NC

BY BROOK LARMER
PHOTOGRAPHS BY WILLIAM DANIELS
Dance!” shouted the army officer,
waving a gun at the trembling
girl. Afifa, just 14 years old, was
corralled in a field with dozens of
girls and women—all members
of the Rohingya Muslim minority. Soldiers had
invaded her village in western Myanmar that
morning last October. The men and boys, fearing
for their lives, had dashed into the forests to hide.
After enduring an invasive body search, Afifa
had watched soldiers drag two women into a rice
paddy before others turned their attention to her.
“If you don’t dance at once, we will
slaughter you,” the officer warned.
Choking back tears, Afifa swayed
back and forth. The soldiers clapped
rhythmically, and the officer slid an
arm around her waist.
“Now that’s better, isn’t it?” he
said, flashing a smile.
The encounter recalled by Afifa
marked only the beginning of the
latest wave of brutality against the estimated
1.1 million stateless Rohingya who live, precariously,
in Myanmar’s Rakhine state. The Rohingya
are one of the world’s most persecuted minorities.
They are Muslims in a nation dominated by
Buddhists. The Rohingya claim they are indigenous,
and many are descended from settlers who
came in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1982
the then military government stripped them of
their citizenship. They are now considered illegal
immigrants in Myanmar as well as in neighboring
Bangladesh, where many have fled.
Five years ago clashes between Buddhist and
Muslim communities left hundreds dead, mostly
Rohingya. With their mosques and villages
torched, 120,000 Rohingya were forced into
camps in Myanmar. This time the Burmese military
unleashed a four-month campaign of terror
that included executions, mass detentions, razing
of villages, and systematic rape, according to the
ASIA
BANGLADESH
INDIAN
OCEAN
United Nations and human rights organizations.
The army onslaught, which began after an attack
on border posts by suspected Rohingya militants
left nine policemen dead, triggered an exodus of
about 74,000 Rohingya into crowded refugee
camps across the border in Bangladesh.
Before the soldiers left Afifa’s village, they set
fire to the harvest-ready rice fields, looted houses,
and shot or stole all the cattle and goats. “We
didn’t want to leave our home,” Afifa’s father,
Mohammed Islam, told me in March, when
five of the family’s 11 members staggered into a
refugee camp in Bangladesh. “But the army has
only one aim: to get rid of all Rohingya.”
Yanghee Lee, the UN special rapporteur for
human rights in Myanmar, said the
army attacks “very likely” amount
MYANMAR
(BURMA)
to crimes against humanity. The
army rejects the claim, as does
Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s first
truly civilian leader after a half century
of military rule. “I don’t think
there is ethnic cleansing going on,”
she told the BBC. Winner of the
Nobel Peace Prize for her long
struggle against the military junta, Aung San Suu
Kyi has dismayed rights activists by not speaking
out against the atrocities, much less bringing
perpetrators to justice. In June her government
refused to grant visas to members of a new UN
fact- finding mission. “We had a very big hope
that Suu Kyi and democracy would be good for
us,” says Moulabi Jafar, a 40-year-old shop owner
who fled to Bangladesh. “But the violence only
got worse. That came as a big surprise.”
Afifa, her father, and three of her siblings spent
five months on the run. On their first attempt to
cross the Naf River, which separates Myanmar
from Bangladesh, a Burmese patrol boat opened
fire, capsizing their boat and killing several refugees.
They eventually joined about 500,000
Rohingya refugees, many crammed into squalid
camps along the border, while her mother and
five children remained in hiding in Myanmar.
In Balukhali, where some 11,000 recent arrivals
102 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC • OCTOBER 2017
NGM MAPS