7 things you need to know about the Rohingya Crisis

1. Myanmar, or Burma, is a Buddhist state in which Rohingya Muslims are an ethnic minority. Though they’ve been there since the 12th century, they are denied citizenship and labelled as illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh, to where they now flee.

2. Myanmar’s State Councilor and de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi is a global human rights icon. Her Nobel Peace Prize is now unsurprisingly being protested, and she is to be stripped of her honorary Freedom of Oxford title. Suu Kyi was awarded the title in 1997 by the city in which she studied and started her family.

3. However, most governing power in Myanmar belongs to the military, which started what it’s calling ‘anti-terror raids’ and the United Nations has called ‘textbook ethnic cleansing’ on August 25th. An absolute minimum of 1,000 Rohingyas have been killed and more than 500,000 displaced since this date.

4. The raids have come in the form of violence and sexual violence, with refugee interviewees describing the situation to CNN as “the military cutting bodies to pieces and burning them,” and “Burmese people and the military torturing our girls, burning their clothes, cutting off breasts. After rape most of those girls are hacked to death,” they’ve said.

5. Myanmar’s government has reportedly stopped NGOs and UN agencies from entering or providing aid to the north of the state, saying it’s too unstable, and accused the agencies of supporting ‘Terrorists’.

6. Rohingyas are now facing adversity from Bangladeshis also, who are destroying the boats used to carry them to their presumed refuge and allegedly beating arrivals. Bangladeshi authorities have cited a crackdown on drug trafficking for the beatings.

7. The Hon. Saimo Chaha QC, the lawyer working on the Rohingya case at CrowdJustice, notes that “While there has been widespread political condemnation across the world, a concerted legal effort to bring the perpetrators to justice must be mounted now.” Chaha is acting on behalf of Hussein Mohamed and Najma Maxamed, activists who’ve already collected hundreds of thousands of signatures to protest the genocides and now plan to take their case to the next level.

Watch this powerful video on the refugees published by Al Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/09/rohingya-crisis-month-misery-myanmar-rakhine-170925035409435.html