Alwaght- Rohingya Muslims trapped inside Myanmar are dying of hunger while many are in need of medical care in northern Rakhine State.
Witnesses say the situation is dire in Myanmar’s volatile Rakhine state, where a half-million Rohingya Muslims have fled an army crackdown and communal violence.
Abdulla Mehman, who works for an aid agency in the Buthitaung Township, said more than 2,000 people in his village, Kwan Dine, had run out of food, with many others facing shortages.
"We are not allowed to move about freely, and people are struggling to survive," Mehman told Al Jazeera by telephone on Tuesday. "Some people are starving."
Muslim Rohingya families in at least four other villages in northern Rakhine - Kin Taung, Bura Shida Para, Kyar Gaung Taung, and Sein Daung - also reported urgent food shortages and accused soldiers and Buddhist neighbours of intimidation, looting, extortion and cattle theft.
"Please help us," a Rohingya woman from the village of Kin Taung, speaking on the condition of anonymity, begged in a telephone conversation with the Qatari news network.
"We are sick, but we cannot seek medical treatment. We cannot work and we cannot eat."
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, has demanded that Myanmar’s authorities immediately end military operations that have sent more than 500,000 Rohingya Muslims fleeing to Bangladesh, calling the crisis “the world’s fastest developing refugee emergency and a humanitarian and human rights nightmare”.
The current crisis erupted on 25 August, when Myanmar’s army backed by gangs of Buddhist extremists brutally attacked Muslims in Rakhine state on the pretext of responding to the killing of security forces. In the ensuing operation, over 6,000 Rohingya Muslims have been killed in what is clearly an organized campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
