Word: arakan
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...Sorry,' I was told, 'but there are no Rohingya here.' I was mystified. From everything that I had heard about this persecuted Muslim minority, the Rohingya come from western Burma's isolated Arakan State. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya, who speak a dialect similar to that of Bengalis from neighboring Bangladesh, have fled the brutality of Burma's military regime by escaping their Buddhist-majority homeland for lives as illegal immigrants. The ruling junta has denied the Rohingya some of the most basic human rights - no citizenship, no freedom of movement, no marriage without permission. In January, their plight made...
...that I'd made the long trip to Arakan, there was a strange lack of information on the Rohingya. Many locals denied their very existence. (The Burmese government, in a curious feat of logic, denies having mistreated the Rohingya, since there is, according to Foreign Minister Nyan Win, no such a minority group in Burma.) Then, a break: a Buddhist Arakan local confided that there were some ethnic Bengalis who lived in a nearby village. He guessed that they'd come from Bangladesh to Burma 10 or 20 years ago and were living in Arakan illegally. Would I like...
...felt more downtrodden than most. The sour smell of anxiety pervaded the air. Eventually, O Lam Myit, the 75-year-old village patriarch, shuffled up, his eyes milky, his longyi (or sarong) frayed, a ragged prayer cap on his head. Like his father and grandfather, he was born in Arakan state. O Lam Myit laughed when I told him that many Burmese thought this village was populated only by recent economic migrants from Bangladesh. In 1978, he was returning from a visit to his home village in the northern part of the state when Burmese immigration officers stopped...
...ship or a nearby island, and many on board attempted to swim for it lest their boat drift in the wrong direction. "We saw many drowning, one by one, as the current was carrying them away and none of them had any energy left to swim," Muzaffar told his Arakan Project interviewer...
...flooding the barge; Indian ships reportedly attempted to search for the 300 missing but were able to rescue only nine refugees from the sea. The survivors have been fed and given medical treatment. They are being housed in relief camps, where they were reached by phone calls from the Arakan Project as well as a reporter from the BBC. The Thai government has yet to return TIME's calls on the matter of the treatment of these refugees, but the country's Foreign Ministry released a statement on Jan. 16 saying that officials were investigating the "facts and surrounding circumstances...