AFP, Mrauk U, Myanmar :
By the twisted standards of Myanmar’s Rakhine state, Abdullah is one of its more fortunate Rohingya residents.
The 34-year-old is alive, his village is intact and he is able to make a living-albeit a meagre one-in his homeland as a farmer.
Abdullah’s Rohingya Muslim minority are disappearing fast from Myanmar.
Some one million of them-around two-thirds of their entire stateless community-have been forced over the border to refugee camps in Bangladesh by successive waves of persecution.
The latest has expelled some 700,000 Rohingyas since August last year, when the army launched a campaign of violence that the UN says amounted to “ethnic cleansing”.
Abdullah’s village of Shan Taung is near the temple-studded town of Mrauk U, not far from the epicentre of the most recent crackdown in northern Rakhine but partly sheltered from its worst excesses by a range of forested mountains.
By the twisted standards of Myanmar’s Rakhine state, Abdullah is one of its more fortunate Rohingya residents.
The 34-year-old is alive, his village is intact and he is able to make a living-albeit a meagre one-in his homeland as a farmer.
Abdullah’s Rohingya Muslim minority are disappearing fast from Myanmar.
Some one million of them-around two-thirds of their entire stateless community-have been forced over the border to refugee camps in Bangladesh by successive waves of persecution.
The latest has expelled some 700,000 Rohingyas since August last year, when the army launched a campaign of violence that the UN says amounted to “ethnic cleansing”.
Abdullah’s village of Shan Taung is near the temple-studded town of Mrauk U, not far from the epicentre of the most recent crackdown in northern Rakhine but partly sheltered from its worst excesses by a range of forested mountains.
