The Plight of the Rohingya: A minority group of Muslims has been violently driven out of Myanmar in what experts are calling a case of ethnic cleansing.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

As her village burned behind her, a young woman named Rajuma was approached by a pack of soldiers. They tore her screaming baby out of her arms, hurled the infant boy into a fire, and dragged Rajuma off.

Survivors of the attack, which happened in the nation of Myanmar, say they saw government soldiers stabbing babies, burning entire families in their homes, and rounding up dozens of unarmed men and shooting them, execution-style.

"People were holding the soldiers' feet, begging for their lives," Rajuma says. "But they didn't stop; they just kicked them off and killed them. They chopped people, they shot people, they raped us, they left us senseless." Rajuma is a Rohingya Muslim. The Rohingya are a minority group from Myanmar (also known as Burma) that has long been persecuted by the majority population, which is Buddhist. The Rohingya have lived there for centuries, long before the country gained independence from the British in 1948.

In the past few months, more than 620,000 Rohingya have fled their homes in Rakhine State--more than 60 percent of the 1 million who lived there. (Myanmar's population is 53 million.) The military and, in some cases, Buddhist mobs have been burning villages and killing civilians. Human rights groups say the government troops have one goal: to erase entire Rohingya communities. The United Nations is calling it a "textbook example" of ethnic cleansing (see "What Is Ethnic Cleansing?" p. 13).

"There are lots of ethnic conflicts all over the world, but it's rare that a government essentially accuses an entire population of not being citizens and targets them for removal," says John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.

"This is the 'never again' scenario," he adds, referring to the international pledge that came in the wake of the Holocaust to never let a genocide happen again. "Here we are 75 years later, and there s another stateless people who are being denied their citizenship and attacked."

Myanmar's army claims that it has been acting in response to attacks carried out in late August by Rohingya militants and that it is targeting only insurgents. But according to many eyewitness accounts and human rights groups, the attacks have been widespread and directed at unarmed Rohingya villagers.

Vast Refugee Camps

Most of the refugees--including Rajuma--have fled to neighboring Bangladesh, a majority-Muslim country. Some have walked for weeks over mountains and through rivers, eating leaves and drinking rainwater to...