Rohingya refugees today marked the anniversary of a deadly military crackdown in their Myanmar homeland that drove 700,000 of the persecuted minority into Bangladesh, stateless and confronting a grim future. Raids by Rohingya militants on August 25 last year across Myanmar's Rakhine state spurred an army crackdown which the United Nations has likened to "ethnic cleansing". Waves of Rohingya fled by foot or boat to Bangladesh in an exodus unprecedented in speed and scale.

Rohingya activists in Bangladesh's refugee camps vowed to mark the "black day" with prayers, speeches, and song. The latest influx has placed enormous pressure on Bangladesh's impoverished Cox's Bazar district, which quickly grew into the world's largest refugee settlement. The squalid camps already hosted generations of Rohingya expelled from Rakhine and the latest arrivals pushed numbers close to one million.