When the bombs started falling, they were almost beautiful — like the purple blossoms of the banana tree, Manwara and her sister Shamshida would recall later.
Their family was on the run, escaping the mortar fire that drove them from their home in Hari Fara, one of the last refuges for Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority. They left their village in August, only to be hit by a rain of bombs released from drones. The strikes killed their parents. Their other three sisters, missing, are presumed dead.
They were among thousands of ethnic Rohingya families fleeing their villages this summer amid a new wave of targeted violence, a horrible echo of the ethnic cleansing by Myanmar’s military that killed thousands and exiled hundreds of thousands in 2017.
This violence was not at the hands of the military, though. Instead, it was from a pro-democracy rebel group that was raised to fight the army. The rebels’ political aim may be different, but the persecution they are inflicting on the Rohingya — airstrikes, mass arson, sexual violence — is torn from the government’s old playbook.
No matter who is in control in Myanmar, it seems, it is the Rohingya who suffer.
“Everyone hates us, but I don’t know why,” said Ms. Manwara, 19. “It’s our curse.”
After years of civil war, the military junta that overthrew a democratic, civilian government in 2021 has lost control of about two-thirds of the country’s territory. Yet the victories by the armed resistance — a patchwork of militias fighting in the name of restoring democracy and of securing better rights for the minorities they represent — offer no moral certainty.
The Arakan Army, the mightiest in the rebel alliance, stands accused of massacring the Rohingya, including the parents of Ms. Manwara and Ms. Shamshida, in a display of ethnic chauvinism that traces one of Myanmar’s many fault lines.
Over the years, more than a million Rohingya have been expelled from Rakhine State to neighboring Bangladesh. Effectively stripped of their citizenship, they are the world’s largest stateless population.
Now, another wave is fleeing. The Arakan Army, drawn from an ethnic Rakhine population, is using its victories against the junta to target the Muslim minority, according to testimony from scores of recent arrivals.
The rebel group’s attacks on the Rohingya have been so brutal that Rohingya armed groups formed to oppose the military regime have now joined with the army — the same force that terrorized them for decades — in fighting the Arakan Army.
“Myanmar is plumbing the depths of a human rights abyss,” said James Rodehaver, the head of the U.N. human rights team monitoring the country.
The fate of Hari Fara, the sisters’ hometown and one of dozens of Rohingya villages emptied in recent months, shows the speed with which catastrophe has struck Myanmar’s most vulnerable population.
On military-guided tours of Rakhine State in 2018 and 2019, I passed though Hari Fara, noting its tidy shop houses and vegetable plots.
After previously traveling through villages ethnically cleansed by the military and ethnic Rakhine mobs, the display of regular Rohingya life — men strolling to the mosque, women haggling over fish, children playing on cellphones — felt like a mirage.
Today, these residents of Hari Fara are gone. Many homes are destroyed, another Rohingya repository erased.
“Hari Fara was very big and busy, but I don’t know what’s left now,” said Anwar, a pharmacist whose shop was on the main street. “I fear it’s all gone.”
It started with a single, ominous killing.
In February, Mujib Ullah, Hari Fara’s chairman, was walking back from prayers when men on a motorcycle fatally shot him. Locals blamed the Arakan Army, which was scoring battlefield victories against the junta in its quest for ethnic Rakhine autonomy.
Arakan Army scouts came, demanding recruits. Dozens were taken away, including Omar Ali, 19.
Soon after, Rohingya Salvation Organization soldiers arrived in Hari Fara. The fighters, who sneaked in wearing women’s burqa robes, said that times had changed: The Rohingya needed to fight alongside the Myanmar military, not against them, because the Arakan Army was a bigger threat.
About 150 recruits from the area were conscripted, including Omar’s brother, Hassan Ali, 17. At an emptied school, he learned to load an AK-47. He was sent to the front lines against the Arakan Army, escaping a month later.
“I didn’t like shooting guns,” Hassan told me. And he feared he might shoot Omar, conscripted by the other side.
In mid-July, the Arakan Army ordered residents of Hari Fara to leave home for their safety. Some figured they could outlast these troubles, just as they had escaped earlier violence.
Within days, the boom and crackle of rocket launchers, mortars, small-arms fire — it was hard to know which, it was so loud — neared Hari Fara, all fired from the direction of Arakan Army positions.
Then the drone strikes started.
Sajida was beside her husband, their 3-year-old son tucked between them, when what sounded like daytime insects swarmed the night.
The drone bomb killed her husband. Bomb fragments ripped the flesh from Ms. Sajida’s flank, and her son’s body was sprayed with shrapnel, medical records show. But they survived.
As villagers fled Hari Fara in early August, mixed among them were armed men in black, whom they assumed were Rohingya militants. The Arakan Army has said that it targets only Rohingya soldiers.
Terrified Rohingya streamed toward the border where the Naf River divides Myanmar from Bangladesh. They carried sacks of rice and family photos. Some rolled wheeled suitcases until the road ran out. Then they balanced the luggage on their heads. Children stumbled along with Disney backpacks. Their parents clutched USB cords and headphones, diapers and squawking chickens.
The riverbank swelled with crowds of people desperate to cross. Then the drones swooped again.
Those strikes killed at least 150, according to United Nations estimates. The mud turned purplish from blood, witnesses said. It was one of the deadliest attacks since Myanmar’s civil war began and came, witnesses and the international investigators say, from positions controlled by the Arakan Army.
U Khaing Thu Kha, an Arakan Army spokesman, denied that the armed group killed civilians.
“There is war in Rakhine, it is not only Muslims who are suffering,” he said, asking why international groups “only talk about Muslim human rights and are silent about the human rights of Rakhine people?”
The sisters — Ms. Manwara and Ms. Shamshida, who was heavily pregnant — fled their home in Hari Fara a few days later. Their parents were killed by a drone bomb along the way.
The sisters ran together, but at some point, their tightly held hands loosened. Then another hand, strong and male, grabbed Ms. Manwara. She was dragged away, she said, and raped by soldiers in Arakan Army uniforms.
Ms. Shamshida’s water broke while crossing the Naf to Bangladesh. As the boat nosed onto the riverbank, she staggered off and dropped into the mud. Among the grasses, she gave birth to a baby girl.
Since September, Ms. Manwara, Ms. Shamshida and their younger brother, Anwar Halek, have been living in a corner of a tarpaulin shelter in Camp 26 of 33 Rohingya settlements in Bangladesh.
More than a million Rohingya live in this narrow finger of Bangladesh pressed against Myanmar. Lacking official refugee status, they cannot build proper houses and are ineligible for school or health services.
The camps in Bangladesh have exploded with violence in recent months, as armed groups battle for dominance. At least 70 people have been shot dead this year, according to local monitors.
The situation has galvanized thousands of Rohingya to pay traffickers for passage across the Bay of Bengal to Malaysia and Indonesia, in hopes of manual labor jobs. Dozens have drowned or died since the sailing season began in September. The United Nations refugee agency said that arrivals to Indonesia in October were up 700 percent compared with the year before.
Not all passengers are willing. Four Rohingya boys were playing soccer in September when a man offered them jobs in Bangladesh. Instead, they were kidnapped and loaded into the hold of a crowded boat, the ceiling so low they could barely sit up. As the waves sloshed, they vomited in a plastic bag passed between captives. They relieved themselves in plastic bags, too.
Off the southern coast of Myanmar, the boat was eventually apprehended by the Myanmar Navy.
About 120 people were packed inside, Myanmar state media documented. The captives, including the four boys, blinked in the light but were too weak to do much more. Two other boys had been thrown overboard after dying.
After 25 days away, the boys made it back to their camp in Teknaf, Bangladesh.
“I’m scared to go out anymore because I think I will be snatched again,” said Abdel Hossain, 13, one of the four boys. He no longer plays soccer.
Abduction is a constant fear in the camps. Children are enslaved as servants or prostitutes. Boys and young men are kidnapped by Rohingya militias and delivered to the Myanmar junta to fight the Arakan Army. In May, Rohingya soldiers grabbed conscripts at gun- or knife-point.
Jubair, 14, was walking in the camp when a scrum surrounded him, telling him that his family would be killed if he did not go with them.
The militants gathered about 80 captives in an empty shelter, the walls of tarp and palm leaf thin enough for their screams to echo through the warren of tents. But no one came to rescue them.
The conscripts were taken over the Naf River to a military camp in Myanmar. Bangladeshi border guards watched them board the boat, three conscripts said. Jubair was taught how to pull the pin of a grenade and to assemble a land mine.
“I tried to learn, but I was shaking all the time,” he said.
After 20 days of training, eight draftees, including Jubair, stole out at night. One man stepped on a mine. The rest kept running and made it back to Bangladesh.
Now, Jubair is under threat of another conscription.
“I don’t want to go back to fight,” he said. “But I don’t want my family to die.”
Near his tent, the Naf moved slowly between Myanmar and Bangladesh. Shells traced parabolas, as R.S.O. soldiers battled the Arakan Army. This month, the Arakan Army claimed significant territory from the military, including Hari Fara.
Ms. Shamshida has not left her tent since September, except for latrine visits. Her newborn suffered from jaundice and fever. At 20 days, the baby died.
Ms. Shamshida barely speaks now. When she does, the words come out garbled. She rocks back and forth, her arms cradling a missing baby.
Ms. Manwara holds her sister’s hand and strokes her hair.
“We want to go home to Hari Fara,” she said. “But everything has changed.”
The post Tormentors Change, but Not the Torment appeared first on New York Times.
