By Maung Zarni and Gregory Stanton

The Wire

December 6, 2016

The world is reacting with horror to the massacre of Rohingyas in Rakhine State, but Suu Kyi and her government continue to turn a blind eye to what increasingly appears like a genocide.

Amidst widespread protests in Asian capitals over the ongoing massacre of Rohingyas in Western Myanmar, Adama Dieng, UN special adviser on the prevention of genocide, issued a sternly-worded statement over the “allegations of extrajudicial executions, torture, rape and the destruction of religious property” in Rohingya villages, and firmly urged the Aung San Suu Kyi government to “demonstrate its commitment to the rule of law and to the human rights of all its populations”.

Human Rights Watch has presented satellite images of over a thousand charred buildings in Rohingya villages where government troops have been carrying out ‘clearance operations’ since October 9 when Rohingya militants, armed with swords, sticks and a ‘few hand-made’ guns, attacked three border posts near the country’s border with Bangladesh, killing several Burmese troops. For nine weeks, the government has locked down the northern portion of Rakhine State, blocking the flow of humanitarian assistance (both food and medicine) to 160,000 Rohingya Muslims. Rohingya activists have smuggled out grainy images of burning rice supplies in the areas of the military’s mop-up operations, indicating that the government intends to deprive the entire Rohingya population in the locked-down area of their food supply. The government’s intention can only be understood as an induced starvation of the Rohingya population – an act of genocide.

Reminiscent of past genocide cases, the government troops separate men of all ages from their families for brutal interrogations while raping women with blanket impunity. A friend told me about a phone conversation between a woman survivor and her relative, a Rohingya migrant worker in a poor neighbourhood called Salayang in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The woman reportedly said, “Just wish us to die [a] fast death. We can’t bear this any more. They (the Burmese troops) are killing our men and boys. They are doing anything they please with us women. We don’t want to be carrying babies of these monsters. Please, please, send us birth control pills.”

Weeks of wanton slaughter, arson and rape have resulted in the displacement of over 30,000 Rohingyas from entire villages in the swampy flat plains of northern Rakhine. The UNHCR has estimated that at least 10,000 Rohingyas fleeing death and destruction have gathered along the 170-mile land and river borders with Bangladesh. The Bangladesh government has decided to keep its borders shut, forcing the refugees back to the Burmese side. A small number of those who have made it across to the nearest refugee camp tell tales of horror in Rakhine, confirming the widely reported allegations of mass atrocities against the Rohingyas in Myanmar.

History of oppression

These are just the most recent testimonies of a well-documented, systematic program of state-organised persecution of the Rohingya over the last four decades. General Khin Nyunt, former head of military intelligence with 25 years of intimate involvement in these violent operations against the Rohingya, recorded in his Burmese-language book The Problem of Burma’s Western Gate that nearly 280,000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh in the first large-scale operations against them in 1978. When General Ziaur Rahman of Bangladesh threatened to arm the Rohingyas if Myanmar refused to take them back, the Ne Win government grudgingly accepted the UNHCR’s managed repatriation of the majority of those who fled.

Following this repatriation, Myanmar’s military rulers enacted a new citizenship law in 1982, stripping the Rohingyas of all citizenship and legal rights, thus making them instant aliens on their own ancestral land. The law excludes from citizenship any Rohingya who cannot prove their ancestors were already in residence in Myanmar on the eve of the first Anglo-Burmese War of 1824. Few people have such records. This requirement is enforced only with respect to the Rohingya. The Rohingya are also excluded from the list of groups that were recognised as ethnic minorities in the multi-ethnic Union of Burma.

The official estimate of the Rohingya population is 1.33 million, of which 800,000 are completely without any legal status. They are effectively stateless. An estimated 60,000 Rohingya children are un-registered because the Burmese government refuses to grant each newborn the right to a nationality, in direct violation of its obligations as a party to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

State-sponsored violence against the Rohingya and other minorities from 1978 to 2012 went largely un-reported in the global media because Myanmar was almost completely closed off from the western world. Since its commercial opening in 2012, the government of president Thein Sein framed its persecution of the Rohingya people as ‘communal or sectarian violence’ between the Muslim Rohingyas and Buddhist Rakhine people. The world has come to view the violence against the Rohingya as a clash between religious communities. In reality, it is ethnic persecution.

By releasing Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest and permitting her party contest the parliamentary election, in which it won a majority, the Thein Sein military junta has lulled the world into believing that Myanmar is “democratising.” In fact, the junta still holds a quarter of the seats in parliament as well as the key ministries of defence, home affairs and border affairs. In sharp contrast to the official explanation of violence in Rakhine as communal, Suu Kyi’s government has sought to tell the world that her government is fighting Rohingya Muslim extremists who are spreading Islamic terrorism. Western governments have rolled back the economic, military and diplomatic sanctions on Myanmar and have moved to normalised relations.

Deafening silence

But Suu Kyi’s silence on the ongoing massacre of Rohingyas has not gone unnoticed. Fellow Nobel laureates and world leaders continue to call on her to stop the genocide being perpetrated by the Burmese generals, whose partnership and cooperation she depends on for her influence.

Not only have these calls fallen on deaf ears but they have become a laughing matter for Suu Kyi and much of the Burmese population, who remain deeply enthralled with the woman they call mother.

In her live webcast town hall meeting this week with thousands of adoring Burmese supporters in Singapore, where Suu Kyi was on a three-day official visit, she took a question from the audience, which framed the growing allegations of rape, arson and slaughter of Rohingyas as “external fabrications”. Suu Kyi agreed that the allegations are “fabrications”. Then, she laughed out loud.

Dieng and Yanghee Lee, UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, have requested independent UN investigations on the alleged ‘ethnic cleansing’ and other mass atrocities in the Rohingya region of Rakhine State. Instead, Suu Kyi’s government announced the establishment of a “national inquiry commission” with vice president Myint Swe as chair. Myint Swe, a former lieutenant general, also previously headed military intelligence and coordinated the border affairs army division, one of the main persecutors of the Rohingyas.

Suu Kyi and her government are in complete denial of the genocidal massacres being perpetrated against the Rohingya. When a Nobel Peace Prize finds allegations of genocide funny, she becomes undeserving of the prize. In fact, Suu Kyi should be prosecuted for complicity in the crimes.

Maung Zarni is co-author (with Alice Cowley) of The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya and a grassroots Burmese activist who coordinated the international consumer boycott of Myanmar in support of the National League for Democracy from 1995-2004. Gregory Stanton is the founding president of Genocide Watch and research professor at George Mason University, USA.

By Emanuel Stoakes

The Diplomat

December 6, 2016

Roughly a year ago, remarkable scenes were broadcast around the world from the streets of Yangon as citizens gathered to participate in, and celebrate, Myanmar’s general election.

The intense atmosphere of hope that accompanied the poll, the first openly contested one if its kind for decades, was an inspiration to behold; at the time, unfamiliar observers could be forgiven for thinking that the country was on the verge of making a clean break with its troubled past.

Twelve months on and harder political realities have come to the fore. It has taken the sternest test yet of the new government to show how far Aung San Suu Kyi, the state counselor and de facto civilian leader, will go to express solidarity with the armed forces, an autonomous state-within-a-state, which retains the constitutional right to run key ministries and set its own budgets.

It is perhaps out of a desire to avoid a confrontation between competing parts of state power that Suu Kyi has opted to take this stance while neglecting to do more to help those affected by the present crisis, in which thousands of children have been needlessly placed at risk of starvation and death.

This urgent humanitarian situation is just one of the outcomes of a drama currently taking place in Rakhine state, western Myanmar, involving one of the most unwanted and hopeless minorities in the world: the Rohingya, a predominantly Muslim group of roughly one million people.

The minority, who are almost entirely stateless, have been persecuted in Myanmar for decades, enduring policies designed to make their lives miserable, including limitations on freedom of movement, access to healthcare, education, and other basic rights. Crimes such as rape, extrajudicial killings and extortion have occurred with impunity.

In October, a group of militants committed the first known act of armed aggression by the minority in decades, eliciting a severe crackdown by state forces and setting into motion a series of events that have had dire consequences.

“Distraught and Disgusted”

It is in this context that the lives of thousands of minors have been imperiled. Humanitarian aid to parts of northern Rakhine state was suspended following the declaration of a “military operations area” in which the army has been conducting counter-insurgency sweeps. Allegations of rapes, killings, and arson leaked out of the locked-down zone, only to be met with fervent denials from various parts of the Burmese state; verification has been close to impossible given that independent media have been denied access to the affected areas.

Email updates provided to humanitarian groups by the United Nations acknowledge that roughly 3,000 children in parts of Northern Rakhine State are suffering from Severe Acute Malnutrition — a condition affecting infants and children produced by prolonged periods without access to adequate food and drink. The internal message observes that those minors reliant on specialized care for SAM “have not been able to receive their regular treatment” due to government-sanctioned blocks on humanitarian aid deliveries, which have lasted for weeks. “Without appropriate treatment,” the author of the email adds, “30-50 percent of SAM children may die.”

Pierre Peron, spokesperson for the Office of the Commissioner for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) the UN’s key humanitarian agency confirmed the numbers cited above, and echoed its grim conclusions, noting that without access to the care they had been receiving, “many children with SAM are at risk of dying.”

While the time frame of risk to the children was not clearly stated in the emails, one humanitarian official speaking on condition of anonymity told me that those deprived of access to the treatments administered at therapeutic feeding centers are classed as going back to “square one” in terms of their condition — and therefore at greatly heightened risk of death — after three weeks. Aid has been severely restricted for roughly a month and a half.

Asked what the general reaction was to the blockade among staff working in the humanitarian community, he replied that he and his colleagues were “distraught and disgusted.”

Rights groups were similarly condemnatory about the restrictions on aid. Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, told me that many Rohingya were “facing a crisis of survival” as a result of the restrictions. Referring to the blockade, he indicated that the decision to limit the humanitarian presence in the area may be attributable to the most cynical of motives.

“What’s clear is that the Myanmar government doesn’t want any outside eyes and ears seeing what the security forces are doing in this area, and that means keeping the humanitarians out regardless of the suffering that this causes to the Rohingya people dependent on international assistance,” he said.

Matthew Smith, executive director of Bangkok-based NGO Fortify Rights, was terser in his analysis, saying “the authorities have no defensible reason to block aid. It’s inhumane, pure and simple.”

A State of Denial — and Complicity

Against the backdrop of deteriorating humanitarian conditions and alleged atrocities, Suu Kyi, known in the past for her panegyrics to human rights, has signed off on an increasingly absurd campaign of denial delivered by parts of the government under her control. Saying little on the matter herself, the message from her subordinates has been one of total support for the military.

While the decision not to alienate the armed forces may be shrewd, and certain efforts to do good may be taking place “behind closed doors,” the consequences of this political theater have been deadly serious.

It has eased pressure on the military-controlled parts of the state that are playing a key role in blocking aid, despite the fact that the move to suspend access amounts to a form of collective punishment for communities in the area. With every week that passes more people — beyond the 3,000 children — are at risk of sickness and even death.

That is not all. The language issuing from officials and appointees dealing with the situation, particularly when referring to the Rohingya as a group, has been dangerous and even dehumanizing.

Perhaps the most grotesque example of this was provided by the man picked to head the initial investigation into the violence, Member of Parliament U Aung Win. In an interview with the BBC, laughing as he spoke, he refuted allegations of rape by the military on the grounds that no soldier would deign to violate Rohingya women as they are “very dirty.”

More denialist effluvia was emitted recently by senior government spokesman Zaw Htay in a press conference posted on a Facebook page controlled by Suu Kyi’s office. The spin doctor took aim at the most concrete evidence yet of criminality by government forces — satellite imagery circulated by Human Rights Watch demonstrating obvious destruction of hundreds of Rohingya homes — fallaciously claiming that he had refuted “wrong accusations” made by the organization. At the same presser it was asserted, to the amazement of journalists, that the timing of the violence was part of a conspiracy involving groups that lobby for Rohingya rights.

While these lines have not taken been seriously by the international community, they are received with more credulity by the Burmese public. The idea that the Rohingya, who are the subject of widespread prejudice throughout Myanmar, are involved in conspiracies with international groups has long been by promoted by popular demagogues in the country. Advancing such a narrative to deflect criticism from the army and government is not only deeply cynical but genuinely dangerous.

Elsewhere, commentary in state outlets drifted into the language of outright dehumanization. The Global Light of Myanmar, a mouthpiece newspaper controlled by the Suu Kyi-run Ministry of Information, ran a self-explanatory piece titled “The Thorn Needs Removing If It Pierces,” implicitly supporting the actions of the armed forces, while remaining ambiguous on whether or not the “thorn” was a symbol for all Rohingya or just the insurgents. In the same manner a more recent op-ed warned of the danger posed by “detestable human fleas… trying to combine with each other to amass their force.”

“Burnt Alive in Their Homes”

In contrast to the government’s position, allegations of atrocities were treated as highly credible by The Arakan Project, an independent monitoring group that provides briefings to the United Nations.

“According to our information, the claims about rapes, arson attacks, and killings are accurate. More than 100 civilians have been killed, including women and children, and hundreds have been arrested. The military have shot people on sight, while they were fleeing,” Chris Lewa, director of the group, told me.

“In some cases people were burnt alive in their homes,” she added.

Rights groups have likewise treated claims of abuse seriously, while one senior UN official asserted that the purpose of the current military crackdown was “ethnic cleansing.” OHCHR, the UN’s dedicated human rights agency, added to the crescendo, stating recently that the crackdown may have involved crimes against humanity.

To date, the government has resisted calls for an international investigation of the violence, most recently announcing a second, entirely domestic probe into the situation. Suu Kyi herself, in her first sit-down interview with foreign media on the issue, opted to blame the international community for “concentrating on the negative side of the situation.”

The new investigation has drawn controversy given that it will be headed by a retired general once blacklisted by the United States, known for his role in suppressing popular protests in 2007. While this development is unlikely to assuage critics, the inquiry looks set to be an improvement on the one headed by Aung Win.

There have been other small glimmers of hope: a recent Reuters report cited diplomats who claimed that, after long weeks of waiting, the state counselor was far more willing to pressure the military on the aid situation.

At the time of writing, rumors are adrift that there may be some movement on the issue when Kofi Annan, head of the broader commission on Rakhine state set up prior to the violence, completes his visit to parts of the region.

Such an intervention could not come soon enough; yet crucial questions remain — will this be yet more theater, accompanied only by minimal change on the ground? If so, how much worse does it have to get before more meaningful steps are taken?

Emanuel Stoakes is a journalist specializing in rights-related stories. He has produced two major documentaries on the Rohingya minority in Myanmar and written for The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Vice, Al Jazeera, and The Diplomat, among others.

By Sir Geoffrey Nice, Francis Wade

Foreign Policy

November 30, 2016

The world can no longer look away from the intensifying assault on Burma’s Rohingya minority.

Last fall, Burmese voters elected their first democratic government in half a century. That inspired hope that the country’s long history of violence and oppression was finally taking a turn from the better.

Now, just one year later, that promise has given way to dread. In a small pocket of western Burma, a new phase has begun in what threatens to become the genocide of the country’s Muslim Rohingya minority.

Government security forces have responded with widespread violence to a series of coordinated attacks by militant Rohingya on police outposts since October 9. The military has created a 20 kilometer-square “operation zone” barring all independent journalists from the area. Despite the restrictions, numerous reports have emerged of rapes, torture, and extrajudicial killings of Rohingya civilians by the police and army as they sweep through villages in search of militants.

The Rohingya have been refused citizenship by successive Burmese governments, who assert they are illegal Bengali immigrants. Control measures applied only to Rohingya have, for years, severely limited their access to healthcare and education. More than 120,000 already live in displacement camps following waves of violence in 2012 and 2013 in which ethnic Buddhist Rakhine razed their neighborhoods across Rakhine State.

A recent escalation in the latest violence has raised the official death toll since the October crackdown to 134, although Rohingya advocacy groups put it at more than 420. Despite Bangladesh’s refusal to take refugees, several hundred are believed to have fled to camps there. A number who crossed the Naf River separating the two countries in the middle of November were gunned down mid-river. While a number of security personnel have been killed in skirmishes, the overwhelming majority of deaths have been Rohingya. The government has claimed that all are militants, but with independent media completely barred from the region, the claims have been impossible to verify.

In recent decades, scholars of genocide have identified several likely indicators of mass killings. Several of those signs are now clearly in evidence in western Rakhine: The systematic dehumanization of the target group; their isolation inside camps and barricaded ghettos; and violent attacks on them involving the participation of security forces. These trends have intensified in recent weeks with the amplification of a narrative that singles out the Rohingya as a menacing alien presence in Burma. The new civilian government, elected in April amid jubilation that Burma was finally charting a passage towards democratic rule, has shown a worrying tolerance toward these ominous developments — at times borderingt on outright complicity.

The blanket exclusion of independent journalists from the area in recent weeks has created a black hole in which security forces can attack villages, carry out arbitrary arrests, and block the movements of Rohingya, who are unable to leave their homes to access markets or to reach medical care. Satellite imagery released by Human Rights Watch shows that 1,250 Rohingya buildings in five villages have been destroyed by recent arson attacks. The government, led by Aung San Suu Kyi, has responded by saying that the Rohingya are burning their own homes to garner international sympathy.

Presidential spokesman U Zaw Htay told journalists in late October that the government had initially deliberately blocked aid to Rohingya who had fled police and military sweeps to force them to return to their villages, where they could be investigated for possible involvement in the October attacks. This appears to be an attempt at starving them into submission, and suggests that the government believes all Rohingya to be suspects.

This latest eruption of violence fits uneasily with the optimistic narrative of a changing Burma. In April 2016, the National League for Democracy, headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, was sworn into government. She immediately renewed efforts to broker ceasefires with warring ethnic armies in the north and east of the country, and later appointed former UN chief Kofi Annan to head an advisory commission to investigate and address human rights violations in the violence-torn Rakhine State.

Despite the worsening crisis, Suu Kyi continually refuses to be drawn on the plight of the Rohingya. At best, she calls repeatedly, but vaguely, for rule of law to be respected in Rakhine State. She asked the U.S. Ambassador to Burma in May 2016 to refrain from using the word “Rohingya” lest it imply recognition of a group that the state in Burma long ago deemed to be an illegal presence in the country, and to whom it has refused citizenship and all associated state protections.

The growing volume of criticism directed at the Nobel laureate’s position mirrors the increasing dangers facing the Rohingya. Since the violence of 2012 and 2013, when Rohingya and ethnic Buddhist Rakhine attacked each other in bouts of vicious bloodletting, Rohingya have been increasingly contained inside villages, camps, and barricaded ghettos. Their 1.3-million-strong population is allowed access to only one adequately equipped hospital in the state, and is completely barred from attending higher education. The latest violence will ensure a further tightening of those restrictions, with the UN warning that 160,000 Rohingya have been without aid since October 9.

It was hoped that Suu Kyi’s government might improve conditions for the Rohingya, but recent events cast doubt on this. Demanding greater security for the maligned group would be politically costly. The ultra-nationalist Buddhist lobby in Burma has repeatedly branded the Rohingya as “terrorists” and “Islamizers,” and public opinion is pitched wholeheartedly against their being granted greater protections. Any criticism from Suu Kyi of the military’s actions in Rakhine State would be interpreted as a sign that she sympathizes with the Rohingya, and her support could fall. Accordingly, her National League for Democracy has made no attempt to rein in the hate speech. Nor has it called publicly for any control measures on the group to be removed.

Meanwhile, rhetoric from officials has grown more ominous. It has dehumanized Rohingya in precisely the ways that, as we now know, historically pave the way for mass violence against marginalized groups. The Home Affairs Minister Kyaw Swe recently described the Rohingya presence as “an invasion” of “rapid Bengali breeders,” language that cast them as animals. When Aung Win, head of a governmental commission set up to investigate the October 9 attacks, declared that “all Bengali villages are military strongholds,” he cast the group as outsiders deserving of attack. Later he told the BBC it was highly unlikely that troops had raped Rohingya women on the grounds that they “are very dirty.”

State media has weighed in too. On November 26 an opinion piece in the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper warned that the country was “facing the danger of the human fleas” that “we greatly loathe for their stench and for sucking our blood.” The Nazis had used the analogy of “fleas” to describe the Jews. An earlier opinion piece on November 1 was entitled “The Thorn Needs Removing If It Pierces!” It went on to speak of “trespassers” on Burma soil, and similarly warned of the threat they allegedly pose to the country’s sovereignty. This lightly veiled call, in print, for the cleansing of the Rohingya — published without government disapproval — suggests an alignment between the civilian government, the military, and ultra-nationalist Rakhine groups that will tolerate the very worst of humanitarian excesses against the Rohingya.

By attacking the police outposts, a small fraction of the Rohingya population may have sealed the fate of the entire community. Punishment of the Rohingya has always been collective, despite the fact that collective punishment is illegal under international law. Groups tend to resort to armed conflict when institutional channels for negotiating grievances are closed off, and the decision to attack may have reflected a sense of resignation that, even in a democracy, the Rohingya would forever remain a pariah group. The response by the government and security forces — the targeting of an entire identity, rather than individuals who may have committed wrongdoing — marks a key stage in the turn to mass violence.

Today we know enough about the conditions that give rise to genocide that no one in power can justifiably claim ignorance. An understanding of these processes is assumed among all modern leaders, Aung San Suu Kyi included. The democratic mandate handed to her civilian government a year ago has resulted in that most pernicious of democratic outcomes — a tyranny of the overwhelming majority against which a small and vulnerable population is now bracing itself. Rather than providing a pathway to harmony after decades of conflict, Burma’s transition has unleashed popular hatreds that no institution in the country seems either able or willing to rein in. Suu Kyi should know that inactivity in the face of genocidal actions can carry moral, legal, and even criminal responsibility.

In the photo, a Rohingya refugee from Burma carries the body of a six-month-old boy who died in a Bangladeshi refugee camp on November 26.

Photo credit: MUNIR UZ ZAMAN/AFP/Getty Images

One year after a historic election put a civilian government in charge, the country's army is using brutal methods to regain its popularity.

On a cool night last November, a euphoric crowd surged around the headquarters of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy (NLD) in Yangon. Supporters danced and waved flags as result after result was announced from a digital billboard. It was a landslide. Amid the cheers, a man named Than Htay told me he how he had waited decades to vote freely.

For the first time in more than half a century of a brutal junta, civilians would be in charge of the country. But a year after the vote, it’s not clear just who is in charge in Myanmar — and Myanmar’s military, once despised, is riding a new wave of support.

The reason? An enemy propped up for decades by the army has made a resurgence in the public imagination, if not in reality. The military is restoring its political power by returning to its war footing against Rohingya Muslims, a persecuted minority who for years have been loathed as “illegal immigrants” from Bangladesh, despite their presence in Myanmar dating back centuries.

The Rohingya have been discriminated against for generations, but the persecution has grown particularly intense in recent years.

It was dictatorial Gen. Ne Win who, after seizing power in a coup in 1962, pushed through the 1974 Emergency Immigration Act and 1982 Citizenship Law that stripped Rohingya of their citizenship. In Burma: A Nation at the Crossroads, Benedict Rogers quotes a former government minister as saying the junta chief “had an ‘unwritten policy’ to get rid of Muslims, Christians, Karens and other ethnic peoples, in that order.’”

Government prejudice has been mixed with demagogic hatred, with the Rohingya portrayed as foreigners and, more recently, vehicles for the spread of jihad. In the era of the Islamic State, existing suspicions have become bound up with a global narrative of Islamist extremism. Nationalist Buddhist monks like Ashin Wirathu have framed Islam as an existential threat to Myanmar, stoking fears that Muslims are both outbreeding the Buddhist majority and connecting to international terrorist groups.

The Myanmar military now claims to be facing an organized rebel insurgency among the Rohingya, chiefly in the western province of Rakhine, which borders Bangladesh. It’s true that the far-flung state has been home to various insurgencies, both Buddhist and Muslim. In the past year, the Arakan Army rebels, comprised of Rakhine Buddhists, has fought several skirmisheswith the military.

In the early hours of Oct. 9, scores of assailants armed with swords and pistols attacked three border posts in Maungdaw Township, northern Rakhine, which borders Bangladesh. Nine police officers were killed and five soldiers then died pursuing the attackers. Both the authorities and the public blamed the Rohingya, with the government accusing the attackers of being Rohingya Muslim terrorists trained by the Taliban, citing evidence obtained — possibly by force — after soldiers captured some of the alleged culprits. In a later interview, Suu Kyi backpedaled, saying the claims came from only one person and may not be reliable.

The subsequent crackdown was swift and, according to multiple accounts, brutal. There have been accusations of arbitrary arrests, burned villages, extrajudicial killings, and rape.

All have been met with blanket denials, not only by the government but by a public already defensive about international criticism of Myanmar’s treatment of the Rohingya. Jingoistic articles have dominated state media and Myanmar-language Facebook. “Insurgents arrested!” (Bedraggled-looking men in a police lineup.) “Guns seized!” (Decades-old hunting rifles).

For the military, the attack came at a convenient moment, as other long-standing conflicts — with the Kachin rebels along the Chinese border, and with the Ta’ang Liberation Army in Shan State — are flaring up again. When 30 soldiers were killed this May in fighting with the Arakan Army, another minority — but not Muslim — militia in Rakhine, the military didn’t comment. But following the Maungdaw attack, the authorities have been warning of a “Muslim invasion” and promising to arm Buddhist civilian militias. The plan has fueled fears of a repeat of 2012 violence when Rakhine Buddhist mobs — allegedly facilitated by local authorities — set upon Rohingya Muslim communities, burning down homes and killing scores. “For the first time since the Kokang crisis of early 2015, the military is getting strong public support for its actions,” commented Richard Horsey, a Yangon-based political analyst, referring to a spasm of fighting in the north last year which killed more than 100 soldiers and rallied support for the armed forces.

In the wake of the Maungdaw attacks, Rakhine Buddhists marched around villages chanting their support for the army, while leading Myanmar journalists questioned why Rohingya were “uncooperative” with the military. A reporter who gave an interview to the New York Times saying he had witnessed soldiers shooting unarmed Rohingya later retracted his comments in a Facebook post that was shared thousands of times. What pressures he was under to do so remain unknown.

Sittwe, the Rakhine State capital, is an hour’s flight from Yangon and five hours away from the operation zone in Maungdaw, which is off limits to foreign journalists. In the dusty coastal town, it’s easy to forget how much Myanmar has changed since 2011, when the military launched reforms. The junta apparatus is everywhere, from the hotel whiteboards that listing the names of every guest and their room numbers, to the secret police and informers. Checkpoints stand outside derelict mosques, guards watching for long-gone congregants. They’re no longer needed, as most of the Muslim population were driven out of their homes following clashes with the Rakhine Buddhist majority in 2012, pelted with fruit by local Rakhines they trudged to the internment camps on the outskirts of the city where they have been confined ever since.

Inside the camps, the mood is bleak. In Maw Thi Nyar camp, Noor Islam, a middle-aged Rohingya community leader, told me he hadn’t heard from his sister from Maungdaw in more than a week. “She told me that her neighbor had already been killed,” he said. During their last conversation, she said, “Just pray for us and just pray for Maungdaw.”

He and others were convinced the rebel movement had been fabricated by the military. “Currently, the Myanmar military is implementing their policy,” he said as a small crowd gathered to listen in. “I’m just a simple man, so I don’t understand, but I’m hearing from my grandmother and grandfather and my father — because this is my ancestral land — that the Myanmar government is trying to ethnically cleanse these people, torturing people, eliminating people, doing such bad things to these people.”

The next morning, two Muslim men said that they had been fishing in a local river a few days earlier when they were detained and beaten by the navy. One of them, Abdul Amin, lifted his longyi, the long cloth worn by Myanmar men, to reveal purplish red marks on the backs of his legs. “We were just taking a rest after we pulled in the net and ate our dinner at 8 p.m.,” he said. “At that time the navy came to us and just bound our hands and beat us with a stick, made us lie down and beat us with a wooden stick.”

As we spoke, other Muslims gathered around, nodding in agreement as Abdul Amin said, “It’s like it’s government policy to kill people.”

There is no evidence that the Myanmar military faked the murder of their own border police. But few doubt that their actions over recent years may have nourished an appetite for retaliation.

Matthew Smith, CEO and founder of Fortify Rights, a nongovernmental organization, described the military’s “divide and conquer” strategy in the region to rally the support of the region’s majority Buddhist population. “It has an uncanny ability to instigate conflict between ethnic groups, and it’s done that to great and deadly effect in Rakhine,” he said. “We haven’t seen evidence that the attacks on police were a false flag event but it’s clear the military is using the situation to shore up favorable sentiment.”

“The allegations [about military atrocities] emerging from northern Rakhine State are still difficult to verify given very limited international and media access to date. But they are broadly consistent with allegations that are heard from other military operations zones, including in northern Shan and Kachin,” Horsey, the political analyst, commented, referring to two other long-standing conflicts between the military and minority groups.

But many local Buddhists don’t want to see a return to violence of any kind. Rakhine Buddhists who had fled the fighting against the suspected Rohingya insurgents in the north and were staying in a makeshift refugee camp inside a stadium in late October said that they had been friends with Muslims back in their home villages and met up for religious ceremonies.

Ronan Lee, a doctoral candidate at Singapore’s Deakin University who has done research in northern Rakhine, said that “despite the events of 2012, many Muslim and Buddhist communities in northern Rakhine State were keen to work together and they understood that both their communities were better off when there was peace and trade between them. Despite the state’s natural resources, keeping Muslim and Buddhist communities separate and restricting Muslims’ ability to travel has damaged the state’s economy.” As the military’s popularity has surged following the attacks, the civilian government’s muted response has left it looking ineffectual. Shortly after the attacks, State Counsellor and de facto government leader Suu Kyi flew to India. Last week, she was in Japan. She has not visited Rakhine and neither has her president, Htin Kyaw. According to Reuters, the Ministry of Information submitted a list of questions about the army’s response that went unanswered. “There are really two governments in Myanmar: the civil government and the military government,” said Widney Brown, director of programs at Physicians for Human Rights, which recently released a report on northern Rakhine.

The military retains control of vital institutions including the ministries of defense, home affairs, the police, and immigration. “Thus, there is a very strong military presence along the land borders, including with Bangladesh,” Brown said. “This control coupled with concerns about insurgencies means that the military government, not the civilian government, is really in control in northern Rakhine State.”

The months leading up to the Maungdaw attacks had brought rare, civilian-led progress in the search for peace in the state. In the face of staunch opposition from the military, the government paved the way for an independent Rakhine commission, headed by former United Nations chief Kofi Annan, to conduct investigations and file an advisory report. The recommendations are due in late 2017.

Now that enterprise looks distinctly shaky. “The naming of Annan to head up a state advisory commission is an attempt to shed light on abuses and set the stage for some reconciliation,” said Brown. “However, the ability of the commission to have an impact was already limited, as it is merely advisory and the recent violence in northern Rakhine State may have cost the commission any opportunity to have an impact.”

More disturbing than the suggestion that the civilian government is powerless against the military is the idea that they tacitly approve. Nobody really knows what Suu Kyi thinks of the Rohingya, although she has often been criticized for her failure to act. There is also evidence that other senior NLD officials are deeply hostile.

After the October attacks, state media, which is run by the civilian-led Ministry of Information, has carried opinion pieces condemning “fabricated” allegations of human rights abuses by the military and accused journalists of being “hand in glove” with terrorists. They have referred to Rohingya as “thorns.”

On Facebook, Zaw Htay, a spokesman for the government, singled out a journalist at the national English-language newspaper, the Myanmar Times, for her reporting on alleged military rapes. “We support and advise government to take legal action against [the Times] and those who are responsible for fabricating false news,” read one of the many comments. The reporter was fired, reportedly following calls to the paper by Zaw Htay, a former soldier who served in the former military-backed administration but was kept on by Suu Kyi.

A few days ago, Zaw Htay confidently said the government and army were “collaborating” on the crisis. “And [they have] also the same policy on it.”

Additional reporting by Aung Naing Soe.