In 2017, a Rohingya militant group attacked several police posts in Myanmar. As the army responded with brutal force, thousands of Rohingya fled to Bangladesh. Today, the militants threaten those who dare to defy them.
As night fell, the alleyways meandering through the world's largest refugee camp were almost deserted. Two men clutching torches, their light flickering on the wet and muddy ground, scurried through the rain and disappeared into the shadows. A dog barked in the distance, while music and muffled voices drifted from one of the countless tiny huts made of corrugated iron, bamboo and tarpaulin.
Young men sheltered in doorways, staring out into the shadows. They were Rohingya watchmen on the lookout for criminal gangs. For at night, when a government-imposed curfew sends the many aid workers back to their hotels and lodgings, security is tense. DW has heard tales of murders, abduction and rape.
Murder in the Rohingya camps
One evening in late August, a local source took DW to meet a woman whose husband was killed nearby. As the source stood guard outside her hut, the woman clutched a young child, while another stared at his mother from behind the curtain that divided the tiny space into two minuscule rooms. One single plastic toy lay on the bed, a single thin mattress that took up half of the room.
As the rain drummed on the roof, she whispered so her neighbors wouldn't hear the hurried conversation. Her husband, she said, had worked for the good of the Rohingya. "He wanted to stop misconduct in the camps."
DW knows the identity of both the woman and her husband. But because she fears she is being watched, DW has chosen not to reveal his name or position within the camp. But one thing is clear: His actions seem to have angered a powerful group operating with near-impunity.
ARSA active in the camps
Those who killed him, she said, belonged to Harakah al-Yaqin — the former name of a group of Rohingya militants, which in 2016 renamed themselves ARSA, or Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army. Led by a small cadre of Rohingya emigres from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the group wants self-governance for the Rohingya, an impoverished Muslim minority that has long been denied full citizenship in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. Most Rohingya live in Rakhine, the poorest state in an impoverished country, and need special permits to travel and marry.
ARSA made international headlines when it launched a coordinated attack on 30 border guard police posts and an army base in Rakhine state in Myanmar in August 2017, killing 12 members of the security forces according to government officials. This followed previous attacks on police posts in late 2016. The attacks marked a major escalation in a simmering conflict and triggered a large-scale and violent army offensive.
The Tatmadaw, as the army is called, responded with a scorched earth tactic, burning and bombing villages. In September 2017, the UN human rights chief labelled the crackdown a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing." More than 730,000 Rohingya fled the country to neighboring Bangladesh, crossing the Naf border river that separates Myanmar and Bangladesh in boats, floats and on foot.
Bangladesh welcomed the refugees, settling them in crowded, makeshift camps that the authorities built close to the border. Together, they make up the world's largest refugee camp. Among the refugees were members of the group whose actions had escalated the deadly violence in the first place: ARSA militants.
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