[Neither the government’s nor the activists’
version of events could be independently verified. But an advocacy group,
Fortify Rights, recently said that it had interviewed witnesses who described
what appeared to be extrajudicial killings by the military.]
By Mike Ives
 |
|
Police officers searching a village
in Rakhine State, Myanmar, last week.An attack
on police outposts has
prompted a lockdown by security forces in the area. Credit
Ye Aung Thu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
|
HONG KONG — More than a week after attacks on
police officers began a wave of bloodshed in western Myanmar, a lockdown by
security forces has prevented aid workers from operating in the area, and new
videos of what appear to be local Muslims calling for resistance have raised
fears of more violence.
Maj. Gen. Aung Soe, the deputy minister for
home affairs, told reporters on Monday in Naypyidaw, the capital, that 30
attackers had been killed in Rakhine State since the Oct. 9 assaults on three
border posts that left nine police officers dead. Activists from the Rohingya
ethnic group, a persecuted Muslim minority who number more than a million in
Rakhine, have accused the security forces of waging a counterinsurgency
campaign against civilians, and they have circulated photos that they say show
security forces burning Rohingya homes.
Neither the government’s nor the activists’
version of events could be independently verified. But an advocacy group,
Fortify Rights, recently said that it had interviewed witnesses who described
what appeared to be extrajudicial killings by the military.
A United Nations World Food Program official,
Arsen Sahakyan, said Tuesday that a lockdown in the area since the Oct. 9
attacks had halted the agency’s relief work in villages there, which typically
reaches 70,000 people per month during the lean agricultural season from May to
November. Pregnant or lactating women and young children also receive
year-round food assistance under the program, he added.
Now that road access has been severely
curtailed, “people report to the office, but that’s it,” said Mr. Sahakyan, the
agency’s partnerships officer in Myanmar, referring to its field office in
northern Rakhine. “We cannot go to the areas where we normally distribute
food.”
Rakhine State, which borders Bangladesh, has
long been haunted by ethnic unrest, and it was the site of violence between
Buddhists and Muslims in 2012 that left hundreds dead. Rohingya are denied
citizenship by Myanmar’s government, which considers them migrants from
Bangladesh, even if their families have been in the country for generations.
The government has attributed the Oct. 9
attacks to organized Muslim militants, though it offered no evidence and has
since appeared to backtrack somewhat from the charge. Last Friday, President
Htin Kyaw’s office said the attacks had been carried out by an organization
called Aqa Mul Mujahidin, which it said had links to another little-known
group, the Rohingya Solidarity Organization.
Several analysts and activists who follow
Myanmar said in interviews that they had never heard of the first group and
that the second was thought to be defunct. On Monday, according to news
reports, the Foreign Ministry’s permanent secretary, U Kyaw Zeya, said the
statement from the president’s office was preliminary and should not be used to
“start making accusations, much less condemnations.”
But videos have circulated since the attacks
that appear to show armed Rohingya men in Rakhine calling for violent jihad.
One that emerged in recent days, showing four men holding military-grade
weapons, has an English-language voice-over that makes several demands of the
government, including returning land that it said had been taken from Rohingya.
“We stand as an independent body which is
free from all elements of terror in any nature but seeks fundamental but
legitimate rights and justice for all Arakanese, including our innocent
Rohingyas and other civilians dying from the continuous military assault,” the
voice-over said. Rakhine State is also known as Arakan State.
Jasminder Singh, an analyst at the S.
Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore who studies terrorism
in Southeast Asia, said Wednesday that both the videos and the Oct. 9 attacks
appeared to be the work of a new group called Harakah al-Yaqin, or the Movement
of Certainty, possibly inspired by Al Qaeda or the Islamic State, and that the
initial attackers appeared to have entered Rakhine by boat. He said he had
reached those conclusions after studying the videos and Facebook pages
maintained by Rohingya groups, which feature postings from around Asia.
But U Kyaw Min, the chairman of the Democracy
and Human Rights Party, a registered political party in Myanmar whose Rohingya
members are barred from running for office, said he did not believe the attacks
were the work of organized militants.
Mr. Kyaw Min said information he had gathered
from people in Rakhine suggested the attacks had been carried out by gang
members involved in drug trafficking, not terrorists with links to overseas
Islamist groups. He said he believed the government had fabricated a link
between armed Rohingya and foreign terrorists as a pretext for eventually
forcing people in northern Rakhine to live in refugee camps.
“The Rohingya are the sufferers,” he said.
More than 100,000 people already live in
refugee camps in southern Rakhine, on the fringes of the state capital, Sittwe.
Most are Rohingya, though some are Rakhine, a Buddhist ethnic minority that has
also been persecuted by the Myanmar Army. All were displaced in the 2012
fighting between the Rohingya and the Rakhine, which broke out around Sittwe
and killed dozens.
The de facto leader of Myanmar’s government,
Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, has in recent months called for reconciliation between
the two groups. In August, she appointed Kofi Annan, the former United Nations
secretary general, as chairman of an advisory commission on Rakhine State with
the goal of opening a dialogue with local political and community leaders.
Mr. Annan visited Sittwe in September, and
the commission is expected to file a report in 2017. But analysts said the
recent violence, coupled with the jihadist videos circulating online and the
government’s warnings about Islamist terrorism, was fueling anti-Muslim
sentiment across Myanmar and making the prospect of ethnic reconciliation in
Rakhine State look increasingly remote.
Widney Brown, director of programs at
Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group based in New York that has
documented human rights violations by the authorities against both Rohingya and
Rakhine people in Rakhine State, said it was imperative that the Myanmar
government conduct an impartial investigation into the Oct. 9 attacks and the
subsequent violence.
“There needs to be accountability,” she said
in a telephone interview. “And let’s be clear: on both sides.”
Correction: October 19, 2016
An earlier version of this article referred
incorrectly to an analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
in Singapore. The analyst, Jasminder Singh, is a man.
Follow Mike Ives on Twitter @mikeives.
