It really wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. Aung San Suu Kyi had been hailed by everyone from U2 and Kofi Annan to Pope John Paul II and the Nobel Commission – they awarded her their 1991 Peace Prize – as Myanmar’s saintlike democratic saviour. Her release in 2010 after 20 years of house arrest was meant to usher in a new Myanmar, free from the isolationist military dictatorship that had been in power since 1962. The dream turned into a bloody nightmare, though, on October 9, 2016 when hundreds of militants, drawn from Buddhist Myanmar’s minority Muslim Rohingya community, attacked three checkpoints along the country’s border with Bangladesh. After further fighting, which claimed the lives of 103 militants and 32 members of the security forces, the army launched a major crackdown that initially saw them arrest and illegally detain thousands of Rohingyas, some of them young children who clearly had no links to the militants.

Worse was to come with soldiers and vigilante mobs launching a scorched earth policy in Myanmar’s eastern Rakhine state.

The United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al-Hussein, revealed that his team on the ground was “receiving accounts of indiscriminate shootings, summary executions, arbitrary arrest, enforced disappearances, rape and other forms of sexual violence and torture.”

The international jury is out on exactly how complicit Aung San Suu Kyi has been in the violence – former Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, is among those who believe she’s lost control of the military – but no one is disputing how serious the crisis is.

In the past eight weeks, 589,000 Rohingyas have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh where they’ve been restricted to a network of camps along the Cox’s Bazar-Teknaf peninsula, which has the longest unbroken beach in the world and has for several decades been a popular backpackers’ destination.

“The Rohingya have experienced difficulties in Myanmar for a long time – there were a couple of hundred thousand in Cox’s Bazar already as a result of previous displacements - but the scale of this has overwhelmed everybody,” says Kieran McConville, a photographer and filmmaker working with Concern who have 40 staff in four camps where they’ve reached more than 250,000 refugees. “Every day you see big open-backed trucks coming up the road with a new influx of frightened and bedraggled families packed into them. I met a lady who said that people, including her brother-in-law, had been shot whilst crossing the border. There are unconfirmed reports of landmines being laid, which, if true, will mean even more deaths and casualties.

“The Bangladeshi government are planning to build another camp with services for 800,000 people so the expectation is that the situation is going to get a whole lot worse.”

One of the first people McConville met in Cox’s Bazar was 24-year-old Amir.

“He limped up to us slowly, his right-calf wrapped in a dirty bandage,” Kieran resumes. “Amir told us how soldiers had burst into his home, killed his young son and daughter and then shot him. His parents are also dead, and he can’t locate his wife. He’s wandering around Kutupalong, this big camp, in a state of shock with a bullet-wound in his leg and no realistic expectation of being able to return to what, if anything, is left of his home.”

While Amir survived, poor little Lukia died shortly after arriving at Cox’s Bazar.

“She was two-years-old and the first kid to arrive at our first nutrition centre,” Kieran notes sadly. “Her mother was sick back at the shelter, so her grandmother brought her in. Our job is to treat severe acute malnutrition, using an outpatient programme of therapeutic feeding. If a child has medical complications, as Lukia did, one of our paramedics refers them to a medical facility to be treated. Tragically, Lukia died before she got to our colleagues at Médecin Sans Frontiers. Our team were really devastated - but that’s what drives them on to help others.” Along with bullet and machete wounds, aid workers are also having to deal with the scars left by rape.

“Some women are understandably reluctant to talk about it themselves, but the anecdotal evidence suggests systemic rape and other forms of sexual assault,” Kieran asserts. “

Refugees have suffered the added indignity and trauma of being able to watch as their homes are burned to the ground.

“I was at our Hakin Para nutrition centre, which is up on a hill, and saw a bunch of people standing and staring off into the distance,” Kieran resumes. “I wandered over to check out what was happening, and very clearly, six or seven miles away, you could see this huge wall of fire and a military helicopter circling overhead.

“A lot of the Syrian refugees you see in Turkey and the Lebanon come from a professional background, but most of the Rohingya are subsistence farmers or labourers. Money and possession-wise they have virtually nothing. If there’s an upside to any of this, it’s that the majority of people I’ve spoken to in the camps now say that they feel safe.”

Over half of the Rohingyas in Cox’s Bazar are young children.

“A lot are orphans who are there with neighbours, grandparents and other relatives,” McConville says. “What they’ve had to endure these past few months in unimaginable.”

The general consensus among western observers is that the main militant Rohingya group, Harakah al-Yaqin (The Faith Movement), is becoming increasingly radicalised and may, if the crisis worsens, start reaching out to the likes of IS who rarely pass up on the opportunity to exploit a localised conflict. At present, Harakah al-Yaqin appears to be a somewhat ragtag force of around 350 men armed with machetes, slingshots and the odd gun smuggled in from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia where they’re believed to have private backers.

The support they enjoy is far from universal, with many Rohingyas accusing the militants of unnecessarily endangering their lives. There have been recent reports of Harakah al-Yaqin preventing males of fighting age from crossing into Bangladesh.

“It suits the Myanmar authorities to have the Rohinghya fighting among themselves,” suggests a UN source who goes on to explain: “With few exceptions, they’re educated, get married, have kids and die in their own disadvantaged communities. Previously I’d have drawn a comparison
with apartheid-era South Africa; now it’s full-on ethnic cleansing.”

As cyclone season approaches, Concern are working in tandem with the Bangladeshi government to scale up their response to the refugee crisis.

“With flooding comes the increased danger of serious disease,” resumes Kieran McConville. “The refugees arriving in Cox’s Bazar are in need of shelter, food, water and healthcare. They require reassurance that they’re safe and will be looked after and that the world cares about what is happening to them.”

concern.net/where-we-work/asia/bangladesh