[When Rohingya insurgents attacked police posts and an army encampment last August, killing a dozen security personnel, a paroxysm of violence against Rohingya civilians followed within hours: mass executions, rapes and village burnings by security forces that United Nations officials have suggested could constitute genocide. Rakhine Buddhist mobs abetted in the bloodletting.]
By Hannah Beech
 |
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Rohingya
Muslims seen behind barbed wire in the Taung Pyo border area where
they
are stranded between Myanmar and
Bangladesh. Credit Adam Dean
for
The New York Times
|
MAUNGDAW,
Myanmar — We waded through
floodwaters, past soldiers hefting rifles, and climbed into a prefabricated
hut.
Inside, a row of men sat huddled against the
wall as armed police and immigration officers stood over them. They were, we
had been given the impression, among the 700,000 Rohingya Muslims who had fled
northern Rakhine State in Myanmar for Bangladesh last year in an exodus that
the United States and other countries condemned as ethnic cleansing.
Now, dozens had been repatriated, officials
said, thanks to the good will of the Myanmar government, which wanted to show
off its commitment to welcoming back the Rohingya and the rows of barracks it
had prepared for the returnees.
But like nearly every interaction on a recent
government-led trip for journalists to the epicenter of the crisis, cracks
appeared in the official story line.
The men at one of the country’s three
repatriation centers shook their heads when asked if they had peacefully come
back to Myanmar from Bangladesh.
They said they had not been repatriated at
all. In fact, they said, they had never even left this waterlogged stretch of
marsh and mountain in Myanmar, and had been swept up in the government’s broad
repression of the Rohingya minority.
One day, last year, three of the men said,
soldiers had arrested them in their village in northern Rakhine State. Five and
a half months later, they were released and charged with illegal immigration.
“They accused us of coming from Bangladesh,
but we have never been to Bangladesh,” Abdus Salim said. “Rakhine is our home.”
U Win Khine, the lead immigration officer,
looked apologetic. Maybe they were liars, he said. He refused to call the men
Rohingya, referring to them as Bengali to imply they belonged in neighboring
Bangladesh.
“Bengalis are not from our country because
they have different blood, skin color and language from us,” Mr. Win Khine
said. “We have no Rohingya here.”
Outside of Myanmar, the tragedy of the
Rohingya is clear. Over the decades, the Muslim minority has been stripped of
its rights — to attend college, to access medical care, to move freely — by a
Buddhist-chauvinist, army-dominated government. Most have no citizenship.
When Rohingya insurgents attacked police
posts and an army encampment last August, killing a dozen security personnel, a
paroxysm of violence against Rohingya civilians followed within hours: mass
executions, rapes and village burnings by security forces that United Nations
officials have suggested could constitute genocide. Rakhine Buddhist mobs
abetted in the bloodletting.
But on this rare trip to northern Rakhine,
under the watchful eye of armed guards, the official narrative diverged from
the internationally accepted reality. The Rohingya had burned their own
residences, we were told by officials and civilians alike. They were terrorists
— and if they were not terrorists, they were women and children manipulated by
shadowy groups in Bangladesh and elsewhere in the Islamic world.
Yet even as we were shepherded through the
muddy, still charred countryside of Rathedaung and Maungdaw, two townships in
northern Rakhine, the discussions grew sticky with contradictions.
We stopped in a village once populated by
Rakhine Buddhists, Rohingya Muslims and the Mro, a formerly jungle-dwelling
ethnic minority. Eight Mro were killed last August by Rohingya insurgents, the
Myanmar authorities have said. Why hadn’t the international media covered these
murders, local officials on our tour asked? But they didn’t address the
thousands of Rohingya who human rights groups say were killed last year.
Like everywhere else we went, officials in
the village insisted that the Rohingya here had torched their own houses in
order to garner global sympathy.
But at one point we spoke freely with local
residents, and a girl, who would be in danger if her name were revealed, said
she missed a Muslim friend who had lived a few houses down. “The Rakhine burned
their houses down,” she said, referring to civilians from the Buddhist ethnic group
that gives Rakhine State its name. “My friend is gone forever.”
A man corrected her quickly. “You’re supposed
to say the reverse,” he admonished. “You should say they burned their own
houses down.”
Outside, another child, playing soccer
barefoot in the rain, was more emphatic.
“I saw it with my own eyes, how the Rakhine
burned down all the Muslim houses,” he said, detailing how a car belonging to a
Rohingya family was lit on fire because the looters didn’t know how to drive.
“Who would burn down their own houses?” the
boy added. “That’s stupid.”
A new school and Buddhist pagoda had been
built on what was once the village’s Muslim quarter. The remaining residents
have been gifted new homes by the government, rows of prefabricated houses that
looked incongruous in one of the poorest places in Asia.
In the town of Maungdaw, U Kyaw Win Htet, the
assistant director of the Maungdaw District General Administration Department,
gave a briefing on the area’s changing demographics. A year ago, Maungdaw
District had a population of 800,000. Now, there were 416,000 people. Before,
the township was 90 percent Muslim. Now it was barely half.
Why did the Muslims leave? Mr. Kyaw Win Htet,
a Buddhist, said he wasn’t sure. “I think they didn’t want to live here
anymore,” he said. “But the reason why, only they themselves know.”
Did the local government have death tolls
from last year’s violence, broken down by ethnicity? Mr. Kyaw Win Htet said he
did not know. Had he ever visited any of the hundreds of burned Rohingya
villages? No, he had not. Did he know of any Muslim employees of his government
department, given that nearly most of the district’s population had been
Rohingya? No, he did not.
Later, Mr. Kyaw Win Htet admitted that the
“Bengali issue” was not his bailiwick. His expertise was flood control. He had
been assigned to talk to us only because his boss was away.
Earlier this week, the Myanmar government
formed yet another commission to investigate what exactly had happened in
northern Rakhine. Half a dozen such committees have been convened so far; none
has determined anything substantive.
Meanwhile, the country’s leadership continues
to deny there was any state-sponsored campaign to remove the Rohingya from
Myanmar.
At one swollen river crossing, a few Rohingya
ventured through the murky water. We had gotten out of the car because it
wasn’t clear whether the vehicle could manage the current, and an elderly
woman, Suma Bibi, and her husband splashed by. I wanted to talk to her so we
ducked under the roof of a border guard hut to escape the rain. She was
shaking.
“I am afraid,” she whispered, jutting her
chin at the armed policeman standing behind me. “I don’t want to be close to
people like that.”
Ms. Bibi said she had tried unsuccessfully to
escape to Bangladesh when her village was destroyed by fire.
“I want to leave,” she said. “But I cannot.”
We had with us an armed guard, Cpl. Ko Hla
Phyu, who wasn’t pleased when we talked to Muslims or showed too much interest
in the scorched wrecks of mosques. The corporal said he knew all about the
“terrorists,” who had created havoc in northern Rakhine.
When the photographer with us, Adam Dean,
defied his instructions and jumped out of the car to take pictures of a charred
village, he remarked that if Adam’s head wasn’t bulletproof, it would be
advisable to return to the car.
“I will lay down my life to make sure the
terrorists don’t get my gun,” he said, cradling his battle rifle.
The final day of our government tour, we
stopped at the Taung Pyo border between Myanmar and Bangladesh, where thousands
of Rohingya have been caught behind barbed wire in a kind of buffer zone
between the two countries. The Myanmar government claims Muslim militants
operate from this narrow strip of territory, a charge these displaced Rohingya
deny.
On earlier occasions, from the Bangladesh
side, I had talked with Dil Mohammed, the leader of this marooned community.
Mr. Mohammed had gone to the University of Yangon, Myanmar’s finest. He once
had a nice house. Now he was stateless, homeless and soaked by the monsoons and
the occasional surge of sewage.
But he laughed when he saw me peering through
the fence from Myanmar.
“Before, you were on that side,” Mr. Mohammed
said in his courtly English, pointing to Bangladesh. “Now you are on this
side.”
A Myanmar border guard shifted the aim of his
muzzle, and Mr. Mohammed stepped aside into a squelch of mud.
“But I am still here in the same place,” he
added. “Do you think that will ever change?”
Follow Hannah Beech on Twitter: @hkbeech
Saw Nang contributed reporting.
