Empty Villages, Rohingya on the Run: Who is Left in

Myanmar's Rakhine?
Metrotvnews.com, Yangon: A military campaign to wipe out Rohingya insurgents
has rained violence down on Myanmar's Rakhine state, sending nearly 390,000
Muslim Rohingya refugees fleeing for sanctuary in Bangladesh.

Around 30,000 Rakhine Buddhists and Hindus have also been displaced, as ethnic
and religious hatreds carve through the western state.
Access to the epicentre of unrest, the northern wedge of Rakhine, has been blocked by the
government as the crisis unfolds.

But the weary and wounded Rohingya arriving in Bangladesh have told consistent but
unverifiable accounts of village massacres, with soldiers and vigilante mobs teaming up to
empty out communities and burn them to the ground.

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 government refutes the accusations, instead saying the army has carried out targeted
operations to snuff out the militant group, whose attacks on police posts in late August
unleashed the massive military response.

Here is what we know about who is left in violence-ravaged Rakhine, where tens of
thousands of people are believed to still be on the move.

Empty villages

A census published in 2015 said three million people lived in Rakhine, including an
estimated 1.1 million Rohingya.

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.

The recent refugee arrivals in Bangladesh amount to more than a third of the total number of
Rohingya once based in Myanmar.

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.

On Thursday Myanmar's government said some 4,000 people had started trickling back to
their villages in Maungdaw as clashes between the army and militants ebbed, without
specifying their ethnicity.

Raging fires

Myanmar's Information Committee has said over 7,000 homes have been destroyed by fire
across at least 59 villages, the vast majority belonging to "Bengalis" as the government
pejoratively calls the Rohingya.

New satellite images released by Amnesty International on Friday showed that more than
two dozen villages in the Rohingya-majority area had been set alight since August 25, with
patches of grey ash marking the area where structures had stood.

AFP reporters on government-steered press trips have seen abandoned villages and homes
reduced to ashes.

Columns of smoke from the gutted villages have also been visible almost daily from across
the Naf river in Bangladesh, where the Rohingya refugees are massing in ramshackle
camps.

Rohingya refugees say Myanmar officers and Buddhist vigilantes started the fires after
driving them out of their homes with gunshots and other threats, a tactic that Amnesty has
described as an "orchestrated campaign" of ethnic cleansing.

Myanmar authorities deny that, saying the militants have torched the villages in a bid to
attract global sympathy.

People on the move

Tens of thousands of Rohingya are believed to still be trekking through the monsoon-soaked
area.

For those fleeing fire-hit areas further south, it may take weeks to cross over difficult terrain,
blanketed by security forces, to reach the Bangladesh border.

Aid groups have been unable to access northern Rakhine since the violence erupted in late
August, compounding the humanitarian crisis.

"Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, may be trapped in remote areas far from the border
with limited food and medical supplies and are unable to reach safety," said Pierre Peron, a
spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Rohingya who have stayed in their villages are living in fear and struggling to survive without
the food deliveries that have supported their impoverished communities for years, said Laura
Haigh from Amnesty International.

"They are essentially locked in and markets are not functioning," she told AFP.

Myanmar has said it will establish camps in Rohingya-majority areas of Maungdaw to

provide relief, but details of the project are scant.

On Thursday the Information Committee said shelters will be set up for Muslims "who can
guarantee they are no way connected to the terrorists".

Government spokesman Zaw Htay has also said the country would not allow all of those
who crossed into Bangladesh to return, comments likely to fuel allegations Myanmar is
intentionally ejecting the Rohingya, whose presence in Myanmar has incensed powerful
Buddhist nationalists for years.

"Some reached the other side of border. If they come back, we cannot accept all of them,"
Zaw Htay said, adding that returnees would need to be "scrutinised". (AFP)

(WAH)

Blog by Antero
Effects of globalization and theay the world is very globalized. Every country, every person is
connected throughout the millions and millions of contacts, jobs, internet sites, etc. But how
does this affect us? Because I am teen, I decided to write about the effects of it on youth and
the duties that it brings us whether we like it or not.

By woodleywonderworks

We, the so called millenials, are the first generation that is growing up using computers. We
now have more information at our reach than our parents had. If there is a significant event in
the world, we know about in a matter of seconds or as fast as someone mentions it online. To
push the society further to the internet, there is almost unlimited number of social networks,
such as Facebook and Twitter. As a result from the birth of social network, our natural and
traditional way of communication – speaking and body language – has got a new rival out of
the many ways we interact online, for example smileys, likeing, blogging, commenting,
tweeting, pictures, videos. What some maybe haven’t noticed yet, is that it is globalized way of
speaking and interacting. In other words communicating, which it has already revolutionized
forever.

Music. You can go almost everywhere on the planet and teen girls recognize Justin Bieber and
guys recognize Metallica. Music has become the signature element of being young. And music
itself has been globalized or how I see it, become America-centered. Most of the great music
come from there, at least the selling music does. We teenagers have learned English as a
byproduct of it and the downside is that singing in own language is less popular, because you
have a better chance making a profit in English. And the musical heritage and individuality of
countries will be lost. It is our duty to embrace and save it.

By all that improbable blue

Nowadays you can see the cultural difference between countries blurring. There are many
similarities between young people all around the world: Fashion, use of spare time, food and
drinking habits and more. It can make people more aware of other people’s problems and less
racist. But it can also make less popular cultures extinct. Our cultural legacy would lose so
much in that. We will lose a part of ourselves.

I think that we, as today’s children and future adults, must embrace the world and all that it
has to offer, while not losing our identity. We are the generation that will make many
important decisions, but we shouldn’t forget our heritage.