ZUMA Press photographer Olmo Calvo was awarded a POYi 2018 Award of Excellence for his work ’Rohingyas, Flee from Genocide.’ http://poyi.org/75/R1075/ae02.php
Since August 2017, more than 600,000 Rohingya refugees have arrived in Bangladesh to escape persecution in Myanmar and is becoming the world’s fastest growing refugee crisis. This Muslim minority denounces that the army and radical Buddhists of the border country burn their villages and attack them with machetes and firearms. According to Medecins Sans Frontieres, nearly 7000 Rohingyas have died in Myanmar since last August. In the words of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the Rohingya people are being victimized by ”an ethnic cleansing manual”. In spite of the dimension of the tragedy, it is happening before the passive gaze of the international community. The Rohingya, who numbered around one million in Myanmar at the start of 2017, are one of the many ethnic minorities living in the country. Rohingya Muslims represent the largest percentage of Muslims in Myanmar, and the majority live in Rakhine state. They have their own language and culture and claim their descendants have been in the region for generations. But the government of Myanmar, a predominantly Buddhist country, denies the Rohingya citizenship and even excluded them from the 2014 census, refusing to recognize them as a people. It sees them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. The changing seasons of the subcontinent are about to bring further suffering upon the already persecuted population that has fled to Bangladesh. Now they must prepare for the onset of the monsoon, the flooding that follows.
ZUMAland.com 