Myanmar language rohingya
When a military junta took over Burma in 1962, it labeled the Rohingya "Bengalis" and excluded them from citizenship, leaving them stateless, with no access to government health care, education, or most jobs. In 1948 the Rohingya were left in newly independent Burma amid a Buddhist majority that now saw them as disloyal and potentially dangerous foreigners. The British promised the Rohingya their own state but did not deliver. During World War II, the Rohingya supported the British while Burmese nationalists supported the Japanese. Why do the Burmese reject them?Mistrust goes back decades, and has its roots in ethnic and religious enmity as well as political differences. The Rohingya language, Rohingyalish, is close to the Chittagonian dialect spoken in southern Bangladesh. During more than a century of British colonial rule, from 1824 to 1948, many Muslims in what is now India and Bangladesh relocated to Burma, then a British Indian province, to work, and they, too, were absorbed into the Rohingya.
But since populations have been driven back and forth across the border of what is now Bangladesh at least four times since the late 1700s, there was significant mixing with South Asian Muslims. The Rohingya are believed to be descended from those early Arab and Mughal traders. Muslims have lived in the coastal Rakhine area, separated from the rest of Myanmar by a mountain range, since at least the 12th century. Who are the Rohingya?They are often described as the world's most persecuted people. "I've never seen a group this devastated, this destroyed." "The sheer scale of it is beyond belief," Tejshree Thapa of Human Rights Watch told Newsweek. About 60 percent are children, and many have lost their parents to massacres back home. The influx of brutalized families has overwhelmed aid efforts, and thousands of hungry people are camping in the open, exposed to monsoon rains. has labeled it a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing." With more than 420,000 people chased into Bangladesh since August and tens of thousands following them every week, the exodus is the world's most rapid and intense refugee crisis since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The Myanmar army and government call their assault a counterterrorist operation, but the U.N. In some places, Buddhist militias and mobs have joined in the attacks against the Muslim-majority Rohingya. Troops have burned scores of villages, beheading men, raping women, and even killing children. What's going on?Hundreds of thousands of desperate Rohingya people are fleeing a vicious military purge in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma). Why are these people so hated? Here's everything you need to know: Government troops are slaughtering the Rohingya and driving them out of Myanmar.