Eyewitness: the Rohingya horrors and Aung San Suu Kyi’s whitewash

Abstract

First paragraph: It was a bright autumn morning, and I had just dropped off my two children at nursery and was scrolling through Twitter, when I spotted avideoof another mother’s two children. The youngest was a one-year-old boy, the same age as my own youngest; the other, his nine-year-old sister, had been carrying him for miles. She was weeping, the tears from her terrified eyes indistinguishable from the rain pouring off her short black hair and drenched clothes. A Rohingya child, she had fled from the one of the many scenes of horror inflicted by the Myanmar military on Muslim areas across the country’s beleaguered Rakhine state, where hundreds of villages have beenburned to the groundand where fleeing people have been killed by landmines andchildren beheaded. As I struggled to get my front door key into the lock, I found I was crying too.