Rohingya persecution enters darker phase in Myanmar

Mosuna Begum buries her head in a scarf to hide her tears and recounts what happened to her a few weeks ago outside her village home in the west of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma).

"A large number of military entered the village," she recalls from her new home at the Leda refugee camp in the Cox's Bazar district of Bangladesh, just 3km from the Myanmar border.

“They started shooting and burning houses. In the dead of night, the military entered my room,” she says. “They divided the males and the females, and the women were taken into the forest. I was raped by two soldiers and my husband was slaughtered.”

Begum’s story cannot be independently verified but it chimes with those of thousands of recent Muslim refugees from predominantly Buddhist Myanmar. Rights groups say members of the security forces are persecuting Rohingya Muslim civilians.

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The events have pitted the civilian-led government of Aung San Suu Kyi against international critics who say it should be doing more to protect the Rohingya and hold the army to account. Almost a dozen Nobel Peace Prize winners signed an open letter to the UN Security Council last week criticising their fellow laureate. They branded the action against the Rohingya a "human tragedy amounting to ethnic cleansing", drawing parallels with Rwanda and Bosnia.

Fabricated allegations

Aung San Suu Kyi has appealed for time. Some government officials and state media have dismissed the allegations as fabrications and condemned the activists and journalists who have reported them.

The crisis is the worst for years in the western Myanmar state of Rakhine and for its Rohingya minority, against whom discrimination became entrenched during previous military-dominated governments. Many have been refused citizenship, made subject to restrictions on movements and jobs and consigned to squalid camps while large numbers have fled the country.

The latest Rakhine problems began in October when nine Myanmar police officers were reportedly killed in attacks close to the Bangladeshi border. Soon afterwards, the army began conducting sweeps to root out the people they believed were responsible.

According to the testimonies of several witnesses in refugee camps in Bangladesh, these sweeps have been indiscriminate in their violence.

Noor Haba claims the military came to her small village of 3,000 and killed half of the people there. “They started killing and burning. They shot us from helicopters and one air attack killed my husband,” she says. “Our houses were completely burnt to ash.”

On Monday, the office of Aung San Suu Kyi said it had detained several police officers over a video showing security forces rounding up Rohingya villagers and beating them.

Last month, Amnesty International accused Myanmar of engaging in a "campaign of violence against Rohingya people that may amount to crimes against humanity".

Destruction of buildings

The International Organisation for Migration, an intergovernmental group, has said that about 21,000 people fled Myanmar for Bangladesh between October 9th and December 2nd. Human Rights Watch, a US-based group, has estimated that at least 1,500 buildings had been destroyed by early December.

In recent weeks Aung San Suu Kyi has talked of her administration's "serious commitment to the resolution of the complex issue and the need for time and space for the government's efforts to bear fruit". In August, she set up a special commission headed by Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general, to tackle the Rakhine troubles. But the government has been criticised for appointing Myint Swe, the vice-president and a former general, to head a team investigating the latest events in Rakhine.

“While the military is directly responsible for the violations, Aung San Suu Kyi has failed to live up to both her political and moral responsibility to try to stop and condemn what is unfolding in Rakhine state,” says Rafendi Djamin, Amnesty International’s director for Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s supporters point out that she does not control the army, which still enjoys wide powers in Myanmar. She is also seen as wary of antagonising Rakhine’s Buddhist community or a wider public stoked by anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric.

Rohingya insurgency

The attacks on security forces have led to a debate about whether an organised Rohingya insurgency is under way.

A recent report by the International Crisis Group claimed that members of the Rohingya group that attacked frontier security forces have international links to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Before the attacks, some fighters had received training that included the use of weapons, the report said.

The Bangladeshi government is struggling to cope with the numbers coming into the country and, according to Amnesty International, has even begun pushing people back into Myanmar.

Col MM Anisur Rahman, the regional army commander in Bangladesh, says: “This problem was initiated by Myanmar. They have created this problem, they have to solve this problem.” – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017