MSF: 6,700 Rohingya Killed in First Month of Myanmar Violence

Rasa - Doctors Without Borders (MSF) announced that at least 6,700 Rohingya Muslims were killed in the first month of a Myanmar army crackdown in Rakhine state that began in late August.

News ID: 435335

Date: 14 December 2017 - 23:14

RNA - "At least 6,700 Rohingya, in the most conservative estimations, are estimated to have been killed, including at least 730 children below the age of five years," the aid group declared, basing the figures on surveys it had conducted, The News Online reported.

The MSF added that the figures had come from six surveys of more than 2,434 households in Rohingya refugee camps and covered a period of one month.

In a statement Thursday, MSF said the deaths, which included 730 children younger than five years old, were caused by violence.

Among children below the age of five years, more than 59% killed were reportedly shot, 15% burnt to death in their homes, 7% beaten to death, and 2% died due to landmine blasts.

The survey revealed that between Aug 25 and Sept 24, an estimated 9,000 Rohingya died, with 71.1%, or 6,700 deaths, due to violence.

Gunshots were the cause of death in 69% of the violence-related deaths, followed by being burnt to death in their houses (9%) and beaten to death (5%).

“We met and spoke with survivors of violence in Myanmar, who are now sheltering in overcrowded and unsanitary camps in Bangladesh,” the group’s medical director, Sidney Wong, said.

“What we uncovered was staggering, both in terms of the numbers of people who reported a family member died as a result of violence, and the horrific ways in which they said they were killed or severely injured,” he added.

The revelation was made as Myanmar’s army has so far denied widespread accounts of violence against the Muslim Rohingya minority and has said that only 400 people died in the first few weeks of a new wave of “security operations” that began on August 25.

About 650,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar to Bangladesh since late last year, when Myanmar's soldiers and Buddhist mobs began vicious attacks on the minority Muslims in Rakhine. The crackdown on the Rohingya has intensified since August.

All along, government troops and the Buddhist mobs have been killing, raping, and arbitrarily arresting members of the Muslim community. They have also been setting the houses of the Muslims on fire in hundreds of predominantly-Rohingya villages in the Northern parts of Rakhine, where nearly all the Rohingya reside.

Myanmar’s government denies full citizenship to the Rohingya, branding them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Dhaka, in turn, regards the desperate refugees as Myanmarese. The Rohingya, however, track their ancestors many generations back in Myanmar.

The UN has already described the Rohingya as the most persecuted community in the world, calling the situation in Rakhine similar to “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

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