Bertil Lintner, former Myanmar correspondent of the now-defunct newsmagazine Far Eastern Review, first visited the country at the age of 24 in 1977. He spent most of the next three decades reporting on the excesses of military rule, which stretched from 1962 to 2010.
Myanmar: Rohingya trapped in dehumanising apartheid regime
Rohingya segregated and abused in “open-air prison”
Two-year investigation reveals root causes of current Rakhine State crisis
System of discrimination amounts to the crime against humanity of apartheid
The Rohingya people in Myanmar are trapped in a vicious system of state-sponsored, institutionalised discrimination that amounts to apartheid, said Amnesty International today as it publishes a major new analysis into the root causes of the current crisis in Rakhine State.
“Caged without a roof” puts into context the recent wave of violence in Myanmar, when the security forces killed Rohingya people, torched whole villages to the ground, and drove more than 600,000 to flee across the border into Bangladesh.
The Myanmar authorities are keeping Rohingya women, men and children segregated and cowed in a dehumanising system of apartheid. Their rights are violated daily and the repression has only intensified in recent years.
The two-year investigation reveals how authorities severely restrict virtually all aspects of Rohingyas’ lives in Rakhine State and have confined them to what amounts to a ghetto-like existence where they struggle to access healthcare, education or in some areas even to leave their villages. The current situation meets every requirement of the legal definition of the crime against humanity of apartheid.
“The Myanmar authorities are keeping Rohingya women, men and children segregated and cowed in a dehumanising system of apartheid. Their rights are violated daily and the repression has only intensified in recent years,” said Anna Neistat, Amnesty International’s Senior Director for Research.
“This system appears designed to make Rohingyas’ lives as hopeless and humiliating as possible. The security forces’ brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in the past three months is just another extreme manifestation of this appalling attitude.
“Although these rights violations may not be as visible as those that have hit the headlines in recent months, they are just as horrific. The root causes of the current crisis must be addressed to end the cycle of abuse and make it possible for Rohingya refugees to return to a situation where their rights and dignity are respected.”
Rakhine State: An open-air prison
While Rohingya have faced systematic, government-sponsored discrimination in Myanmar for decades, Amnesty International’s investigation reveals how such repression has intensified dramatically since 2012, when violence between Buddhist and Muslim communities swept the state.
Rohingya in Rakhine State are essentially sealed off from the outside world and face severe restrictions on their freedom of movement that confine them to their villages and townships. These restrictions are put in place through an intricate web of national laws, “local orders” and policies implemented by state officials displaying openly racist behaviour.
A regulation in effect across Rakhine State clearly states that “foreigners” and “Bengali races [a pejorative term for the Rohingya]” need special permits to travel between townships. In northern Rakhine State, where the majority of the Rohingya lived until the recent exodus, even travel between villages is heavily restricted by a system of permissions. Arbitrary curfews have been harshly and continually imposed in predominantly Rohingya areas for the last five years.
In central Rakhine State, Rohingya are kept tightly locked down in their villages and displacement camps. In some areas they are not allowed to use roads and can only travel by waterways, and only to other Muslim villages.
For Rohingya who do manage to obtain permission to travel in northern Rakhine State, frequent checkpoints mostly staffed by Border Guard Police (BGP) are a constant menace, where they are regularly harassed, forced to pay bribes, physically assaulted or arrested.
One Rohingya man described witnessing such abuse when the bus he travelled on was stopped by police: “There were four police in total, two of them beat the guys with a cane on their backs, shoulders and thighs. Another slapped the lady four or five times with his hand. […] After that they took them to the police station.”
While conducting research for the report, Amnesty International staff saw first-hand a border guard kicking a Rohingya man at a checkpoint, and documented at least one case of an extrajudicial execution, when BGP officers shot dead a 23-year-old man travelling during curfew hours.
During the violence in 2012, tens of thousands of Rohingya were driven out of urban areas in Rakhine State, in particular the state capital Sittwe. Today some 4,000 remain in the town where they live in a ghetto-like area sealed off with barbed wire barricades and police checkpoints. They are at risk of arrest or violence from the surrounding community if they try to leave.
A life on the brink of survival
The restrictions on movement are having a devastating impact on the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who have been pushed to the brink of survival.
While the quality of hospitals and clinics in Rakhine State is generally poor for all communities, Rohingya face serious and often life-threatening barriers in accessing health care.
Rohingya are denied access to Sittwe hospital, the highest-quality medical facility in Rakhine State, except for in extremely acute cases. Even then they require authorization from the Rakhine State authorities and travel under police escort. In northern Rakhine State, many see no choice but to travel to Bangladesh to access the health care they need, but this trip can often be prohibitively expensive for all but the wealthiest families.
One man in his 50s said: “I wanted to go to Sittwe hospital for medical treatment, but it’s forbidden, the hospital staff told me I couldn’t go to there for my own safety and said I needed to go to Bangladesh for treatment. It cost a lot of money. My brother has many paddy fields and oxen and he had to sell some of these to pay for the travel. I was lucky… most people cannot afford this, so they just end up dying.”
Outside of northern Rakhine State, only a few medical facilities are accessible for Rohingyas. There, they are kept in separate “Muslim wards” which are guarded by police. One aid worker compared one such ward to a “prison hospital”.
Several Rohingya described how they had to pay bribes to hospital staff and police guards if they wanted to call family members or purchase food from outside. Others avoided hospitals altogether – fearing abuses by doctors and nurses, or thinking they would not be offered care at all.
“Denying Rohingya access to medical care is abhorrent – we spoke to women who said they would rather give birth at home in unsanitary conditions than risk abuse and extortion at hospitals,” said Anna Neistat.
It is very challenging at the moment because we don’t have enough to eat. We would be better in jail or prison because at least then we would have food regularly. It is like we live in a prison anyway.
Since 2012, Myanmar authorities have tightened restrictions on Rohingyas’ access to education. In large parts of Rakhine State, Rohingya children are no longer allowed into previously mixed government schools at all, while government teachers often refuse to travel to Muslim areas.
With higher education largely off limits for Rohingya, many people Amnesty International spoke to expressed a sense of despair and hopelessness about the future.
Tightened restrictions on travel have also affected many Rohingyas’ ability to earn a living or to put enough food on the table. People selling produce have been cut off from trade routes and markets, while farmers are often prevented from working their fields. Malnutrition and poverty have become the norm among Rohingya in the affected areas, a situation the authorities have compounded by severely restricting humanitarian access.
“It is very challenging at the moment because we don’t have enough to eat. We would be better in jail or prison because at least then we would have food regularly. It is like we live in a prison anyway,” said one 25-year-old Rohingya man.
A ban on gatherings of more than four people, applying specifically to Muslim-majority areas, also means that Rohingya – the overwhelming majority of whom are Muslim – are effectively banned from worshipping together. Authorities in Myanmar have also sealed off mosques, leaving Muslim places of worship to decay.
Denial of citizenship
Underpinning the discrimination against Rohingya is their lack of legal rights in Myanmar. At the heart of this are discriminatory laws and practices, in particular the 1982 Citizenship Act, which have effectively denied citizenship to Rohingya on the basis of their ethnicity.
Amnesty International’s research also reveals how Myanmar authorities have engaged in a deliberate campaign to strip Rohingya of even the limited forms of identification they do possess. Since 2016, the government has made it extremely cumbersome for Rohingya to register newborn babies on “household lists” – often Rohingya families’ only proof of residence in Myanmar. Meanwhile, in northern Rakhine State, those who are not home for annual “population checks” risk being deleted from official records altogether.
One consequence of this campaign is that it has become virtually impossible for Rohingya who have fled the country to return to their homes. This is particularly concerning since the military operations in 2016 and 2017 have driven close to 700,000 Rohingya to flee into Bangladesh, where they are living in refugee camps in desperate conditions.
“Restoring the rights and legal status of Rohingya, and amending the country’s discriminatory citizenship laws is urgently needed – both for those who remain in the country and those who wish to return. Rohingya who have fled persecution in Myanmar cannot be asked to return to a system of apartheid,” said Anna Neistat.
Dismantling the system of apartheid
Amnesty International has, through a thorough legal analysis of this extensive body of evidence concluded, that the Myanmar authorities’ treatment of the Rohingya amounts to apartheid, defined as a crime against humanity under the Convention against Apartheid and the Rome Statue of the International Criminal Court.
Myanmar is legally obliged to dismantle the apartheid system in Rakhine State, and must also ensure accountability for those responsible for committing acts that amount to crimes against humanity.
“Rakhine State is a crime scene. This was the case long before the vicious campaign of military violence of the last three months. This abhorrent system of discrimination and segregation permeates every aspect of Rohingyas’ lives and unless there are immediate steps to dismantle it, it will remain in place long after the military campaign ends,” said Anna Neistat.
“Authorities cannot rely on hollow arguments about the need for ‘safety’ or to combat ‘terrorism’ to impose further restrictions on Rohingya. The repression is unlawful and completely disproportionate. Crimes against humanity can never be justified - whether as ‘security measures’ or on any other basis.”
“The international community must wake up to this daily nightmare and face the reality of what has been happening in Rakhine State for years. While development is an important part of the solution, it cannot be done in a way which further entrenches discrimination. The international community, and in particular donors, must ensure that their engagement does not make them complicit in these violations.”
Background: What is apartheid?
Under the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, apartheid is defined as a crime against humanity covering a range of acts, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and with the intention of maintaining that regime.
Specific acts committed in this context and criminalised as apartheid range from openly violent ones such as murder, rape and torture to legislative, administrative and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and deny them basic human rights and freedoms. A clear example of where officials in Rakhine State have combined regulatory and violent acts is the extreme restrictions on freedom of movement on Rohingya, which constitutes the crime of “severe deprivation of physical liberty” as defined in the Rome Statute.
Myanmar: Rohingya trapped in dehumanising apartheid regime
The Rohingya people in Myanmar are trapped in a vicious system of state-sponsored, institutionalised discrimination that amounts to apartheid.
၁၉၄၅ အလြန္ ကမၻာ့ႏိုင္ငံေရးေလာကမွာ အခ်ဳပ္အျခာအာဏာ ကစားပြဲ (Sovereignty Game) ဆိုတဲ့ သေဘာတရားက ေခတ္စားလာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ႏိုင္ငံတခုရဲ႕ ရပ္တည္ႏိုင္မွဳ (survival) ဟာ စစ္အင္အားဆို တာေပၚမွာ မူတည္ေနခဲ့တာေၾကာင့္ ကမၻာတလႊားမွာ စစ္ပြဲေတြ၊ က်ဴးေက်ာ္သိမ္းပိုက္မွဳေတြ၊ ကိုလိုနီနယ္ခ်ဲ႕ စနစ္ က်င့္သံုးမွဳေတြ ျဖစ္ခဲ့ရပါတယ္။ ဒါေၾကာင့္ ႏိုင္ငံတခုရဲ႕ ရပ္တည္မွဳဟာ က်ဴးေက်ာ္စစ္ေတြအေပၚ ခုခံစစ္စြမ္းပကား (defensive military capabilities) တခုတည္းေပၚမွာ မူတည္ျခင္း မရွိပဲ အခ်ဳပ္အျခာ အာဏာ (sovereignty) ကို ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ဥပေဒအရ အကာအကြယ္ေပးမွဳေပၚမွာ မူတည္ရမယ္ဆိုတဲ့ သေဘာတရားေတြ ေပၚထြက္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒီသေဘာတရားေတြအရ ႏိုင္ငံတခုကို အျခားႏိုင္ငံတခုက စစ္ေရးအင္အား အသံုးျပဳမွဳ (The Use of Force) အား ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္မွဳေတြကို Article 2 (4), Articles (39-51) of UN Charterနဲ႕ Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties 1969 တို႕မွာ ေဖာ္ျပထားခဲ့ပါတယ္။
ဒီလို စစ္ေရးအင္အားအသံုးျပဳမွဳအား ထိန္းခ်ဳပ္ျခင္း (prohibition of the Use of Force) ဟာ ႏိုင္ငံတကာ ဆက္ဆံေရးမွာ ကမၻာ့ႏိုင္ငံအသီးသီးက လက္ခံက်င့္သံုးေနတဲ့ acceptable norm တခု ျဖစ္ေနေပမယ့္လဲ အေၾကာင္းေၾကာင္းအရရ စစ္အင္အားအသံုးျပဳရတဲ့ အေျခအေနေတြလဲ ေပၚထြက္လာခဲ့ပါတယ္။ ဒါနဲ႕ပတ္ သက္ျပီး ႏိုင္ငံတခု (သို႕မဟုတ္) ႏိုင္ငံအစုအဖြဲ႕ေတြကေန ႏိုင္ငံတခုကို စစ္ေရးအင္အား အသံုးျပဳမွဳကို ဘယ္လိုအခ်ိန္အခါ၊ ဘယ္လိုအေျခအေနေတြမွာ ျပဳလုပ္သင့္တယ္ဆိုတာနဲ႕ ပတ္သက္ျပီး အျငင္းပြားမွဳေတြ၊ ေလ့လာသံုးသပ္မွဳေတြ ရွိလာပါတယ္။ အခုဒီေဆာင္းပါးမွာ စစ္ေရးအင္အားအသံုးျပဳမွဳ (The Use of Force) နဲ႕ ပတ္သက္တဲ့ Just War Doctrine နဲ႕ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမွဳျဖင့္ ၀င္ေရာက္စြက္ဖက္ျခင္း (Humanitarian Intervention) ေတြကို ေရးသားတင္ျပပါမယ္။
Just War Doctrine
၂၀ရာစုေႏွာင္းပိုင္းနဲ႕ ၂၁ ရာစု စစ္ေရးအင္အားအသံုးျပဳမွဳေတြမွာ Just War Doctrine ကို အသံုးျပဳျပီး ဒီစစ္ ပြဲေတြရဲ႕ တရားမွ်တမွဳကို ေလ့လာဆန္းစစ္ၾကပါတယ္။ Just War Doctrine သေဘာတရားရဲ႕ အေျခခံက laws of armed conflict ရဲ႕ functions ႏွစ္ခုျဖစ္တဲ့ jus ad bellum (lit. the law towards war) နဲ႕ jus in bello (lit. the law in war) တို႕ပဲ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။ jus ad bellum က ႏိုင္ငံတကာဆက္ဆံေရးမွာ စစ္ေရးအင္အား အသံုးျပဳမွဳကို တတ္ႏိုင္သမွ် ေရွာင္ရွားရန္၊ အသံုးျပဳမွဳအား ကန္႕သတ္ႏိုင္ရန္ ရည္ရြယ္ျပီး၊ jus in bello ကေတာ့ မလြဲမေရွာင္သာ စစ္ေရးအင္အား အသံုးျပဳရတဲ့အခါ စစ္ပြဲတြင္းမွာ မလိုလားအပ္တဲ့ ထိခိုက္မွဳေတြ ေလ်ာ့နည္းရန္ ရည္ရြယ္ပါတယ္။
Just War Doctrine အရ စစ္ေရးအင္အားအသံုးျပဳမွဳရဲ႕ တရားမွ်တမွဳကို jus ad bellum နဲ႕ jus in bello ဆိုင္ရာ သတ္မွတ္ခ်က္ေတြနဲ႕ တိုင္းတာပါတယ္။ Jus ad bellum criteria အရ ႏိုင္ငံတခုဟာ အျခားႏိုင္ငံ တခုအေပၚ စစ္ေရးအင္အားအသံုးျပဳမွဳဟာ တရားမွ်တေၾကာင္း ေဖာ္ျပႏိုင္ဖို႕ တရား၀င္အာဏာ ပိုင္ အဖြဲ႕အ စည္း (legitimate authority), တရားမွ်တေသာ အေၾကာင္းရင္း (just cause), မွန္ကန္ေသာ ရည္ရြယ္ခ်က္ (right intention), ေအာင္ျမင္မွဳအလားအလာ (chance of success), အခ်ိဳးအစား (proportionality), ေနာက္ဆံုးနည္းလမ္း (last resort) ဆိုတဲ့ အခ်က္ အမ်ားစုနဲ႕ ျပည့္စံုရမွာ ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
jus in bello function (lit. the law in war) ကေတာ့ စစ္ဥပေဒေတြျဖစ္တဲ့ Geneva law နဲ႕ Hague law ေတြကို အေျခတည္ထားပါတယ္။ Geneva law က စစ္ေရးပဋိပကၡရဲ႕ သားေကာင္ေတြကို ကာကြယ္ေရး အပိုင္းေတြနဲ႕ ဆက္စပ္ျပီး၊ Hague law ကေတာ့ စစ္ပြဲမ်ား အသံုးျပဳတဲ့ နည္းလမ္းေတြ၊ ဗ်ဴဟာအခင္း အက်င္းေတြ၊ စစ္လက္နက္ အသံုးျပဳမွဳေတြနဲ႕ ဆက္စပ္ပါတယ္။ စစ္ေရးပညာရွင္မ်ားက jus in bello နဲ႕ ပတ္သက္ျပီး စစ္ေရးအင္အားအသံုးျပဳမွဳရဲ႕ တရားမွ်တမွဳကို တိုင္းတာဖို႕ criteria ႏွစ္ခုကို အသံုးျပဳပါတယ္။ ပထမတခုကေတာ့ အခ်ိဳးအစား (proportionality) ျဖစ္ျပီး၊ ဒုတိယတခုကေတာ့ ခြဲျခားသတ္မွတ္မွဳ (discrimination) ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။
အခုဆက္လက္ျပီး စစ္ေရးအင္အားအသံုးျပဳမွဳ (The Use of Force) နဲ႕ ပတ္သက္တဲ့ လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမွဳျဖင့္ ၀င္ေရာက္စြက္ဖက္ျခင္း (Humanitarian Intervention) အေၾကာင္းကို ေရးသားတင္ျပပါမယ္။
Humanitarian Intervention
ႏိုင္ငံတခု (သို႕မဟုတ္) ႏိုင္ငံအမ်ားစုကေန တျခားႏိုင္ငံတခုရဲ႕ ျပည္တြင္းေရးကို လူသားခ်င္းစာနာမွဳျဖင့္ ၀င္ေရာက္စြက္ဖက္ျခင္းဆိုတဲ့ မူလအေျခခံသေဘာတရားမွာ non-military means ေတြျဖစ္တဲ့ အေရးေပ ၚေငြေၾကး၊ စားနပ္ရိကၡာ၊ ေဆး၀ါးပစၥည္း၊ ကၽြမ္းက်င္မွဳ တို႕ျဖင့္ ေထာက္ပံ့ကူညီျခင္းနဲ႕ သံတမန္ေရးရာ နည္းလမ္းမ်ား၊ ပိတ္ဆို႕အေရးယူမွဳ နည္းလမ္းမ်ားျဖင့္ လူ႕အခြင့္အေရး ျမွင့္တင္ျခင္း စတာေတြနဲ႕ စစ္ေရး အရ ၀င္ေရာက္စြက္ဖက္ျခင္း (military intervention) တို႕ပါ ပါ၀င္ခဲ့ပါတယ္။ သို႕ေပမယ့္ စစ္ေအးတိုက္ ပြဲအလြန္ ကာလေတြမွာ non-military means ေတြကို humanitarian aid အေနနဲ႕ပဲ သတ္သတ္မွတ္မွတ္ ေခၚဆိုအသံုးျပဳလာၾကျပီး၊ humanitarian intervention ဆိုတာကို military intervention တမ်ိဳးအေနနဲ႕ပဲ သတ္မွတ္ အသံုးျပဳလာၾကတာေၾကာင့္ humanitarian intervention နဲ႕ စစ္ေရးအင္အား အသံုးျပဳမွဳ (The Use of Force) တို႕ဟာ ဒြန္တြဲလာပါေတာ့တယ္။
CNN Pope Francis: 'The presence of God today is also called Rohingya'By Joshua Berlinger and Delia Gallagher, CNN Updated December 1, 2017
Dhaka, Bangladesh (CNN)Pope Francis referred to the Rohingya people by name on Friday, the first time he has directly addressed Myanmar's persecuted Muslim minority in his Asia tour.
"The presence of God today is also called Rohingya," the Pope said after speaking to an interfaith audience in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka.
He did not use the term in public earlier in the week in Myanmar, to the dismay of campaigners for the Rohingya, whose stories of escaping violence in the country have provoked international condemnation. Friday is the final full day of his trip.
After his speech, the Pope met a group of Rohingya refugees one by one, giving some of them blessings and listening to the stories of others.
Pope Francis meets Rohingya Muslim refugees.
"Your tragedy is very hard, very big. We give you space in our hearts," the Pope said. "In the name of everyone, of those who persecute you, those who hurt you, and especially of the world's indifference, I ask for your forgiveness. Forgive us."
"Many of you talked to me about the great heart of Bangladesh, which offered you refuge. Now I appeal to your heart to give us the forgiveness we are asking from you," he told the group of refugees after meeting them.
Pope Francis shakes hands with Rohingya refugees during an interreligious and ecumenical meeting for peace on Friday in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
More than 620,000 Rohingya have fled across the border from Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh since a spate of violence began in August. Many say were forced to flee atrocities committed by the Myanmar military.
Myanmar's government does not use the term Rohingya to refer to the group. It considers the Rohingya people to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, even though some families have lived in Myanmar for centuries. The Rohingya are not recognized as an official minority in Myanmar, effectively meaning they are denied citizenship.
During a speech Tuesday alongside Myanmar's de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, Pope Francis did not use the term Rohingya despite hopes he would do so.
Vatican spokesman Greg Burke dismissed the idea that Francis -- who has used the Rohingya term before -- diminished his moral authority by avoiding a direct reference to the group during his visit to Myanmar, the first by a Pope to the Buddhist-majority country.
"People don't expect him to solve impossible problems," Burke said.
Activists argued that because Francis did not use the term while he was in Myanmar, he was complicit in the country's strategy to delegitimize the Rohingya plight by questioning their name and identity.
"The term Rohingya is not a racial slur. It is a dignified term for more than two million people who are living across the world," European-based Rohingya activist Nay San Lwin told CNN in an email.
After the Pope's remarks in Bangladesh, Lwin told CNN that he and other Rohingya advocates felt like "winners."
"Unexpectedly he used the correct term. He didn't avoid when he met the Rohingyas in person," Lwin said.
The international community has been outraged by the stories of fleeing refugees.
Jafar Alam, a 24-year-old Rohingya who was due to speak with the Pope in Bangladesh, told reporters before the meeting that the army lined up 30 people in his village and killed them all.
The United Nations, the US and the UK have accused the Myanmar military of ethnic cleansing, systematically driving the minority Muslim population from their homes through murder, rape and terror.
Myanmar's military claims it is pursuing terrorists responsible for a deadly attack on security forces in August. It denies that it has systematically persecuted the Rohingya.
During his visit to Myanmar, Francis met the country's two most important leaders: Suu Kyi and Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of Myanmar's armed forces.
During a brief meeting with Pope Francis Monday, Hlaing insisted that all faiths were able to worship freely in Myanmar.
Who are the Rohingya and why are they fleeing? 02:30
But many Myanmar watchers said Hlaing's claim is false, pointing to the Rohingya crisis.
"The mind boggles when you're confronting such blatant falsehoods and incredibly bogus narratives that have been formulated by people covering up atrocities," said Phil Robertson, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asia division.
Suu Kyi, a former Nobel Peace Prize winner for her nonviolent resistance to the military junta that ruled Myanmar for decades, has also denied that ethnic cleansing is going on her country.
She addressed the crisis in general terms during a speech alongside Francis Tuesday, saying her government aims "to bring out the beauty of our diversity and to make it our strength, by protecting rights, fostering tolerance, ensuring security for all."
Al Jazeera
24/11/2017 For nearly three months now, hundreds of thousands of Muslim Rohingya have been fleeing from Myanmar. They are escaping a military crackdown in Rakhine state that the UN has called 'ethnic cleansing'. More than 600,000 have been living in makeshift camps in neighbouring Bangladesh. Now, the governments of the two countries have signed a deal to send the refugees back to Myanmar. It is a decision Human Rights groups are calling 'unthinkable'. They say, the refugees should not be sent back if their safety cannot be guaranteed. There have been extensive reports of abuse, rape, torture and killings in Rakhine state. The military says it's combating Rohingya fighters but the operation has been condemned around the world. The government of Aung San Suu Kyi strongly denies the accusations of abuse. So, will Myanmar guarantee the safety of Rohingya refugees who return to Myanmar?
Myanmar, Bangladesh sign deal to repatriate Rohingya but details scarce
(CNN) Myanmar and Bangladesh have signed a memorandum of understanding on the return of possibly hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees to their homes in Myanmar's Rakhine State, a spokesman for State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi confirmed Thursday.
Nineteen suspected of involvement in 25 August terrorist attacks arrested
16 November, 2017
Nineteen men suspected of involvement in the terrorists attacks of 25 August were arrested and charged under the anti-terrorism law.
Security forces and other personnel found 38 suspects in Harbi village (west) and Harbi village (middle) in the Harbi village-tract during surprise checks on the morning of 7 November. Following an investigation, it was found that 19, including a man named Mohamed Jarwis and another man named Ismai, were strongly suspected to have been involved in the 25 August terrorist attacks. Under the anti-terrorism law,cases were filed against them at the Pyin Phyu police station.
Four out of 20 suspects found to be involved in terrorist attacks
16 November, 2017
An investigation of 20 men detained after the stakeout of an area alleged to be a hiding area for fugitives resulted in the arrest of four people on suspicion of terroristic activity.
On receipt of a tip-off the that terrorists and fugitives were hiding in the prawn breeding ponds between Gordu Thara west and Gordu Thara Chaungwa, a combined team that includes security forces launched a stakeout starting on the morning of 11 November until the evening, when 20 people arrived and were immediately detained on suspicion of terrorism. Under the investigation conducted in accord with rules and regulations, four men, including Marmed Cobi of Myo Thagyi village in Maungtaw village and Marmed Haron of the village of Du Nyaungbingyi in Maungtaw Township, were filed under the anti-terrorism law, with the remaining men under investigation, it was learnt.
Multiple mine explosions on Yangon-Sittway Road
16 November, 2017
A series of landmine explosions on Yangon-Sittway Road in Rakhine State on Wednesday that were apparently targeting convoys of Tatmadaw vehicles resulted in an injury to a pedestrian and extensive damage to several army trucks.
Three landmines exploded on Wednesday morning on Yangon-Sittway Road near the 84/4 mile marker west of Phar Pyaw (Chin Ywa) in Minbya township, Rakhine State, as three Tatmadaw trucks carrying medicine from Kamni approached, it was learnt. There were no injuries. Shrapnel from the explosions caused extensive damage to the three trucks, flattening tyres, shattering windscreens and destroying the bodies of the vehicles, according to a Tatmadaw news release. No injuries were reported, it was learnt.
Later the same day, another landmine exploded near a concrete bridge between the 116/3 and 116/4 mile markers near Vethali Village and Pauktawpyin Village as seven Tatmadaw convoy trucks approached from Minbya. The force of the blast created a 3-feet wide, 1.5-feet deep hole in the ground near the bridge and caused some ofthe concrete from the bridge’s left guard rail to peel off.
The blast didn’t damage the trucks or Tatmadaw personnel on board, but shrapnel from the explosion hit the left side of the forehead and left ear of nun Daw Thawna Htayri, 64, who was walking from Mrauk U side to Vethali Village. Her conditioncould not be determined.
Yesterday morning, security personnel were conducting security measures along theYangon-Sittway Road when they came upon three suspicious mound of earths 20 feet apart between mile markers 243 and 244 near the border of Kyauktawand Ponnagyun townships. Upon investigation, three mines were found and deactivated. A further search of the vicinity turned up another mine, which was also
deactivated. The four mines found yesterday were learnt to be remote-controlled IEDs.
