The on-going Rohingya genocide

By Chris Scott, news producer

Since August 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar into neighbouring Bangladesh.

Thousands are still trying to escape every day, according to the United Nations.

If you ask the Rohingya men, women and children about why they fled, the accounts are similar; reports of the Myanmar army burning down their villages, raping women and killing their family and friends.

The chair of the UN fact-finding mission on Myanmar, Marzuki Darusman, described the situation as an "ongoing genocide".

"They came to the village shooting at us," said one female refugee.

"We hid our money and jewellery inside pockets in our dresses. They stripped us naked and stole everything. And this was in front of everyone.

"They came in groups and one or two stood guard while the rest went into the houses to violate the other women. One grabbed my hand and took me to a path between some trees and pushed me. I fell down and then he began raping me. I started to scream but then another soldier came and pointed a gun at me."

Another woman said she struggles to comprehend what happened: "A large number of soldiers came and they tortured and raped whoever they could catch. What they have done to us I can't even begin to tell you. I escaped to the forest. After our village was burnt down, they found me there."

Tensions between the Rohingya Muslims, an ethnic minority in Myanmar, and the Buddhist majority have been around for many years, as Sky correspondent Ashish Joshi, who won an International Emmy and BAFTA for his coverage of the Rohingya crisis, explains.

"The Rohingya are a group of people who live between Bangladesh and Burma, historically," says Joshi, speaking on the Behind the Headline podcast. "They were there when the British Empire existed. And this really goes to the heart of the Rohingya problem. It's a question of identity and geography and politics."

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This stretch of land dividing Bangladesh and Burma was known as Arakan. And Joshi says the 2017 crisis can trace its roots back to the Second World War.

"A lot of people who are scholars, who study the history of that region will tell you this is bad blood going back decades," says Joshi. "Because the Rohingya, the settlers of the Arakan region, sided with the British in what was eventually a victorious triumph against the Japanese, whereas the Burmese sided with the Japanese.

"But eventually, what happened is that when the British left and the borders were formed, that area, the contentious area of Arakan which is part of the British Empire, became part of the wider Burma."

Ever since, the Myanmar government has refused to accept the Rohingya as genuine Burmese settlers.

"The Rohingya have no citizenship. They have no state. In other words, they are stateless. They don't belong to Myanmar. They have no identification papers. They are referred to as Bengali illegal immigrants," says Joshi.

"They are seen as treacherous traitors who are there to destabilise the country."

Violence between the two groups has been a constant theme for decades, but it reached its peak in 2017, when an estimated two-thirds of the Rohingya Muslims decided to flee the country in the face of Burmese security forces committing mass killings, arson and rape.

The United Nations has described what happened to the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar as "a textbook case of ethnic cleansing."

In 2017, Zeid Raad al Hussein, who served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2014-2018, accused the Myanmar government of systematically stripping the Rohingya of civil and political rights for decades.

"It goes back before August [2017]," says Joshi.

"First of all, what do you do to dehumanise a group of people? You take away their identity. Let's stop calling them Rohingya, let's refer to them as Bengali immigrants.

"Then let's take away their citizenship, let's make them stateless. So, now they are nameless and stateless. And then let's deprive them of basic human rights. Let's take away education, health.

"And what are we going to do next? I know, we'll slaughter them in their thousands. So, there's this mass killing, this machine clicks in and they are being slaughtered and as they're being slaughtered, they're being told if you stay, we'll rape your women.

"So, they flee, and as they're fleeing, everything they own is razed to the ground; their homes, their mosques, their towns, their villages. And once they've gone, their land is taken over, their paddy fields, livestock are raided and sold and they have nothing.

"So, there's nothing there for them to identify with. That is textbook ethnic cleansing."

But even those who escaped the violence of the Myanmar authorities were not free from terror. To get over the border to Bangladesh, the Rohingya had to cross miles of monsoon-flooded land and over mud-slicked hills before they got to the treacherous Naf River that divides the two countries.

To evade the Myanmar authorities, a lot of those fleeing would attempt to cross at night, sailing in small wooden boats across the rough waters.

"I had my two children on my lap," said one woman.

"When I saw the wave coming I tried to pass one to my husband but we got separated. I was trying to swim holding onto my seven-year-old son. He told me he couldn't swim anymore and I had to let him go because my youngest boy was swallowing water. Then another wave hit us and that separated me from my youngest child. Another wave hit and we both went under.

"After we got separated, I began looking for him under the water. I came up for air and after a while his dead body floated up in front of me. I could hear my oldest boy calling out for me as he was being swept away by the current. Both my children died."

"My mum, dad, brother and sister all got separated in the water," Arafat, a child refugee told Sky News.

"Then my mother found me and grabbed onto me. But I told her you're going to die. And you'll drown as well. Then she let go. And she drowned."

So did the rest of Arafat's family.

Another child, Mohammed, survived by floating on top of a dead body that drifted into shore. He too hasn't seen his parents since trying to cross the river.

The survivors of the crossing congregated in Bangladesh, acres of vast forest soon replaced with sprawling makeshift camps.

"The scenes on the ground really defy all expectations," says Joshi.

"Everywhere you look there are women carrying babies who have just been born. There are men with bandaged legs and arms, clearly who have been hurt in some way.

"They'd been shot, they'd been burned, they'd been slashed with machetes. There were old people being carried on poles and it's a cacophony of sound. It's chaos. They have nowhere to go. Everyone is moving in a different direction trying to find a bit of land they can just sit on just to try and breathe."

The camps didn't exist when Joshi first arrived in Bangladesh. People were just scrabbling around in the mud and dirt for scraps of food. Local Bangladeshis tried to help where they could as international aid was yet to arrive. This sometimes led to further tragedy.

"Groups of friends would hire a truck or a minibus, load it up with food or clothing or blankets or scraps, drive along the highway, throwing these things out the back," Joshi says. "They would be chased by children mostly who had energy to chase after these trucks. And people would die. They would get under the wheels of these trucks. Because they were so desperate, they would get too close."

When Joshi returned, two weeks later, the camps had improved significantly with international aid organisations arriving from all over the world. But they still struggled to keep up with the demand for food, medicine and supplies.

"Everyone has a story of utter and sheer horror," says Joshi. "There are so many traumatised people here all trying to wake from their nightmares. They've seen their families drowned, or butchered, their villages razed to the ground and their women and girls preyed on by predators in uniform.

"These were people sitting in their tents, under tarpaulin sheets, who would tell me their story and I was very conscious of the fact that I was intruding on their grief and the torment. You could just see in their eyes and their expressions.

Behind the Headline: The Rohingya Crisis with Ashish Joshi

Sky News correspondent Ashish Joshi has been to the region three times to see for himself the immense human suffering of the men, women and children forced to leave their homes

The trips would take an emotional toll on Joshi.

"For me as a father, every time I interviewed a child I would be reminded of my own children," he says. "The first trip I came home and I cried a lot. I was very emotional.

"Dealing with children who were the same age as my children again and again, orphans who have seen their families slaughtered.

"What made it really difficult was knowing that [the refugee camp] is it. This is this is where they're going to spend the rest of their lives. They will not be repatriated. They will not go to a school and have an education and be able to grow and learn as human beings.

"This is their life now and not just them for generations of Rohingya to follow as well."

There has been criticism from some that the media is not covering both sides of the Rohingya story, saying that there is violence committed by Rohingya Muslims on Buddhists as well.

"As a reporter, I can only report on what I see and what I hear," Joshi says in response.

"I would give anything to be allowed to go into Rakhine and talk to Buddhists and Hindus, who have allegedly been attacked by Muslim militants, by Rohingya militants. Any atrocity, I don't cover stories because I want to take sides. I cover what I see in front of me.

"The world needs to bear witness independently to what is happening inside Rakhine State. There's a reason the Myanmar authorities won't let anyone in there and that's because they don't want the world to see what is happening there."