Last month, the United Nations’ top human-rights official called Myanmar’s ongoing military campaign against its Rohingya Muslim minority a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” Since August, nearly half of the country’s 1.1 million Rohingya have fled into neighboring Bangladesh in the face of attacks by Myanmar’s military and Buddhist villagers. Rohingya have starved to death and drowned during the journey and have been trampled by elephants after crossing the border into what they thought would be safety. Many say that they don’t plan to return to Myanmar. The Magnum photojournalist Moises Saman was in Bangladesh this past week documenting the conditions Rohingya are enduring as they flee, whether wading through the river that marks the border between the two countries, making desperate efforts to obtain food and shelter, or finding dignified ways to bury their dead. Saman described the current flood of people across the border as one wave in a cycle of violence that has been going on for years. “It just seems to never end,” he said. “It’s wave after wave after wave.” Refugee camps that have been in the area for years, he continued, were scrambling to build extensions. Heavy rain and extreme heat created dire conditions in the camps; N.G.O.s were warning of the danger of a cholera outbreak. “Every single day, I saw someone dying, or someone being buried,” Saman said. On Monday, thousands of Rohingya who made it across the river into Bangladesh were held in a rice field overnight, prohibited, by overwhelmed Bangladeshi border-patrol members, from continuing on toward the refugee camps several miles up the road. In one photograph, taken at dusk on Tuesday, Saman captured a woman standing in the middle of the river, looking in the direction of his camera. “That was her realizing she’d have to spend another night out in the elements,” he said.
