pray for the return of the old Aung San Suu Kyi.”
Beyond her personal legacy, the direction of Suu Kyi’s leadership carries global consequence.
“People are invested in her because we need her to succeed. This is a democratic moment, and she represents Burma’s democratic promise,” said Derek Mitchell, the former U.S. ambassador to Myanmar. “The country sits at the crossroads of Asia in a region where democracy is in retreat, which makes Burma’s success even more important.”
In Tuesday’s speech, Suu Kyi, acknowledged the state of democracy in her country.
“We are a young and fragile democracy facing many problems,” she said, “but we have to cope with them all at the same time.”
Then, when she spoke about the need to study how peace flourishes in certain areas and not others, she seemed to borrow vocabulary from a self-help manual.
“Remove the negative and increase the positive,” she said.
As the daughter of the assassinated independence hero Aung San, who founded the modern Burmese Army, Suu Kyi has been unapologetic about her fondness for the military, even as it has driven out the Rohingya and stepped up military offensives against other ethnic armed groups who are concentrated in Myanmar’s frontier lands.
The NLD’s founding members include a former general who once served as Myanmar’s defense minister.
“We do not have any trust in Aung San Suu Kyi because she was born into the military,” said Hkapra Hkun Awng, a leader of the Kachin ethnicity from northern Myanmar, one of more than a dozen minorities whose rebel armies have fought the Tatmadaw over the decades. “She is more loyal to her own people than to the ethnics. Her blood is thicker than a promise of national reconciliation.”
Suu Kyi belongs to the country’s Bamar ethnic majority.
Even before the mudslinging of the 2015 election campaign, Suu Kyi was sidestepping questions about the sectarian violence in far western Rakhine state that was disproportionately affecting the Rohingya. Rather than condemning pogroms against the persecuted Muslim minority, she has dismissed accusations of ethnic cleansing and called, instead, for rule of law to solve any problem.
Because most Rohingya were stripped of their citizenship by the military, it has not been clear how any laws might apply to them.
Suu Kyi has largely shielded herself from the media and has holed up in Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s bunkered capital, which was unveiled more than a decade ago by a junta paranoid that the former capital, Yangon, might be vulnerable to foreign invasion.
Earlier this month, Suu Kyi chose not to attend the UN General Assembly, where her stance on the Rohingya would surely have met with criticism. Just a year ago, she attended the annual assembly and was feted by the international community.
Still, Suu Kyi was attuned enough to public sentiment to understand the deep reservoir of anti-Muslim sentiment in Myanmar. Even though a Muslim bloc had been a loyal patron of the NLD for decades, the party did not choose to stand a single Muslim candidate in the 2015 polls.
If anything, her equivocations on the Rohingya has given currency to the widely held assumption in Myanmar that they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh who have occupied land that rightfully belongs to the Burmese.
