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 Syed Zainul Abedin

Dhaka Tribune

October 11, 2017

'The Rohingya crisis is no longer an internal issue in Myanmar. It is a regional crisis now.'

When Foreign Minister AH Mahmood Ali was speaking at a discussion on Tuesday, he noted that “Myanmar’s proposal of partial repatriation might be a ‘trick’ to neutralise the mounting pressure from the international community.”

The minister was speaking at a roundtable discussion at Bangladesh Institute of International and Strategic Studies on Tuesday morning.

“Myanmar may curtail the number of repatriates using their own verification process and may delay the implementation of the recommendations from the Kofi Annan Commission advisory, giving various excuses.”

He said it would be difficult for Bangladesh to send back the Rohingya, who have fled the violent “ethnic cleansing” in Rakhine that began once again on August 25, to Myanmar without support from international community.

“The Rohingya crisis is no longer an internal issue in Myanmar. It is a regional crisis now.”

Minister Mahmood Ali noted that the Myanmar army was strengthening their forces in Rakhine about a month before August 25.

On the Myanmar’s home minister’s plan for “demographic balance,” Mahmood said the Myanmar army was working with Buddhist extremists to execute their plan.

“It is quite noticeable that the Myanmar government is trying to sow confusion among the international community and their own citizens by promoting false news in their state-run media.

“They are trying to establish this issue as ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘extremist Bangali terrorism’. Their campaign plans to confuse their neighbours.

DEVEX

October 11, 2017

October 11, 2017

GENEVA – Brutal attacks against Rohingya in northern Rakhine State have been well-organised, coordinated and systematic, with the intent of not only driving the population out of Myanmar but preventing them from returning to their homes, a new UN report based on interviews conducted in Bangladesh has found.

The report by a team from the UN Human Rights Office, who met with the newly arrived Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar from 14 to 24 September 2017, states that human rights violations committed against the Rohingya population were carried out by Myanmar security forces often in concert with armed Rakhine Buddhist individuals. The report, released on Wednesday, is based on some 65 interviews with individuals and groups.

It also highlights a strategy to “instil deep and widespread fear and trauma – physical, emotional and psychological” among the Rohingya population.

More than 500,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since the Myanmar security forces launched an operation in response to alleged attacks by militants on 25 August against 30 police posts and a regimental headquarters. The report states the “clearance operations” started before 25 August 2017, and as early as the beginning of August.

The UN Human Rights Office is gravely concerned for the safety of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who remain in northern Rakhine State amid reports the violence is still ongoing, and calls on authorities to immediately allow humanitarian and human rights actors unfettered access to the stricken areas.

The report cites testimony from witnesses that security forces scorched dwellings and entire villages, were responsible for extrajudicial and summary executions, rape and other forms of sexual violence, torture and attacks on places of worship. Eyewitnesses reported numerous killings, saying some victims were deliberately targeted and others were killed through explosions, fire and stray bullets.

A 12-year old girl from Rathedaung township described how “the [Myanmar security forces and Rakhine Buddhist individuals] surrounded our house and started to shoot. It was a situation of panic – they shot my sister in front of me, she was only seven years old. She cried and told me to run. I tried to protect her and care for her, but we had no medical assistance on the hillside and she was bleeding so much that after one day she died. I buried her myself.”

The report states that in some cases, before and during the attacks, megaphones were used to announce: “You do not belong here – go to Bangladesh. If you do not leave, we will torch your houses and kill you.”

Credible information indicates that the Myanmar security forces purposely destroyed the property of the Rohingyas, targeting their houses, fields, food-stocks, crops, livestock and even trees, to render the possibility of the Rohingya returning to normal lives and livelihoods in the future in northern Rakhine almost impossible.

UN Human Rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, who has described the Government operations in northern Rakhine State as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing,” has also urged the Government to immediately end its “cruel" security operation. By denying the Rohingya population their political, civil, economic and cultural rights, including the right to citizenship, he said, the Government’s actions appear to be “a cynical ploy to forcibly transfer large numbers of people without possibility of return.”

The report indicates that efforts were taken to effectively erase signs of memorable landmarks in the geography of the Rohingya landscape and memory in such a way that a return to their lands would yield nothing but a desolate and unrecognizable terrain.

Information received also indicates that the Myanmar security forces targeted teachers, the cultural and religious leadership, and other people of influence of the Rohingya community in an effort to diminish Rohingya history, culture and knowledge.

ENDS

Original here.

H.E. Emmanuel Macron 

The honourable President of the French Republic 

55, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré 

75008 Paris, France 

Date: 10 October 2017 

Dear Mr. President, 

We, the undersigned representatives of Rohingya worldwide first like to let you know how grateful we are to the French Republic for rightly termed the attacks on Rohingya minority, who are considered by the UN the most persecuted in the world, as “genocide’. 

In the purpose of the meeting you will hold with Kofi Annan we are bringing to your kind attention the following concerns: 

1. Thousands of Rohingya ethnic minority are fleeing daily (vast majority of them women and children) to join more than 500,000 Rohingyas already at the Bangladesh border because of the constant intimidation, harassment, threatening and otherwise progressive denial of access to food and livelihoods. 

2. Myanmar's criminal deeds are beyond the purview of Mr. Kofi Annan's Advisory Commission on Rakhine State, which, by its own official admission, did not investigate the allegations of Myanmar's egregious and systematic violations of human rights and other international treaties, including the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) that Myanmar ratified in 1991. 

3. Rohingya worldwide commend Mr. Kofi Annan and his commission's recommendations which include normalizing and re-integrating Rohingyas as a self-identifiable and distinct ethnic community, who have been stripped of its ethnicity, full citizenship and basic rights and freedoms in Myanmar for nearly 4 decades. 

4. However, the Annan Commission’s recommendation that Rohingyas allow themselves to be subjected to the verification process as required by Myanmar's perpetrating hybrid government of NLD-military as a pathway to citizenship is deeply troubling -- in light of the fact that the process imposes forcibly a false group identity, Bengali -- in blatant violation of the UN-recognized group's right to self-identify. 

5. Rohingyas are rightly and completely distrustful of Myanmar government's official narrative concerning the Rohingya refugees that have fled Myanmar since October 2016, and specifically: 

-(i) Minister of the Myanmar State Counsellor Office Kyaw Tint Swe repeatedly emphasized what State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi said last month that Myanmar would take back “verified” 

-(ii) Myanmar Vice Senior General Soe Win, the number two leader of the country's military, told the Swiss Ambassador on 3rd October that the "Bengalis" are not entitled to direct full citizenship and hence they have to be subjected to a verification process Two main reasons make us worried about the verification process that could become a persecution instrument depriving the Rohingyas from the fundamental right to citizenship and from any protection: 

Myanmar seized and destroyed, for many years, any proof of documentation and for a large number of Rohingyas did not issue any form of documentation. The Rohingyas lack documents for the verification and the resettlement as their houses and villages, at the same time, were burned down. The Rakhine State government and Rakhine politicians are trying to establish Buddhist villages on those Rohingyas’ villages and lands. Myanmar central government has already claimed state ownership of the Rohingyas’ land within the affected region of Northern Rakhine State and has planned to confine the repatriated refugees in displacement camps like that in Rakhine’s capital Sittwe, which were recently described by New York Times as 21st century concentration camps. 

The Rohingyas, natural born citizens but also an ethnic group recognized by the only parliamentary government of Burma/Myanmar that ruled the country from independence in 1948 to 1962 until military took over will lose their original ethnicity as Rohingya to become Bengali. 

We are sure that you will continue to denounce the blatant violations of international law by a member state in the false pretext of “national defence”, “anti-terrorism”, and that you will not be of those who, by shutting their eyes on the atrocities taking place in Myanmar, erode the trust of 

We the People around the world, in the capacity of the Nations to stop what you have rightly and responsibly qualified as a genocide. 

We thank the French State to consider seriously the long-term concerns of the, terrified and traumatized Rohingyas and their safety, so that any repatriation would be totally accepted to by themselves on a voluntary basis, and not under duress, and with international safeguards that guarantee physical well-being and access to life-sustaining essentials such as food, access to their land on which they earn their living. 

Accept, Excellency, the consideration of our highest esteem. 

Respectfully, 

• The European Rohingya Council 
• Arakan Rohingya National Organization 
• Arakan Rohingya Union 
• Burmese Rohingya Organization UK 
• Burmese Rohingya Community in Denmark 
• Burmese Rohingya Community Ireland 
• Burmese Rohingya Community Netherlands 
• Burmese Rohingya Community Norway 
• Burmese Rohingya Association Japan 
• Burmese Rohingya Community Australia 
• Burmese Rohingya Association in Queensland - Australia (BRAQA) 
• Rohingya Community in Germany 
• Rohingya Community in Switzerland 
• Rohingya Organisation Norway 
• Rohingya Community in Finland 
• Rohingya Community in Italy 
• Rohingya Community in Sweden 
• Rohingya Society Malaysia 
• Rohingya Arakanese Refugee Committee 
• Rohingya Advocacy Network 
• Japan Rohingya American Society 

Contact:

Dr. Hla Kyaw; chairman@theerc.eu; +31652358202

The letter to French President (in French)

By Tom Allard, Nurul Islam

Reuters

October 9, 2017

Rohingya refugees who fled from Myanmar make their way through the rice field after crossing the border in Palang Khali, Bangladesh October 9, 2017. REUTERS/Damir Sagolj

By ANDREA PITZER

The Daily Beast

October 9, 2017

In a stumbling democracy, Rohingya Muslims became trapped in a relentless campaign of ethnic cleansing that has left hundreds of thousands homeless and in detention camps.

At the end of August, Myanmar’s military unleashed operations in response to what it described as terrorist attacks on at least 20 police stations in its western state of Rakhine. What followed has yet to be documented in full, but Bangladesh has accused Myanmar’s military of burning 10,000 homes, and according to satellite imagery from Human Rights Watch, hundreds of villages in Rakhine state have been obliterated. More than 420,000 minority Rohingya Muslims have fled across the border to Bangladesh, where hundreds of thousands are already official or unofficial refugees from a similar exodus more than 20 years ago.

State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, a former democracy activist and now the leader of the governing party, misrepresented and minimized military actions in the region this week. She further suggested that the government does not understand why hundreds of thousands of people would flee to another country. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has warned that based on the information available so far, the crisis appears to be a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

In this excerpt from my book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, I trace my 2015 trip to Rakhine state, diving into the messy history of the region, how it came to have detention camps that may have fueled insurgency, and the rationale those in the state capital use to justify keeping their former neighbors in camps. All these pieces are critical to understanding events happening today—events likely to get worse with the government’s announcement this week that it intends to build seven new Rohingya-only camps in the vicinity of the razed villages.

A flight through Korea or Thailand to Yangon in Myanmar and a short hop on a smaller plane can carry anyone to the Bay of Bengal and Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state. Trees heavy with giant fruit bats and what appear to be ten rickshaw drivers and one mini-truck cabbie per capita compete for any foreigner's attention. The town boasted nearly two hundred thousand residents a decade ago, but many of those inhabitants no longer live in Sittwe, having been relegated to detention camps on the outskirts of town.

In the summer of 2012, reports of a gang rape and other violent crimes stirred tensions between Buddhist and Rohingya Muslim communities across Rakhine state. In response to the escalating violence, extremists led riots that October that burned thousands of Rohingya out of their homes. Vandalized mosques were boarded up; one was converted to a police station.

Under the state of emergency declared by the federal government, the Rohingya population throughout the region was loaded onto buses and trucks and dropped off on the outskirts of their hometowns, near Rohingya-only enclaves, or in the middle of nowhere, eventually ending up stuck in the kinds of camps for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) typically seen during wars and natural disasters. In some cases armed guards stopped extremists from additional pogroms, but they also kept the Rohingya detainees from leaving.

The only Rohingya permitted to stay in the city of Sittwe have been sealed off in Aung Mingalar, the Muslim Quarter, which has become an extension of the camp system that has risen around the state. Roads leading into the district are blocked at checkpoints by red-and-white sawhorses wrapped in barbed wire, creating a ghetto in the middle of a city filled with Buddhists, Christians, and a panoply of other ethnic groups the Rohingya lived among and did business with not long ago. Most residents of the state endured rural poverty even before the advent of the camps, but in the relative prosperity of Sittwe, many Rohingya had assimilated into urban life, working in construction or making eyeglasses and plate-glass windows. Some had attended the city university.

Since the 2012 violence, segregation has been enforced. But the borders of the camps are somewhat permeable. A few Rohingya work as day laborers for the military. As with many prior camp systems in other countries, nongovernmental groups enter to coordinate aid to the displaced populations, and journalists sometimes get government permission to visit the camps—or failing that, are able to bribe their way in, if they do not mind putting their fate in the hands of strangers.

Camp structures vary widely up and down the narrow blade of the coastal state, as do camp communities, but around Sittwe, hustlers work both sides. Outside drivers cart visitors or goods into the camps, selling the latter at exorbitant rates. Some detainees save their food rations to sell to those outside the camps, though they always take a loss, dependent on the mercy of their buyers.

With a little cash, Rohingya entrepreneurs can import comfort foods from town, which they offer to fellow detainees for a profit. In some places longhouse frontage has been converted to small kiosks, with neatly hung rows of packaged goods and stacked canned sodas. A tiny money supply circulates and recirculates in a frenzy, constantly bled off by outsiders. One preteen shopkeeper in Dar Paing Camp in 2015 had taken the business over from his brother, who finally gathered enough money to pay a trafficker to deliver him from Myanmar into another country.

Across the first years of the camps' existence, day-to-day life was unpleasant but more stable than not. A sense of suppressed violence lingered, however, and reports of assaults by extremists haunted the detainees on a regular basis. Spies and informers lurked everywhere.

In 2015 soldiers in the Muslim quarter carried assault rifles, and security police patrolled with pistols. The guards were generally not from Rakhine state, and so lacked some of the local hatred for the Rohingya. Camp detainees were emphatic about wanting detention to be lifted so they could come and go at will, but at that point did not seem to mind the armed protection, and at times expressed gratitude for its presence.

Approximately 4,000 residents live in the quarter itself. Another 120,000 people or so were corralled across the state in camps created for those who lost their homes in the violence. Add in the Rohingya who did not flee their homes but who nonetheless one day found government barricades and checkpoints set up on the outskirts of their villages, and you get more than a million stateless people who live with some form of government segregation or communal detention in Rakhine state.

Early in the process, the then president of Myanmar denounced the 2012 riots and declared that local leaders' role in it would be investigated. But the country was in the first stages of transition from a military dictatorship to democracy. No one was taken to task, and eventually it was understood that the government found the situation to its advantage.

Those who were in Sittwe during what interpreters refer to as "the violence" tell of fire and pursuit, of fleeing homes without time to grab identification papers and family photos, let alone retrieve practical items. They describe the shock of recognizing their neighbors among the attackers, and of seeing law enforcement standing by without intervening. Some residents fled the fire by heading into the small lake bordering the Muslim district of Aung Mingalar, where two women were reported giving birth in the mud during the riots. Hundreds were killed across the state.

As the camps took shape, international aid organizations negotiated a sometimes bumpy partnership with the government to ensure clean water sources via wells, to provide food, and to make inroads toward health care and sanitation. Registries of the dispossessed were kept to track the food assistance that was soon forthcoming, but in many cases residents were cut off from fishing, farming, and skilled work.

The poverty in Rakhine state is such that many local extremists have used the food, latrines, and wells provided to the Rohingya in camps as a kernel around which to build additional resentment, describing them as luxuries provided preferentially to Muslims by biased outsiders. Most people in Rakhine state do not have access to latrines. The town of Sittwe itself was not on an electrical grid until years after the creation of the camps.

The ghetto holds ghosts of an era in which at least some Rohingya managed middle-class lives. The nicest homes—a few still have their glass windowpanes—run slowly to ruin in the blistering humidity. Less sturdy houses fall apart in the ebb and flow of flooding. Plastic sheeting with a UN logo slowly replaces standard repairs, a concession to the ravages of isolation and dependence. Trees and vines grow over early improvised graves behind the mosque, while boys and girls in bright green-and-white uniforms gather outside their school. For those who are able to attend, the open-air patch between classrooms lies half buried in muck and standing water. A plaster sign announces that Japan provided for the school's construction in 2005, a reminder that poverty and need for outside help have long existed in Sittwe. But it turns out that things can always get worse.

Outside town, the IDP camps are less vivid, their rows of living quarters arranged in grids, though people try to reclaim any arable inch for growing plants. As in Aung Mingalar, ducks, dogs, goats, and straw-colored hens run everywhere. Children follow strangers, having little else to do. Detainees live in longhouses, eight units to a building, with one roughly ten-by-ten foot room for each family—whether the family has three or eight members. Each family shares a well, a semiprivate space for bathing, and a communal hallway with the other longhouse residents.

At first the Rohingya were allowed to pay for temporary travel permits to other parts of the country, but these passes can no longer be had. Residents must use a bus, for which they pay a fare, that will ferry them only to visit other Rohingya in nearby camps. When tensions rise, bus travel is halted.

In 2015, thousands of Rohingya were smuggled by traffickers into other countries in hopes of greater freedom or paying jobs. Some did illegal work; others found only detention or even death at the hands of traffickers. Unless they resort to this expensive and dangerous human trafficking, even Rohingya who manage to flee Myanmar are also stuck. Having declared them illegal immigrants, their own country will not take them back, and the ones to which they have fled do not want them.

As the flood of refugees has increased, neighboring countries have worked to block thousands of incoming Rohingya. Bangladesh, which counts more than thirty-two thousand registered Rohingya in its official refugee camps just across the border from Myanmar, regularly threatens to move them to an uninhabitable island. In addition to those officially registered, the country has also been home for decades to hundreds of thousands of unregistered Rohingya, who live in and near the existing camps without legal rights or protection.

But these Rohingya refugee camps differ from those inside Myanmar, in that the former hold populations from other countries, while the latter maintain a vulnerable population still at risk in deliberate segregation from their fellow countrymen. The Rohingya inside Rakhine state continue to live as internal refugees in close proximity to the very people who resorted to violence against them.

The successful effort to label them as foreigners has emboldened those who wish to deny them rights, despite the fact that Rohingya culture has roots going back centuries in the region, with the term appearing in a 1799 treatise on local Rakhine dialects. In an attempt to tar all Rohingya Muslims as illegal immigrants, the state government has long refused to grant any validity to the word, referring to the group as "Bengali."

Officially, the Rohingya were cut off from full citizenship in 1982, though for many years the law was not enforced, and they were able to run as candidates and vote during the few opportunities that had arisen on Myanmar's halting, aborted, and resurrected road toward democracy. In early 2015, however, anticipating the national elections that November, the government confiscated even the temporary ID cards that the Rohingya had held, rendering them stateless.

The Rohingya are the pariah group of Myanmar, but their most enthusiastic jailers, the Rakhine, are also looked down on by the rest of the country. The generals of the dictatorship had no love for Rakhine state, generally treating it as a backwater of hayseeds and traffickers whose natural resources and strategic port were best auctioned off to China for the benefit of those in the capital.

The generals in turn inspired no love in Sittwe, with their surveillance and detentions under the military boot. Before the dictatorship, there was British rule, and before that, there was the invading Burmese king Bodawpaya—successive overlords who provided a reasonably accurate unbroken line of grievance stretching back to at least 1784. This grievance helps the Rakhine people feel entitled to exert whatever power they can today.

Sitting in a restaurant in Sittwe in 2015, not long before the election, U Shwe Mg of the Rakhine Nationalist Party says, "We are a peaceful people. We want peace. But we can only take so much." Asked how he still interprets the Rohingya as a threat when it is overwhelmingly the Rohingya who are in camps, he changes the subject.

Insisting that he is not speaking for his party, he says that in the face of illegal immigration that threatens to swamp the state, the Rakhine people have a right to determine their own destiny. The Rohingya care nothing for education, he explains, claiming that they are religious extremists. He says this without apparent irony, disregarding the slogans of hate that emerged from the 969 Buddhist extremist movement advocating legal restrictions against Muslims.

He says that he does not want violence and declares the camps a good solution for now—though deportations should follow. He refers to the citizenship law of 1982 that laid the groundwork for the Rohingya officially being rendered stateless, but does not note any of the reasons it was enacted or extenuating details about its implementation. He says that all he wants is for the law to be followed, and borrowing a democracy movement catchphrase, asks, "You do believe in the rule of law, don't you?"

Drivers who smuggle journalists or contraband in and out of the camps have their own opinions. One who was born and raised in Sittwe and has never lived anywhere else opens up about the local situation, saying the Rohingya are a problem. Asked about those he grew up with in town—the ones whose parents and grandparents were also born there and ran small businesses or went to school nearby—he expresses mixed feelings. The good ones can stay, he says, but the bad ones must go. He acknowledges that some harm may have been done to those in the camps, but repeats the refrain offered by many in Rakhine state: "We have a right to defend ourselves."

Some Rohingya have managed to keep their cell phones in detention, allowing them to share public information, call for help in emergencies, and build public awareness around the world. One entrepreneur brought a solar panel into one of the camps that residents can use to recharge their devices.

Complaints about lack of access to education and emergency medicine proliferate on social media. Links to government announcements are shared, as are privately circulated reports of violent abuse by security forces, subject to the same confusion and risks as any accounts on social media. The Rohingya may be the first group in the history of mass detention to launch their own digital public relations effort from inside their concentration camps.

Conditions remained bad enough in 2015, or hopeless enough, that many people continued to resort to dangerous tactics in order to flee. Before rainy season closed off the Bay of Bengal as an escape route, thousands of Rohingya set out with traffickers who charged staggering fees to deliver them to new countries. Myanmar's government would have been happy to see them go, but other countries do not want the refugees. Myanmar has learned that it cannot empty its camps this way.

In the meantime, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum released a report the same year, warning that the Rohingya "are at grave risk for additional mass atrocities and even genocide." Others declared that genocide was already underway, based on reported mass executions that have been hard to confirm. Then senior researcher on Burma for Human Rights Watch David Scott Mathieson felt that applying the genocide label in mid-2016 was an overreach for the moment, though he condemned Myanmar's failure to include the Rohingya in an earlier census, as well as their stateless condition. "The government," he said, speaking of the pre-election regime, "shouldn't be caving to extremists and their racist agendas."

A visit to the Sittwe-area camps reveals a culture leaching away, with few education and work possibilities, untreated chronic health conditions, and a people turned into scapegoats in order to pacify the demands of another minority, one with its own history of victimization by the government. When presidential elections in November 2015 brought democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi's party to power, the Rohingya appeared cautiously elated, despite a comment Suu Kyi had made claiming that the media made the situation in Rakhine state worse by exaggerating the problem.

What changes would even be possible remained unclear, since democratic rule was hobbled by the 25 percent of seats in the national legislature reserved for the military—a legacy of dictatorship. After no changes appeared in the first one hundred days and little pressure had been exerted on behalf of those detained, even cautious optimism faded.

Former UN secretary general Kofi Annan was named chairman of a committee in Rakhine state to resolve the issue of the Rohingya, and met with citizens and detainees alike. On the day of his arrival in Sittwe, more than a thousand locals gathered at the airport to protest what they saw as outside interference in their affairs. Progress seems unlikely without a non-Rohingya champion for Rohingya rights who is from Myanmar itself. There may not be a leader willing to take up that mantle.

In October 2016, the stasis that had held for years was shattered after an attack on three border posts reportedly left nine police officers dead in the area of Maungdaw, which borders on Bangladesh. The government identified the attackers as insurgents. In the days that followed, government troops proceeded to close the region to observers and use automatic weapons and helicopter gunships to kill dozens of Rohingya.

Despite the lack of access to some areas, satellite imagery confirmed the destruction of villages in the region. Reports of a campaign of rape and the deaths of more than one thousand Rohingya were relayed by those seeking refuge on the border with Bangladesh. In February 2017, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights confirmed many of these reports, documenting the "devastating cruelty" of summary executions and burning people alive, and calling for a "robust reaction" from the international community. The government has repeatedly denied aid groups and journalists access to areas targeted for military action.

Though camps in Rakhine state had initially provided some security in the wake of the 2012 riots against the Rohingya, by normalizing the group's detention and encouraging their demonization for years, the state and national government turned detainees into sitting ducks for a military with an atrocious human rights record—a military that the country's new leadership may not yet be strong enough to defy, if it is even inclined to try.

Standing in Dar Paing Camp in 2015, surveying an open stretch of field just outside Sittwe, it appears that despite sections of heavier fencing, there are places where perimeter security is more relaxed. Even if someone lacks the money to pay traffickers to get to another country, it seems possible to slip away at night and stay clear of the roads—to make an escape.

But the ability to leave the camps may not be the biggest barrier. Little sympathy exists in the surrounding community for the Rohingya as citizens, neighbors, or human beings. Dismissing the possibility of departure, an interpreter giving a tour of the camp says, "Where would I go? Everyone would know I am a Rohingya."

Asked what would happen if he were caught outside the camp, he stops to consider the question. "I have no rights. If I am caught, I do not even exist."

Excerpted from One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Campsby Andrea Pitzer, copyright ©2017 by Andrea Pitzer.

By Kyaw Soe Oo

Reuters

October 9, 2017

MYEBON, Myanmar -- Buddhist villagers in relatively peaceful parts of Myanmar’s Rakhine state are enforcing a system of local apartheid that punishes people trading with minority Muslims, fuelling fears that violence in the far northwest could spread to new areas. 

Ethnic Rakhines, who form the majority in central parts of the state, have set up committees in several districts that have meted out sanctions ranging from fines to public beatings and expulsions. They say the measures are necessary to protect their communities from Rohingya Muslim militants. 

Muslim residents say they are being cut off from essential supplies and accuse authorities of turning a blind eye. Aid workers fear thousands will attempt to escape via perilous sea routes to Thailand and Malaysia when the monsoon rains abate. 

About 250,000 Muslims live in central Rakhine, an area not directly affected by a military offensive against Rohingya militants who attacked security forces in the northern part of the state in late August. The army operation has forced more than half a million people to flee to Bangladesh, in what the United Nations has denounced as ethnic cleansing. 

“In the current situation, it’s not possible for different communities to live together,” said Ashin Saromani, a Buddhist monk in the central Rakhine town of Myebon, where one such committee was set up at a meeting in a monastery four days after the Aug. 25 militant attacks in the north. 

“The government can’t reconcile them. That’s why we prohibited communication with the Muslims, to prevent conflict.” 

Rakhine state government spokesman Min Aung said he was not aware of efforts to punish Buddhists who had contact with Muslims. He said he thought tensions could best be eased by interfaith community groups. 

“Other states and regions have interfaith groups working for peace. In Rakhine there’s no group like that,” he said. 

Tension between ethnic Rakhines and Muslims have simmered for years. Nearly 200 people were killed and 140,000 displaced in communal violence in the state in 2012. 

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has warned that the violence seen in the north of the state could easily spread. 

“The failure to address this systematic violence could result in a spillover into central Rakhine, where an additional 250,000 Muslims could potentially face displacement,” said Guterres in a recent speech. “They are outnumbered by Rakhine communities, some of whom have engaged in violent acts of vigilantism against their Muslim neighbours.” 

“NATIONAL TRAITOR” 

In Myebon, about 3,000 Muslims have been confined to a camp for displaced people since the 2012 violence, surrounded by tens of thousands of hostile Rakhine Buddhists. They have relied on aid from international agencies and fishing, supplemented by a small amount of trade in the town. 

Since late August, loudspeakers mounted on tricycle rickshaws have rolled around the town, blaring messages from local monks and Rakhine community leaders exhorting Buddhists to avoid contact with Muslims. 

One Rakhine woman who ignored the warnings, 35-year-old Soe Chay, told Reuters she was surrounded by a mob on Sept. 12 after buying goods at a market to sell to Muslims. 

They beat her, cut her hair and marched through the town with a sign reading “national traitor” hung around her neck.

Kyaw Swar Tun, deputy director of the Rakhine General Administration Department (GAD) that overseas the local bureaucracy, said the case was an “individual problem” that was already being dealt with by the courts. 

Two women and a man have been charged with assault on Soe Chay. The two women were members of the Arakan Women’s Network in Myebon, which denied taking part in the attack. 

“People got angry because they don’t have a nationalist spirit, even though they know that 30 police stations were attacked and locals from Maungdaw were beheaded,” said Khin Thein, leader of the network in the town, describing the incident. He was referring to the Aug. 25 attacks, which concentrated in northern Rakhine’s Maungdaw township. 

Buddhist community leaders in Myebon have also blocked international aid agencies from reaching the camp, saying only the government can deliver aid, which must be checked by Buddhists. 

“We are concerned that if we don’t check that boat of the NGOs communicating directly with the Bengalis, they might include weapons together with the aid,” said Ashin Saromani. Bengali is a derogatory term for the Rohingya implying they are interlopers from Bangladesh. 

Similar community-enforced restrictions on aid have been in place elsewhere in Rakhine, according to aid workers. 

“FEAR OF REVENGE” 

Anti-Muslim sentiment has been bubbling up elsewhere in mostly Buddhist Myanmar since the conflict erupted in Rakhine. 

Police had to disperse a mob that attacked Muslim homes and businesses in the central Magwe division on Sept. 10. 

In Kayin state in the east, Muslims were told last month they must get special permission from authorities before travelling outside of their villages, because of security concerns. 

Closer to the conflict zone, Muslim villagers in Rathedaung township say they have been directly pressured to leave by their Rakhine neighbours. 

In Ku Taung village, near the besieged Muslim villages, a group of 46 Rakhine Buddhist elders has formed a “disciplinary committee”. 

They have fined Buddhists as much as 500,000 kyat ($370) for infractions including selling betel leaves to Muslims, according to farmer Tun Thar Sein. 

Some Rakhine villages have set up security teams to protect against the spread of militancy. In Mrauk-U and Minbya, an area that saw several unexplained explosions last month, residents said Muslims were no longer allowed into Rakhine villages. 

Kyaw Swar Tun, the local administrator, said authorities would deal with any cases brought to them according to the law, but was not aware of any such problems in central Rakhine. 

Back in the Myebon camp for displaced people, Muslims say they will have to move away. 

”It’s not possible for us to go back and stay together in Myebon because the Rakhine who destroyed our homes will be afraid to face us. said Cho Cho, a Muslim resident. “They fear that Muslims will take revenge.” 

Reporting by Kyaw Soe Oo in Myebon, Wa Lone, Simon Lewis and Thu Thu Aung in Yangon; Additional reporting by Andrew R.C. Marshall in Sittwe; Editing by Alex Richardson