In early November, Zaw Lay and his family were hiding in the basement of a friend’s house in Yekhatchchaung GwaSone village, near the Myanmar-Bangladesh border. Two Burmese military helicopters circled overhead, firing indiscriminately at the terrified villagers huddled below. “The helicopters [didn’t] see us but they are firing continuously,” he recently told me over the phone, from a forest enclave in Bangladesh where he now lives. “We don’t [dare] go outside the home, if the helicopter men see us they will kill us.” Once the helicopters stopped their strafing, Burmese soldiers on the ground began burning the village to the ground. There was chaos when Zaw Lay fled, and he learned only later that his elderly mother had been trapped inside a burning building. “My mom’s dead,” he told me.
Rohingya Muslims like Zaw Lay are a small minority in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. They are becoming smaller still, thanks to a brutal campaign initiated in mid-October by the Burmese military. The spark for the violence came on October 9, when a Rohingya militia attacked a police outpost in northern Rakhine province, killing nine officers and seizing weapons and equipment. The military’s harsh reprisal campaign, designed to retrieve every gun stolen during the initial raid, is believed to have killed hundreds of Rohingya, and sent around 25,000 more fleeing into Bangladesh in what Amnesty International has termed “collective punishment.” (Courtesy of newrepublic.com)
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