[Much of northern Rakhine remained inaccessible to international relief agencies because of the military operations and travel restrictions, activists and aid workers said this week. They added that thousands of Rohingya people had not been permitted to leave their villages — even as some members of the Rakhine group, a Buddhist ethnic minority in Myanmar that has occasionally clashed with both the Rohingya and the government in recent years, have fled south to Sittwe, the provincial capital.]
By Mike Ives
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Border police officers on
patrol in Maungdaw Township, where much of the violence
in Myanmar has taken place this
month. Credit Ye Aung Thu/Agence France-Presse
— Getty Images
|
HONG
KONG — In the aftermath of
violence this month in western Myanmar that has left scores of people dead, the
authorities are facing mounting pressure to lift a weekslong military lockdown
that advocacy groups say has trapped Muslims in their communities and largely
prevented aid workers from helping them.
People in the northern part of Rakhine State
have watched the Myanmar Army and the border police loot shops, rape women,
burn homes and Qurans, and shoot unarmed people in the days and weeks since an
attack this month on a guard post near the Bangladeshi border killed nine
police officers, rights activists say. The United Nations, in a statement on
Monday, urged the government to address “growing reports of human rights
violations” in the area.
The violence this month has largely affected
members of the Rohingya ethnic group, a stateless Muslim minority with roughly
one million members in Rakhine State. The Rohingya have been unable to obtain
Myanmar citizenship, even though many of their families have lived in the
country for generations.
Much of northern Rakhine remained
inaccessible to international relief agencies because of the military
operations and travel restrictions, activists and aid workers said this week.
They added that thousands of Rohingya people had not been permitted to leave
their villages — even as some members of the Rakhine group, a Buddhist ethnic
minority in Myanmar that has occasionally clashed with both the Rohingya and the
government in recent years, have fled south to Sittwe, the provincial capital.
International nonprofit groups have been
unable to reach those displaced by the violence and to offer humanitarian
programs like basic health services, Marta Kaszubska, the coordinator of the
INGO Forum Myanmar, a consortium of international nonprofits in the country,
said in an emailed statement on Wednesday.
“The longer this situation continues, the
more vulnerable people will get, as food supplies dwindle and life-threatening
health problems are left untreated,” she added.
But U Tin Maung Swe, the spokesman for the
Rakhine government, disputed accounts of human rights violations. Reports of
soldiers and border police officers killing and terrorizing villagers were
untrue, he said in a brief telephone interview on Thursday, and the area had
never been under lockdown. “If you want to go, I will arrange access,” he said.
Reports of human rights violations in
northern Rakhine could not be independently verified. Mr. Tin Maung Swe
declined to say why he believed they were untrue.
The European Commission reported last week
that 10,000 internally displaced Rohingya people were confined in coastal
Maungdaw Township, where much of the violence has taken place this month, and
that 1,000 Rakhine people had been relocated from northern Rakhine State to a
new refugee camp on a soccer field in Sittwe. It said that 2,000 other Rakhine
people were sheltering in monasteries, temples and schools in Maungdaw and
neighboring Buthidaung Township.
A spasm of violence between Rohingya and
Rakhine people in the Sittwe area in 2012 that killed dozens displaced more
than 100,000 people. The vast majority of those are Rohingya, but some are
Rakhine. They now live separately in refugee camps along Sittwe’s rural
fringes.
Naing Min, a Rohingya villager in northern
Rakhine, said he had witnessed border police officers and Myanmar Army soldiers
driving people out of War Pate, a village in Maungdaw Township, in recent days.
“Then they’re burning the houses,” Mr. Naing
Min said by telephone on Thursday. “I’ve seen this from a half-mile away.”
Abdul Rasheed, a Rohingya activist in Yangon,
Myanmar’s cultural and business capital, said his contacts in northern Rakhine
had documented 119 rapes and the burning or demolition of 700 to 800 homes
since the attack this month on the border post. More than 200 people there had
also been killed by the authorities or disappeared, he added, and many others
were wounded by gunfire but unable to find medical treatment. He said he based
his assessment on telephone conversations with more than 20 people in the area.
Mr. Rasheed said he worried that the
military’s response to the initial attack may only aggravate the grievances
that many Rohingya have harbored against the Myanmar government for years,
driving them to further violence.
“Many people may resist against this lawless
action,” he said in a WhatsApp message on Thursday. “Could be harmful for our
people.”
Videos have circulated online this month that
appear to show groups of heavily armed Rohingya men calling for jihad against
the authorities. Activists and government officials say the videos appear to be
authentic. But Fortify Rights, an advocacy group in Southeast Asia, has said
the videos are unusual and should not be taken as signs of widespread militancy
among Muslims in the area.
Chris Lewa, a Rohingya rights advocate in
Thailand, said that shootings and house burnings had appeared to taper off in
northern Rakhine but that the authorities were now arresting community and
religious leaders, many of whom had not yet been released.
“What exactly happens to them once they get
arrested?” Ms. Lewa asked. “We’re of course concerned they would be tortured.”
Myanmar’s de facto leader, Daw Aung San Suu
Kyi, has called for investigations into the violence in northern Rakhine and
cautioned against making accusations without evidence. Other officials have
denied any wrongdoing.
“We haven’t done anything lawless,” U Zaw
Htay, a spokesman for Myanmar’s president, U Htin Kyaw, said in response to the
statement by the United Nations, according to the Irrawaddy, a website that
covers Myanmar.
The United Nations World Food Program, which
provides food assistance for tens of thousands in Rakhine, said that it had
begun distributing cash assistance on Wednesday to 20,000 people from
vulnerable households in Buthidaung Township and that several schools in
Buthidaung and Maungdaw had reopened after being closed this month.
But an official at the agency, Arsen
Sahakyan, said that the planned distribution of food supplements to 17,000
pregnant women, nursing mothers and malnourished children in areas only
accessible by river was delayed and that the agency would resume giving food to
50,000 people in Maungdaw once the area became accessible. It was also
“assessing the feasibility,” he added, of resuming a program that normally
feeds 65,000 students.
Saw Nang contributed reporting from Mandalay,
Myanmar.
