Maungdaw, Sep 3 (AFP) Village chief San Tun’s remote Mro tribe used to get by foraging in the Myanmar jungle, living among the patchwork of ethnic groups who co-existed imperfectly in Rakhine state. Also Read - Bangladesh's Beximco Signs New COVID Vaccine Deal With India's SII to Ensure Priority Access | Read Here

But last month murder visited his community. Also Read - Bangladesh Allows Human Trial of COVID-19 Vaccine Developed by Chinese Company

An attack on his people, allegedly by Muslim Rohingya militants, was the catalyst for the worst round of fighting the region has ever seen, forcing them to flee death, arson and suspicion. Also Read - EU Provides €1.65 Million Humanitarian Aid to Support Flood Victims of Bangladesh, India, Nepal

San Tun says Rohingya militants killed eight villagers as they were out foraging, including his brother and oldest son, on August 3.

Following the deaths a build-up of security forces in northern Rakhine sent tensions soaring.

Heavy fighting broke out three weeks later between Islamist militants and security forces, causing some 73,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee west into Bangladesh, bringing with them harrowing tales of rape and murder at the hands of the military and Buddhist mobs.

But a smaller and similarly terrified stream of civilians from Rakhine’s Buddhist and Hindu communities — some 11,000 — have headed in the opposite direction, their lives also upended by neighbour turning on neighbour.

The Mro, a forest-dwelling and mainly Buddhist tribe who live on Myanmar’s border with Bangladesh, are among them, fleeing the latest round of violence in which they had played an inadvertent central role.

“We Mro used to live on the forests and mountains, our only business was farming since the time of our ancestors,” San Tun, 46, told AFP earlier this week in a government- controlled village outside Maungdaw, the main town in northern Rakhine to which many Buddhists and Hindus have escaped.

“Now we have no security,” he lamented.

Rakhine, Myanmar’s poorest state, has become a crucible of religious hatred focused on the Rohingya, who are reviled and perceived as illegal immigrants in the Buddhist-majority country.

The Rohingya militant group fighting Myanmar’s military since last October — the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) — said the coordinated ambushes they launched on August 25 were in response to the fresh security crackdown on their kin.

San Tun said many of his Mro people — who number between 20,000 and 40,000 — had to leave everything behind as they sought sanctuary in government-held areas, fearful Rohingya militants would target them again.

Now in relative safety his thoughts turned to the village livestock and ripe paddy fields they were forced to abandon.

“There is no one left to feed them, I think our pigs will have died,” he said.

Han Thein, an ethnic Rakhine Buddhist, said her village of Khan Thaya was one of the places ambushed by Rohingya militants on August 25.(AFP)

This is published unedited from the PTI feed.