By Justin Rowlatt

BBC News

December 18, 2017

Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, is determined that the perpetrators of the horrors committed against the Rohingya face justice.

He's the head of the UN's watchdog for human rights across the world, so his opinions carry weight.

It could go right to the top - he doesn't rule out the possibility that civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the head of the armed forces Gen Aung Min Hlaing, could find themselves in the dock on genocide charges some time in the future.

Earlier this month, Mr Zeid told the UN Human Rights Council that the widespread and systematic nature of the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar (also called Burma) meant that genocide could not be ruled out.

"Given the scale of the military operation, clearly these would have to be decisions taken at a high level," said the high commissioner, when we met at the UN headquarters in Geneva for BBC Panorama.

That said, genocide is one of those words that gets bandied about a lot. It sounds terrible - the so-called "crime of crimes". Very few people have ever been convicted of it. 

The crime was defined after the Holocaust. Member countries of the newly founded United Nations signed a convention, defining genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy a particular group. 

It is not Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein's job to prove acts of genocide have been committed - only a court can do that. But he has called for an international criminal investigation into the perpetrators of what he has called the "shockingly brutal attacks" against the Muslim ethnic group who are mainly from northern Rakhine in Myanmar.

But the high commissioner recognised it would be a tough case to make: "For obvious reasons, if you're planning to commit genocide you don't commit it to paper and you don't provide instructions."

"The thresholds for proof are high," he said. "But it wouldn't surprise me in the future if a court were to make such a finding on the basis of what we see."

By the beginning of December, nearly 650,000 Rohingya - around two thirds of the entire population - had fled Myanmar after a wave of attacks led by the army that began in late August.

Hundreds of villages were burned and thousands are reported to have been killed.

There is evidence of terrible atrocities being committed: massacres, murders and mass rapes - as I heard myself when I was in the refugee camps as this crisis began. 

What clearly rankles the UN human rights chief is that he had urged Ms Suu Kyi, the de facto leader of Myanmar, to take action to protect the Rohingya six months before the explosion of violence in August.

He said he spoke to her on the telephone when his office published a report in February documenting appalling atrocities committed during an episode of violence that began in October 2016.

"I appealed to her to bring these military operations to an end," he told me. "I appealed to her emotional standing… to do whatever she could to bring this to a close, and to my great regret it did not seem to happen."

Ms Suu Kyi's power over the army is limited, but Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein believes she should have done more to try and stop the military campaign. 

He criticised her for failing to use the term "Rohingya". "To strip their name from them is dehumanising to the point where you begin to believe that anything is possible," he said - powerful language for a top UN official. 

He thought Myanmar's military was emboldened when the international community took no action against them after the violence in 2016. "I suppose that they then drew a conclusion that they could continue without fear," he said.

"What we began to sense was that this was really well thought out and planned," he told me.

The Myanmar government has said the military action was a response to terrorist attacks in August which killed 12 members of the security forces. 

But BBC Panorama has gathered evidence that shows that preparations for the continued assault on the Rohingya began well before that.

We show that Myanmar had been training and arming local Buddhists. Within weeks of last year's violence the government made an offer: "Every Rakhine national wishing to protect their state will have the chance to become part of the local armed police."

"This was a decision made to effectively perpetrate atrocity crimes against the civilian population," said Matthew Smith, chief executive of the human rights organisation Fortify Rights which has been investigating the build-up to this year's violence.

That view is borne out by refugees in the vast camps in Myanmar who saw these volunteers in action, attacking their Rohingya neighbours and burning down their homes.

"They were just like the army, they had the same kind of weapons", said Mohammed Rafique, who ran a successful business in Myanmar. "They were local boys, we knew them. When the army was burning our houses, torturing us, they were there."

Meanwhile the Rohingya were getting more vulnerable in other ways.

By the summer food shortages were widespread in north Rakhine - and the government tightened the screws. The programme has learnt that from mid-August the authorities had cut off virtually all food and other aid to north Rakhine. 

And the army brought in reinforcements. On 10 August, two weeks before the militant attacks, it was reported that a battalion had been flown in.

The UN human rights representative for Myanmar was so concerned she issued a public warning, urging restraint from the Myanmar authorities.

But when Rohingya militants launched attacks on 30 police posts and an army base, the military response was huge, systematic and devastating.

The BBC asked Aung San Suu Kyi and the head of the Myanmar armed forces for a response. But neither of them has replied. 

Almost four months on from those attacks and Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein is concerned the repercussions of the violence are not yet over. He fears this "could just be the opening phases of something much worse". 

He worries jihadi groups could form in the huge refugee camps in Bangladesh and launch attacks in Myanmar, perhaps even targeting Buddhist temples. The result could be what he called a "confessional confrontation" - between Buddhists and Muslims.

It is a frightening thought, as the high commissioner acknowledged, but one he believes Myanmar isn't taking seriously enough. 

"I mean the stakes are so enormous," he said. "This sort of flippant manner by which they respond to the serious concerns of the international community is really alarming."

If there was one thing almost everyone who has monitored Muslim Rohingya in Rakhine State agreed on, it was that sooner or later their plight would breed militant resistance to the authority of the state. 

The attacks that started in the early hours of 25 August on around 30 police and army posts, triggering a ruthless military counter-attack which has driven more than half a million Rohingya into Bangladesh, showed that militancy, now led by a shadowy group calling itself the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (Arsa), has taken root. 

But conversations with refugees and militants in Bangladesh also show that the group's strategy is still poorly-formed, and that it is not supported by all Rohingya.

Even the accounts given by the Myanmar security forces suggest that the 25 August attacks were mostly simple, almost suicidal charges by groups of men, most armed only with machetes and sharpened bamboo sticks.

One of the earliest and biggest attacks was on the police post in Alel Than Kyaw, a town on the coast south of Maungdaw.

Police Lt Aung Kyaw Moe later told a group of visiting journalists that they had advance warning of the attack and sheltered all local officials inside the barracks the night before.

At 04:00, he said two groups of around 500 men each stormed up from the beach. 

They killed an immigration officer, whose house was close to the beach, but were easily driven off by police officers firing automatic weapons. Seventeen bodies were left behind.

This tallies with an account given to me by a Rohingya refugee in Bangladesh. 

In a conversation about how he had been driven out of Rakhine state, he complained about the way the militants had tried to co-opt his village into joining the attacks in the days after 25 August. 

They had helped themselves to cattle and goats, he said, telling the villagers they would be paid back when there was an independent Rohingya homeland. 

And they gave new machetes to the young men, and told them to attack a nearby police station. 

Arsa has plenty of weapons, he remembers them saying, and would be back to back them. Around 25 men from his community did as they were told, and a number of them were killed, he said.

There was no backup from armed militants.

I was able to meet a young man in his 20s, now in Bangladesh, who had joined Arsa four years before. 

He described how the Arsa leader, Ata Ullah, had come to his village in 2013, telling them it was time to fight against the mistreatment of Rohingya.

He asked for five to 10 men from every community. A group was taken from his village to the forested hills, where they were trained in making crude bombs, using old car engine pistons. 

Our informant said his village was encouraged by this, and began taking up food and other supplies to support the trainees. He eventually joined them. 

They started patrolling the village, armed with sharpened bamboo sticks, and making sure everyone attended mosque. He says he never saw any guns.

'Getting the world's attention'

On 25 August he described hearing shooting, and seeing burning in the distance. The local Arsa commander - his "amir", he called him - arrived and told the men that the military was on its way and would attack them. 

The men were told to launch their attack first - you are going to die anyway, he said, so die as martyrs for the cause. 

Our informant said men of all ages armed themselves with knives and bamboo sticks, and charged the advancing soldiers, suffering many casualties - he named some of the dead. 

After that they ran into the rice fields with their families, trying to make their way to Bangladesh. He said they were also harassed by Rakhine Buddhist men as they fled.

What was the point of such futile attacks, I asked him? 

We wanted to get the world's attention, he said. We had been suffering so much, we thought it did not matter if we died.

He denied any links with international jihadist groups - we are fighting for our rights, and to try to get guns and ammunition from the Myanmar military, that's all, he said.

His and other accounts describe a movement with a small core of several hundred full-time militants, with perhaps a handful of foreigners among them, and many thousands of untrained and unarmed followers who joined the attacks only at the last minute.

On 25 August Ata Ullah, the Pakistan-born Rohingya man who started Arsa after an earlier wave of communal violence in Rakhine state in 2012, issued a video, flanked by hooded armed fighters. 

He described the attacks that day as a defensive action, against what he called a genocide against the Rohingya.

He said his fighters had no choice but to launch the attacks against a Burmese army which had "surrounded and besieged us". 

He appealed for international support. He described Arakan, another name for Rakhine state, as rightfully Rohingya land.

But he has insisted in subsequent statements that Arsa has no quarrel with other ethnic groups in Rakhine state.

There was no call for solidarity from other Muslims. He did not frame his struggle in terms of jihad, or as part of a global Islamist struggle.

Ata Ullah is known to be suspicious of other Islamist groups, and does not at this stage appear to be asking them for help.

"Ata Ullah and his spokesmen have made it clear that they see themselves as an ethno-nationalist movement," says Anthony Davis, a Bangkok-based security analyst. 

"They do not have any substantive links with international jihadism, IS [Islamic State group] or al- Qaeda. They see their struggle as regaining rights for Rohingya inside Rakhine State. They are neither separatists, nor jihadists." 

However the military has successfully portrayed them as a foreign-backed conspiracy to the population of Myanmar, where the media has reported little of the massive Rohingya exodus to Bangladesh.

Ata Ullah's comment about Rakhine belonging to Rohingya was picked up by armed forces commander Gen Min Aung Hlaing early last month, when he warned that the military would never allow the country to lose any territory to what he called "extremist Bengali terrorists". 

He described the military operation in Rakhine as addressing "unfinished business from 1942" - a reference to the time when it was a shifting frontline in the battles between British and Japanese forces.

'Rebalancing' population?

Rohingya and Rakhine Buddhists largely supported opposing sides in that war, and there were a number of massacres by militias on both sides, and large population movements.

This is when many Burmese and Rakhine nationalists believe the Rohingya population in Rakhine was artificially boosted by Bengali immigrants. 

By driving half the Rohingya population out of Rakhine in just four weeks, the military "clearance operations" would appear to have rebalanced the population firmly back in favour of the non-Muslims.

That leaves questions over how Arsa will function, now that it has few or no bases left inside Rakhine State. 

Launching attacks over the border will be much harder, and probably will not be tolerated by Bangladesh, which, though furious with the refugee crisis dumped on it by its neighbour, has always taken care to avoid conflict along its long, porous borders.

Our informant says he is still in regular contact with his "amir" and other Arsa leaders in Bangladesh, although he has had no contact with Ata Ullah.

He says he has no idea what the movement will do next. Most people we spoke to in the camps were aware of Arsa's presence. Some were clearly nervous even speaking quietly about the movement.

There are credible reports of numbers of informers being killed by Arsa in the months leading up to the August attacks. 

But there is also widespread admiration among Rohingya for the only organisation to have fought back against the Myanmar military since the 1950s.

"A great deal now will depend on the attitude of Bangladesh," says Anthony Davis.

"They may choose to keep the border sealed. Or they may wish to exert some control over Arsa by supplying them with rudimentary assistance, rather than have radical Islamist groups, Bangladeshi or foreign, move in and fill a vacuum.

"There are examples elsewhere of military intelligence services using insurgent movements to exert cross-border pressure on a neighbour."

By BBC News

October 3, 2017

An honour granting Aung San Suu Kyi the Freedom of Oxford has been withdrawn by the city's council because of her response to the Rohingya crisis.

The de facto leader of Myanmar was granted the honour in 1997 for her "long struggle for democracy".

But a motion to Oxford City Council said it was "no longer appropriate" for her to hold it.

More than half a million Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar to Bangladesh following recent violence.

The trouble erupted on 25 August when Rohingya militants attacked security posts, triggering a military crackdown.

Ms Suu Kyi spent years under house arrest in Rangoon as a campaigner for democracy while Myanmar (formerly Burma) was ruled by a military dictatorship.

She became a worldwide figurehead for freedom before leading her National League for Democracy party to victory in open elections in November 2015.

'Absolutely appalled'

But her failure to denounce the military or address allegations of ethnic cleansinghas been criticised by world leaders and groups like Amnesty International.

Other organisations are now reconsidering honours given to Ms Suu Kyi, BBC world affairs editor John Simpson said.

"I think it is perfectly natural to look around for ways of saying we disapprove utterly of what you are doing," he told BBC Radio Oxford.

Oxford City Council leader Bob Price supported the motion to remove her honour and confirmed it was an "unprecedented step" for the local authority.

People are "absolutely appalled" by the situation in Myanmar, he said, adding it was "extraordinary" she had not spoken out about reported atrocities in the country.

Last week it emerged St Hugh's College, Oxford, had removed a portrait of Ms Suu Kyi from display.

Suu Kyi and Oxford

• Ms Suu Kyi read philosophy, politics and economics at St Hugh's College, Oxford from 1964 to 1967
• In 1972 she married Michael Aris, a senior research fellow in Tibetan and Himalayan studies at St Antony's College
• They lived together in the city with their two sons Kim and Alexander
• Oxford awarded her the Freedom of Oxford in 1997
• She received an honorary degree from the University of Oxford in 2012

By Jonah Fisher

BBC News

September 29, 2017

The UN leadership in Myanmar tried to stop the Rohingya rights issue being raised with the government, sources in the UN and aid community told the BBC.

One former UN official said the head of the UN in Myanmar (Burma) tried to prevent human rights advocates from visiting sensitive Rohingya areas.

More than 500,000 Rohingya have fled an offensive by the military, with many now sheltering in camps in Bangladesh.

The UN in Myanmar "strongly disagreed" with the BBC findings.

In the month since Rohingya Muslims began flowing into Bangladesh, the UN has been at the forefront of the response. It has delivered aid and made robust statements condemning the Burmese authorities.

But sources within the UN and the aid community both in Myanmar and outside have told the BBC that, in the four years before the current crisis, the head of the United Nations Country Team (UNCT), a Canadian called Renata Lok-Dessallien:

- tried to stop human rights activists travelling to Rohingya areas

- attempted to shut down public advocacy on the subject

- isolated staff who tried to warn that ethnic cleansing might be on the way.

One aid worker, Caroline Vandenabeele, had seen the warning signs before. She worked in Rwanda in the run-up to the genocide in late 1993 and early 1994 and says when she first arrived in Myanmar she noticed worrying similarities.

"I was with a group of expats and Burmese business people talking about Rakhine and Rohingya and one of the Burmese people just said 'we should kill them all as if they are just dogs'. For me, this level of dehumanisation of humans is one sign that you have reached a level of acceptance in society that this is normal."

For more than a year I have been corresponding with Ms Vandenabeele, who has served in conflict areas such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Rwanda and Nepal.

Between 2013 and 2015 she had a crucial job in the UNCT in Myanmar. She was head of office for what is known as the resident co-ordinator, the top UN official in the country, currently Ms Dessallien.

The job gave Ms Vandenabeele a front-row seat as the UN grappled with how to respond to rising tensions in Rakhine state.

Back in 2012, clashes between Rohingya Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists left more than 100 dead and more than 100,000 Rohingya Muslims in camps around the state capital, Sittwe.

Since then, there have been periodic flare-ups and, in the past year, the emergence of a Rohingya militant group. Attempts to deliver aid to the Rohingya have been complicated by Rakhine Buddhists who resent the supply of aid for the Rohingya, at times blocking it and even attacking aid vehicles.

It presented a complex emergency for the UN and aid agencies, who needed the co-operation of the government and the Buddhist community to get basic aid to the Rohingya.

At the same time they knew that speaking up about the human rights and statelessness of the Rohingya would upset many Buddhists.

So the decision was made to focus on a long-term strategy. The UN and the international community prioritised long-term development in Rakhine in the hope that eventually increased prosperity would lead to reduced tensions between the Rohingya and the Buddhists.

For UN staff it meant that publicly talking about the Rohingya became almost taboo. Many UN press releases about Rakhine avoided using the word completely. The Burmese government does not even use the word Rohingya or recognise them as a distinct group, preferring to call them "Bengalis".

During my years reporting from Myanmar, very few UN staff were willing to speak frankly on the record about the Rohingya. Now an investigation into the internal workings of the UN in Myanmar has revealed that even behind closed doors the Rohingyas' problems were put to one side.

Multiple sources in Myanmar's aid community have told the BBC that at high-level UN meetings in Myanmar any question of asking the Burmese authorities to respect the Rohingyas' human rights became almost impossible.

Ms Vandenabeele said it soon became clear to everyone that raising the Rohingyas' problems, or warning of ethnic cleansing in senior UN meetings, was simply not acceptable.

"Well you could do it but it had consequences," she said. "And it had negative consequences, like you were no longer invited to meetings and your travel authorisations were not cleared. Other staff were taken off jobs - and being humiliated in meetings. An atmosphere was created that talking about these issues was simply not on."

Repeat offenders, like the head of the UN's Office for the Co-ordination for Humanitarian Assistance (UNOCHA) were deliberately excluded from discussions.

Ms Vandenabeele told me she was often instructed to find out when the UNOCHA representative was out of town so meetings could be held at those times. The head of UNOCHA declined to speak to the BBC but it has been confirmed by several other UN sources inside Myanmar.

Ms Vandenabeele said she was labelled a troublemaker and frozen out of her job for repeatedly warning about the possibility of Rohingya ethnic cleansing. This version of events has not been challenged by the UN.

Attempts to restrict those talking about the Rohingya extended to UN officials visiting Myanmar. Tomas Quintana is now the UN special rapporteur for human rights in North Korea but for six years, until 2014, held that same role for Myanmar.

Speaking from Argentina, he told me about being met at Yangon airport by Ms Dessallien.

"I received this advice from her - saying you should not go to northern Rakhine state - please don't go there. So I asked why and there was not an answer in any respect, there was just the stance of not trying to bring trouble with the authorities, basically," he said.

"This is just one story, but it demonstrates what was the strategy of the UN Country Team in regards to the issue of the Rohingya."

Mr Quintana still went to northern Rakhine but said Ms Dessallien "disassociated" herself from his mission and he didn't see her again.

One senior UN staffer told me: "We've been pandering to the Rakhine community at the expense of the Rohingya.

"The government knows how to use us and to manipulate us and they keep on doing it - we never learn. And we can never stand up to them because we can't upset the government."

The UN's priorities in Rakhine were examined in a report commissioned by the UN in 2015 entitled "Slippery Slope: Helping Victims or Supporting Systems of Abuse".

Leaked to the BBC, it is damning of the UNCT approach.

"The UNCT strategy with respect to human rights focuses too heavily on the over-simplified hope that development investment itself will reduce tensions, failing to take into account that investing in a discriminatory structure run by discriminatory state actors is more likely to reinforce discrimination than change it."

There have been other documents with similar conclusions. With António Guterres as the new secretary general in New York, a former senior member of the UN was asked to write a memo for his team in April.

Titled "Repositioning the UN" the two-page document was damning in its assessment, calling the UN in Myanmar "glaringly dysfunctional".

In the weeks that followed the memo, the UN confirmed that Ms Dessallien was being "rotated" but stressed it was nothing to do with her performance. Three months on Ms Dessallien is still the UN's top official there after the Burmese government rejected her proposed successor.

"She has a fair view and is not biased," Shwe Mann, a former senior general and close ally of Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, told me. "Whoever is biased towards the Rohingyas, they won't like her and they will criticise her."

Ms Dessallien declined to give an interview to the BBC to respond to this article.

The UN in Myanmar said its approach was to be "fully inclusive" and ensure the participation of all relevant experts.

"We strongly disagree with the accusations that the resident co-ordinator 'prevented' internal discussions. The resident co-ordinator regularly convenes all UN agencies in Myanmar to discuss how to support peace and security, human rights, development and humanitarian assistance in Rakhine state," a statement from a UN spokesperson in Yangon said.

On Tomas Quintana's visits to Rakhine, the spokesperson said Ms Dessallien had "provided full support" in terms of personnel, logistics and security.

Ten ambassadors, including from Britain and the United States, wrote unsolicited emails to the BBC when they heard we were working on this report, expressing their support for Ms Dessallien.

There are those who see similarities between the UN's much-criticised role in Sri Lanka and what has happened in Myanmar. Charles Petrie wrote a damning report into the UN and Sri Lanka, and also served as the UN's top official in Myanmar (before being expelled in 2007).

He said the UN's response to the Rohingya over the past few years had been confused and that Ms Dessallien hadn't been given the mandate to bring all of the key areas together.

"I think the key lesson for Myanmar from Sri Lanka is the lack of a focal point. A senior level focal point addressing the situation in Myanmar in its totality - the political, the human rights, the humanitarian and the development. It remains diffuse. And that means over the last few years there have been almost competing agendas."

So might a different approach from the UN and the international community have averted the humanitarian disaster we are seeing now? It's hard to see how it might have deterred the Burmese army's massive response following the 25 August Rohingya militant attack.

Ms Vandenabeele said she at least believed an early warning system she proposed might have provided some indications of what was about to unfold.

"It's hard to say which action would have been able to prevent this," she told me. "But what I know for sure is that the way it was done was never going to prevent it. The way it was done was simply ignoring the issue."

Mr Quintana said he wished the international community had pushed harder for some sort of transitional justice system as part of the move to a hybrid democratic government.

One source said the UN now appeared to be preparing itself for an inquiry into its response to Rakhine, and this could be similar to the inquiry that came after the controversial end to Sri Lanka's civil war - and which found it wanting.

By BBC News

September 29, 2017

A portrait of Aung San Suu Kyi has been removed by Oxford University, where she was previously awarded an honorary degree, amid criticism of her handling of the Rohingya crisis.

Violence in Myanmar has seen more than 400,000 Rohingya Muslims flee to neighbouring Bangladesh.

Myanmar's de facto leader has been criticised for failing to address UN allegations of ethnic cleansing.

St Hugh's College said her portrait had been replaced with a Japanese painting.

View the portrait here

It swapped the painting earlier for one by Japanese artist Yoshihiro Takada. The reasons for the portrait's removal are not clear. 

Communications manager Benjamin Jones said the portrait had been moved to a "secure location" while Takada's piece was to be displayed "for a period".

The new painting was presented to the college earlier this month and is currently displayed in the entrance of the college's main building.

Ms Suu Kyi, a former political prisoner who has been Myanmar's de facto civilian leader since winning elections in 2015, is coming under growing international pressure to act.

In a speech last week, the Nobel Prize winner condemned human rights abuses but did not blame the army or address allegations of ethnic cleansing.

She graduated from St Hugh's College in 1967 and was awarded an honorary degree in June 2012, which the university said it was not considering removing.

Founded in 1886, St Hugh's is one of the largest colleges at the university with about 800 students. It has been contacted for a comment.

By BBC News

September 17, 2017

Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi has "a last chance" to halt an army offensive that has forced hundreds of thousands of the mainly Muslim Rohingya to flee abroad, the UN head has said.

Antonio Guterres told the BBC unless she acted now, "the tragedy will be absolutely horrible".

The UN has warned the offensive could amount to ethnic cleansing.

Myanmar says it is responding to deadly militant attacks in northern Rakhine state and denies targeting civilians.

The country's army chief, General Min Aung Hlaing, on Sunday accused the Rohingya of trying to build a stronghold in the state.

In an interview with the BBC's HARDtalk programme ahead of this week's UN General Assembly, Mr Guterres said Aung San Suu Kyi had a last chance to stop the offensive during her address to the nation on Tuesday.

"If she does not reverse the situation now, then I think the tragedy will be absolutely horrible, and unfortunately then I don't see how this can be reversed in the future."

The secretary general reiterated that the Rohingya should be allowed to return home.

He also said it was clear that Myanmar's military "still have the upper hand" in the country, putting pressure "to do what is being done on the ground" in Rakhine.

Aung San Suu Kyi - a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who spent many years under house arrest in the junta-run Myanmar (Burma) - is now facing growing criticism over the Rohingya issue.

She will not be attending the UN General Assembly in New York, and has claimed that the crisis is being distorted by a "huge iceberg of misinformation".

She said tensions were being fanned by fake news promoting the interests of terrorists.

Mr Guterres' warning comes after Bangladesh said it was now limiting the movement of more than 400,000 Rohingya who have fled from Myanmar.

Bangladeshi police said Rohingya would not be allowed to travel anywhere outside of their allocated homes, not even to live with family or friends. 

Transport operators and drivers have also been urged not to carry refugees, with landlords told not to rent out any property to them.

Bangladesh also announced plans to build shelters for up to 400,000 people near the city of Cox's Bazar.

Analysts say the government wants to stop the Rohingya from disappearing into the general population and to keep them visible, in the hope of returning them to Myanmar - or even a third country.

On 25 August, Rohingya militants attacked police posts in northern Rakhine, killing 12 security personnel.

Rohingya who have fled Myanmar since then say the military responded with a brutal campaign, burning villages and attacking civilians in a bid to drive them out.

The Rohingya, a stateless mostly Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Rakhine, have long experienced persecution in Myanmar, which says they are illegal immigrants.

But army chief Gen Min Aung Hlaing said on Sunday that the Rohingya formed a Muslim group that has no roots in the country.

"They have demanded recognition as Rohingya, which has never been an ethnic group in Myanmar," he wrote in a Facebook post.

Officials earlier suggested that not all who have fled to Bangladesh would be allowed to return.

Some who fled from Rakhine state told the BBC earlier this month about killings, rape and even massacres, while inside Rakhine, a BBC crew witnessed charred homes inside Rakhine.

A new Human Rights Watch report released on Friday accused the Myanmar military of an "ethnic cleansing campaign" and detailed scores of villages targeted with arson attacks.

By BBC News

September 9, 2017

Aid groups urgently need $77m (£58m) to help Rohingya Muslims who have fled Myanmar for Bangladesh since violence erupted two weeks ago, the UN says.

About 290,000 Rohingya are said to have fled Rakhine state and sought shelter in Bangladesh since 25 August.

There is a desperate need for food, water and health services for new arrivals in Cox's Bazaar, the UN added.

Those fleeing say Myanmar's military are burning their villages - something the military denies.

The violence began on 25 August when Rohingya militants attacked police posts in Myanmar's northern Rakhine state. 

Rohingya residents - a stateless, mostly Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Myanmar - say the military and Rakhine Buddhists responded with a brutal campaign against them. 

Myanmar rejects this, saying its military is fighting against Rohingya "terrorists".

Aid agencies in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazaar say they are overwhelmed by the numbers fleeing, while reporters at the scene have described seeing thousands of Rohingya waiting at roadsides, begging and chasing food trucks.

An AP reporter saw one man collapsing from hunger while queuing at a food distribution point.

The UN Resident Co-ordinator in Bangladesh, Robert Watkins, said: "With the movement of people showing no signs of stopping, it is vital that agencies working in Cox's Bazaar have the resources they need to provide emergency assistance to incredibly vulnerable people who have been forced to flee their homes and have arrived in Bangladesh with nothing."

"There is now an urgent need for 60,000 new shelters, as well as food, clean water and health services, including specialist mental health services and support for survivors of sexual violence."

Those who have fled northern Rakhine state describe village burnings, beatings and killings at the hands of the security forces and Buddhist youths. 

The Myanmar government says it is the Rohingya militants and the Muslim villagers themselves who are burning their own homes and attacking non-Muslims - many of whom have also fled the violence.

But a BBC reporter in Rakhine state on Thursday saw a Muslim village being burned, apparently by a group of Rakhine Buddhists, contradicting the official version of events.

Also on Saturday, rights group Amnesty International accused Myanmar's military of planting landmines at the border with Bangladesh, where many Rohingya are fleeing.

Bangladeshi border guards and villagers have told the BBC that they witnessed more than a hundred Myanmar soldiers walking by and apparently planting landmines at the border.

Bangladeshi officials have said they believe Myanmar government forces are planting the landmines to stop the Rohingya returning to their villages. They have summoned the Myanmar ambassador in Dhaka to protest over the matter.

A Myanmar military source said no landmines had been planted recently, while a government spokesman told Reuters more information was needed, adding: "Who can surely say those mines were not laid by the terrorists?"

The Rohingya plight is sparking concern and protests in many nations, and Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been criticised for failing to protect them. 

Various world leaders have urged Ms Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace laureate who spent years under house arrest for her pro-democracy activism, to speak out on behalf of the Rohingya.

On Saturday, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak said the Rohingya had received "no mercy" and been "tortured, discriminated, killed and raped". He added that the Myanmar government's lack of response was "disappointing". 

Meanwhile, the Pakistani government said it had summoned Myanmar's ambassador in protest at "the ongoing violence against the Rohingya Muslims".

Earlier in the week, Ms Suu Kyi - who faces strong anti-Rohingya sentiment in Myanmar - claimed the crisis in Rakhine state was being distorted by a "huge iceberg of misinformation".

She subsequently said that Myanmar had "to take care of everybody who is in our country, whether or not they are our citizens", and said Myanmar would "try our best" despite inadequate resources.

By Jonah Fisher

BBC News

June 13, 2017

The United Nations has confirmed that its top official in Myanmar is being moved from her position. 

Diplomatic and aid community sources in Yangon told the BBC the decision was linked to Renata Lok-Dessallien's failure to prioritise human rights. 

In particular, this referred to the oppressed Rohingya Muslim minority. 

Internal UN documents - shown to the BBC - said the organisation had become "glaringly dysfunctional", and wracked by internal tensions. 

A UN spokeswoman confirmed Ms Lok-Dessallien, a Canadian citizen, was being "rotated", saying this had nothing to do with her performance which she said had been "consistently appreciated".

Late last year as tens of thousands of Rohingya fled rape and abuse at the hands of Burmese soldiers, the UN team inside Myanmar was strangely silent. 

Ms Lok-Dessallien and her spokesman declined simple requests for information; and on one absurd occasion she visited the conflict area, but on her return refused to allow journalists to film or record her words at a press conference. 

The BBC was told that on numerous occasions aid workers with a human rights focus were deliberately excluded from important meetings. 

Those moments reflect a wider criticism of Ms Lok-Dessallien and her team, namely that their priority was building development programmes and a strong relationship with the Burmese government - not advocating that the rights of oppressed minorities, like the Rohingya, should be respected. 

In an internal document prepared for the new UN secretary general, the UN team in Myanmar is described as "glaringly dysfunctional" with "strong tensions" between different parts of the UN system. 

Ms Lok-Dessallien is currently on leave but has been told that her position is being upgraded, bringing her role to an end after three-and-a-half years, rather than the usual term of up to five years.

A Rohingya refugee girl wipes her eyes as she cries in a Bangladesh refugee camp (Photo: Reuters)

By Jonah Fisher

BBC News

March 12, 2017

When soldiers went searching for militants in Myanmar's Rakhine state last October, the result for members of the Rohingya minority was disastrous. Villages were burned, men were killed, women were sexually abused. And when one woman complained of rape, she was accused of lying by the office of the country's leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and hounded by vengeful soldiers.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, 25-year-old Jamalida Begum tells me what happened in the days after her husband was shot dead in the village of Pyaung Pyaik, north-western Myanmar.

Jamalida fled with her two children and watched from a distance as the army set houses in the village on fire. Satellite images confirm that at least 85 buildings were destroyed. 

Five days later she returned with some of her neighbours to find her belongings and home destroyed. They sheltered together in one of the few homes that had survived - but at dawn the next day the soldiers came back.

"They chose 30 women. Half were young girls aged between 12 and 15," says Jamalida.

The soldiers took them to the village school.

"Then they chose four from among the 30," Jamalida says.

"It was me and three teenage girls. Then we were separated. The army took me to the east of the school near the pond. Another seven soldiers took the other three girls to the hill to the south of the school.

"They shouted at me to open my shirt and my thami (wrap-around skirt). When I refused they started beating me, grabbed my clothes and pushed me to the ground. Three soldiers raped and tortured me for an hour. Blood came out of my lower part and my legs got cramped. They punched me into the eyes saying I was staring at them. It turned my eyes red like fire coal. They left me bleeding and drove away in their Jeeps."

The soldiers were sent into northern Rakhine state to conduct "clearance operations" after militants from Jamalida's ethnic group, the Rohingya, launched an attack on three Burmese police posts on 9 October last year - killing nine officers and seizing guns and ammunition.

A wave of reports of human rights abuses followed, including scores of allegations of rape.

For weeks Myanmar's human rights icon turned leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, denied the allegations, insisting soldiers were adhering to the law, while at the same time refusing to allow independent journalists or observers to access the area.

But as the outcry grew she set up an investigation team, and on 11 December it reached Pyaung Pyaik.

Though initially reluctant, Jamalida was persuaded to speak by the only woman on the team, Dr Thet Thet Zin, the chairman of Myanmar's Women's Affairs Federation.

"She said we won't harm you, bring us the raped and tortured women," Jamalida says. "So I went there and told her everything and they recorded it."

Jamalida's interaction with the investigation team was filmed and several minutes of it broadcast on television. It is extraordinary footage, not just because of the way Jamalida is browbeaten by the translators, but because the Burmese state broadcaster didn't translate what Jamalida is saying to the investigators in the Rohingya language.

Once fully translated, it's clear that Jamalida is describing strong circumstantial evidence that rape has taken place. She tells them she saw three young Rohingya women being taken off into the bushes by soldiers.

"Did you see if those women were raped or not?" the translator asks. 

"I did not," Jamalida replies.

"So, it isn't true," the translator fires back.

"Yes and no," Jamalida says. "They were bleeding directly from here". She points between her legs.

"Don't say that, don't say that, don't say that they are bleeding, just say whether you've seen rape or not," the translator replies.

The translator tells the investigators that Jamalida did not see the women being raped.

Jamalida is also asked directly whether she herself was raped. She tells the investigators that soldiers took her away, stripped her naked and molested her, but says it was "hands only" and not rape.

The translator says: "She wasn't raped."

Here things get complicated.

Ten days later Jamalida is filmed again. This time, a group of handpicked journalists have been brought by the government to Pyaung Pyaik.

Initially none of the Rohingya want to speak to them so someone goes to get Jamalida. She tells the journalists the same story of army abuse again, except this time it changes and she says she was raped.

This discrepancy, between being stripped and molested and being raped, was immediately seized on by Aung San Suu Kyi's office, which was at the time running an aggressive campaign rubbishing foreign and social media reports of atrocities in Rakhine State as "fake news".

Jamalida's face was suddenly on Burmese television and state media once again, now paraded as a liar.

Aung San Suu Kyi's Facebook page called her story an example of "Fake Rape"in a big picture banner.

So what's the truth? When I speak to Jamalida her testimony is detailed and convincing. It matches what she told the journalists and what she said to the investigators apart from that one detail. I believe her when she says she was raped.

I ask Jamalida about the difference in her accounts 10 days apart. She insists that she did tell the government investigators she was raped but that one of the translators was shouting and threatening to beat her. If she did tell the investigators this, it's possible Burmese TV chose not to broadcast this part of her testimony.

"I know they told everyone we weren't raped, tortured or anything," says Jamalida. "We do not have justice in our own country."

The promise made by Thet Thet Zin that no-one would face reprisals for speaking out, turned out to be hollow.

When soldiers came looking for her, she fled to a different village. Then, after speaking to the journalists, she realised it was not safe even there.

"The military were searching for me by getting all the women together in the yard and then showing them my picture," says Jamalida. "I was so scared I hid in the jungle." 

Unable to take it any longer, the young widow fled across the River Naf into Bangladesh - one of more than 70,000 Rohingya to have arrived in the last few months.

I spoke to Thet Thet Zin on the phone. She said that although she couldn't remember meeting Jamalida, the soldiers must have been searching for her to protect rather than harass her. She added that she had seen no conclusive evidence of rape and that she doubted it had happened, as it went against Buddhist culture and tradition. (While the Rohingya are Muslim, most of Myanmar's soldiers are Buddhist.)

Bangladesh is now the best place to go to learn what is happening in northern Rakhine state, which is closed to journalists. Even the UN's special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, has had very limited access.

"I didn't think that I would say this out loud, that it's crimes against humanity," she says, when we meet in the airport at Cox's Bazaar.

"I think that the military needs to bear [responsibility] but at the end of the day it is the civilian government that has to answer and respond to these massive cases of horrific torture and very inhumane crimes that they have committed against their own people."

On Monday Yanghee Lee will urge the UN Human Rights Council to set up a Commission of Inquiry to investigate the abuses against the Rohingya.

As dusk began to fall at the Kutupalong refugee camp, where I met Jamalida Begum, I ask her what she thinks of Aung San Suu Kyi.

"She is doing nothing at all for us," she says. "If she was good, we wouldn't have to suffer so much in that country. Since she is in power Myanmar is hell for us."

Suu Kyi's power to stop the army abuses is limited, under the terms of the constitution drafted by the military. The spokesman for her party told me the UN claims were "an exaggeration" and the Rohingya issue was "an internal affair".

But Aung San Suu Kyi hasn't been to northern Rakhine State, and has never visited a Rohingya camp. In short, Myanmar's Nobel peace prize winner has given no indication to the Rohingya that she really cares.

Jonah Fisher's report was a joint investigation by Our World and Newsnight