Rohingya crisis: Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists chased out, who remains

The UN has accused Myanmar of waging an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya, a stateless group that the Buddhist-majority country refuses to recognise as citizens.

The onslaught in Myanmar has not just affected the Muslims, but the Hindus as well. There is a huge refugee crisis and even many Hindus have borne the onslaught.

Reports suggest that there are at least 86 Hindus who have lost their lives and 200 Hindu families who have reportedly fled to the forests to escape the onslaught of the Burmese Army and Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army.

The local media in Bangladesh reported that many migrants have crossed over. Claiming that houses of Hindu residents were also set on fire by Army, the migrants now taking shelter in Cox Bazaar area of Bangladesh said that hundreds of innocent people have been killed in trouble-torn Rakhine state of Myanmar.

The report stated that while a majority of those killed were Muslims, Kalu Seal one of the migrants who managed to escape to Myanmar claimed that the Army and the ARSA stormed into their localities and started killing 100s of people. They slit the throats of people and even stabbed them, he claimed.

After killing their family members, they burnt their houses only to let them escape with their life. Another migrant Ramani Dhar was quoted by local television as saying that a few masked men stormed into their village and created significant chaos and destruction.

The UN has accused Myanmar of waging an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya, a stateless group that the Buddhist-majority country refuses to recognise as citizens.

A 2015 census says that three million people lived in Rakhine, including an estimated 1.1 million Rohingyas. Rakhine's northernmost Maungdaw district was home to around three quarters of that population, according to government figures. But nearly forty percent of its Rohingya villages have been completely abandoned in the past three weeks, said government spokesman Zaw Htay.

There are 176 villages where the whole village fled," he told reporters Wednesday night, out of 471 Rohingya communities in total. Tens of thousands of ethnic Rakhine Buddhists and Hindus have also been driven from their homes since late August, saying they were targeted by the Rohingya militants.

OneIndia News