(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Ashok Nigam said the Buddhist-majority government of Myanmar declared on Sunday that 22,587 people, including 21,700 Muslims, had been displaced and 4,665 houses set ablaze in a new wave of communal unrest that swept Rakhine state this week. “We have to say that this is a current estimate and we suspect there may be additional numbers.” “Those 22,000 people are still in the locality where they were, they are not moving. The boat people are separate,” Nigam said, referring to thousands of additional displaced people who have surged towards Rakhine’s capital Sittwe. The recent bout of communal violence broke out after Buddhist extremists attacked Rohingya Muslims and set fire to their homes in several villages in Rakhine. Satellite imagery shows an entire section of a town burned to the ground by the assailants. Based on reports coming out of Myanmar, over 100 Rohingya Muslims have been killed since last week. Myanmar army forces allegedly provided the Buddhists with containers of petrol to set ablaze the houses of Muslim villagers and force them out of their houses. The silence of human rights organizations toward the abuses against Rohingyas has emboldened the extremist Buddhists and Myanmar’s government forces. The Buddhist-majority government of Myanmar refuses to recognize Rohingyas and has classified them as illegal migrants, even though the Rohingyas are said to be Muslim descendants of Persian, Turkish, Bengali, and Pathan origins, who migrated to Myanmar as early as the 8th century.
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