[Interviews with monks, politicians and refugees in this port city demonstrate how difficult it will be for Burmese and Bangladeshi officials to hammer out a plan for the Rohingya to return to Rakhine state. Leaders from both the Buddhist community and Suu Kyi’s government deny atrocities against Rohingya have taken place at all, saying that the refugees fled in fear after Rohingya militants attacked police posts in late August.]
By
Annie Gowen
 |
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In
the port city of Sittwe in western Burma, monks and public officials deny
atrocities were
committed by the military, and refugees recount tales of
killings by Rohingya
militants. (Annie Gowen/The Washington Post)
|
SITTWE,
Burma — The Hindu woman wept
as she vowed never to return home, where she said Rohingya militants
slaughtered her son, daughter-in-law and three granddaughters in August.
“They killed my family,” Halu Bar Hla, 70,
said through tears at a camp for internally displaced people in western Burma.
“I will not go back. I will die if I go back to my village. They will slit my
throat.”
Hla’s account illustrates the complexity of
the Rohingya crisis, in which Buddhists and minorities such as Hindus claim
that militant Rohingya have carried out atrocities against them even as a
brutal military “clearance operation” has sent 600,000 Rohingya Muslims across
the border into Bangladesh.
The U.N. human rights chief has called the
Burmese military’s crackdown a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” and
Burma’s democratically elected government and its de facto leader, Aung San Suu
Kyi, have been widely condemned during the exodus.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will
meet with Suu Kyi and the military commander on Wednesday in Burma, where he is
expected to press for a “credible investigation” into alleged abuses and could
raise the possibility of renewed sanctions, a State Department official said.
The Burmese military issued an internal report this week that exonerated its
soldiers of any wrongdoing.
Interviews with monks, politicians and refugees
in this port city demonstrate how difficult it will be for Burmese and
Bangladeshi officials to hammer out a plan for the Rohingya to return to Rakhine state.
Leaders from both the Buddhist community and Suu Kyi’s government deny
atrocities against Rohingya have taken place at all, saying that the refugees
fled in fear after Rohingya militants attacked police posts in late August.
“The extremists incited villagers to go away
saying the Burma army would come and kill them. They killed Hindus and other
ethnic minorities. We could not find the death of any Muslim,” said Win Htein,
a top adviser to Suu Kyi. “There is no genocide or ethnic cleansing.”
Sittwe is about as close as journalists can
freely get to northern Rakhine state, now sealed by the military, where the
militants attacked on Aug. 25. Behind the military cordon, the violence has
ebbed. Villagers and aid workers allowed entry to that area describe ghostly
scenes of burned Rohingya villages, largely devoid of people. Estimates vary,
but between 100,000 to 200,000 Rohingya remain, with food and medical supplies
running low.
“Even with the destruction, you can see a
bicycle that’s just left. It’s a very strange feeling, as if life has stopped.
The sense of emptiness is quite striking,” said Fabrizio Carboni, the head of
the Burma delegation of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Red Cross groups — so far the only outside
aid workers permitted to enter — have distributed food and cash assistance to
86,000 since late August.
A Rohingya grocer in the town of Maungdaw
said by telephone that security is tight and the Rohingya are not permitted to
travel.
“We’re trapped and surrounded by military,”
said Ko Hla Win, 34. They are surviving because some Buddhists are secretly
selling them food, he said.
Elsewhere, state workers began harvesting
70,000 acres of rice paddies the Rohingya left behind, a spokesman said. They
are also preparing two camps to house returning refugees.
It’s been more than two months since the
August attacks triggered a crackdown that left more than 280 villages burned —
according to a Human Rights Watch analysis of satellite photos — and scores
dead. Survivors have alleged widespread human rights violations by the
military, including rapes and mass executions. Witness accounts have been
difficult to verify because the government has denied U.N. human rights
investigators and others access to the area.
The exodus has riveted international
attention on the plight of more than 1 million Rohingya Muslims long denied
citizenship and other basic rights in Burma, the majority-Buddhist nation of 51
million people in Southeast Asia that is also known as Myanmar. The country
held largely democratic elections in 2015, but the military still controls
security, key ministries and lucrative state-owned enterprises.
At the same time the Rohingya fled, more than
30,000 Hindus, Buddhists and ethnic minorities were also displaced, with some
fleeing south to Sittwe to take refuge in monasteries. In interviews, displaced
villagers said they were afraid to return home because they feared the Rohingya
insurgents whose attacks on police posts in their villages precipitated the
crisis.
In the years since Burma’s independence from
Britain in 1948, the country’s military regime gradually diminished the rights
of the Rohingya, stripping them of citizenship and the right to vote. Today the
government considers Rohingya illegal immigrants from Bangladesh; they are
called “Bengalis” here, or the slur “Kalar.” Even the term “Rohingya” is
anathema; Suu Kyi herself won’t use it because it is inflammatory, she told The
Washington Post in an interview last year.
In 2012, the rape of a Buddhist woman by
Rohingya men triggered widespread communal violence after which more than
100,000 Rohingya were confined to detention camps. At the same time, a movement
of hard-line Buddhist nationalism gathered steam, led by radical monks.
Shortly thereafter, a group of Saudi-based
Rohingya expatriates formed the militant Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or
ARSA, according to a December report from the International Crisis Group. Its
leaders eventually traveled to the area to recruit and surreptitiously train villagers
in guerrilla war tactics, the report said.
Maung Oo Than Tin, 25, a Buddhist college
student, recalled that one of his best school friends, a Rohingya, stopped
speaking to him after the 2012 violence and later left the country. About three
months ago, the former friend messaged him ominously on Facebook, “We are going
to kill you.”
Grocery store owner Sander Moe, 25, a member
of the ethnic Marma community, which was also allegedly threatened by
militants, said she believed that most of her Rohingya neighbors joined ARSA
last year after four village men were recruited to be local leaders. They
trained volunteers in the woods and exhorted Rohingya to stop patronizing
Buddhist businesses, causing her sales to drop from $20 to $3 a day.
She said locals made up the mob that attacked
a police station across the street from her home in August, armed with long
knives and grenades. In the crowd, she could discern the mullahs, a stocky rice
farmer and even an 8-year-old boy. She and others fled to a monastery, which
was besieged for several days before the villagers were able to escape to
Sittwe.
She now fears returning home.
“I don’t want to go back,” she said, adding
that she worries she may be raped.
The story of Hindu villagers allegedly killed
en masse by Rohingya militants is more complicated than the experiences of
others who allege violence by the insurgents. In late September and early
October, government spokesman Zaw Htay repeatedly posted on Facebook about the
alleged attack on Hindus by “extremist terrorists.” A group of journalists was
flown to view 45 Hindus allegedly exhumed from a mass grave. Human Rights Watch
accused the government of “playing politics” with the dead.
But now the survivors are languishing. More
than 500 Hindus, including Halu Bar Hla, remain camped in squalid conditions
under the bleachers in Sittwe’s soccer stadium. The government has not provided
food rations since Nov. 2, they say, and they are surviving on rice donations
from monks and other well-wishers in town.
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