Myanmar's Rohingya ethnic minority, victims of a brutal campaign of mass atrocities and persecution by the country's military in 2016 and 2017, is again facing a wave of deadly violence that raises the "specter of ethnic cleansing." This time, however, the perpetrators are said to be the Arakan Army (AA), one of several ethnic groups fighting the nation's ruling junta, as well as Myanmar's security forces, according to survivors and human rights groups.
“Ethnic Rohingya and Rakhine civilians are bearing the brunt of the atrocities that the Myanmar military and opposition Arakan Army are committing,” Elaine Pearson, Asia director of Human Rights Watch (HRW), said in a report this week accusing both the AA and junta forces of “extrajudicial killings and widespread arson against Rohingya” and other civilians.
“Both sides are using hate speech, attacks on civilians, and massive arson to drive people from their homes and villages, raising the specter of ethnic cleansing,” she said.
In April and May 2024, the junta military and allied Rohingya armed groups, as well as the advancing Arakan Army, committed atrocities against civilians, according to the HRW report.
For example, on May 17, when the Arakan Army took control of the remaining junta military bases in Buthidaung Township, its forces shelled, looted, and burned Rohingya neighborhoods in Buthidaung and nearby villages, forcing thousands of Rohingya to flee.
Clashes have since spread west to Maungdaw Township, where fighting has intensified since early August, with reports of killings and other human rights abuses against the Rohingya population, including children, women, and the elderly.
Both the Arakan Army and the Myanmar Armed Forces (MAF) have faced the most serious allegations of targeted violence against Rohingya people in Rakhine in recent months, including beheadings, the burning of villages as people slept, drone attacks, the killing of unarmed people fleeing, and evacuation orders with nowhere to go.
According to human rights activists, various armed groups, including the AA and militant groups affiliated with the MAF, have used Rohingya residents as human shields in recent fighting, and thousands of Rohingya are reportedly still in Maungdaw, trapped between the front lines and in imminent danger.
In northern Rakhine, the security and humanitarian situation in Maungdaw is rapidly deteriorating, with intense fighting for control of the area. The AA has reportedly captured the last MAF base in downtown Maungdaw.
Clashes involving airstrikes and artillery fire have taken place in the downtown area, where Rohingya and other ethnic groups live and where the remaining MAF troops and affiliated armed groups are positioned.
In one of the most recent incidents, denied by the Arakan Army, scores of Muslim Rohingya, including many young children, were reportedly killed in an AA drone and artillery attack as they attempted to flee Myanmar on August 5, according to Rohingya rights activists who spoke to some of the survivors.
The Rohingya families were fleeing violence in Rakhine State's Maungdaw Township and were waiting on the banks of the Naf River for a chance to cross into Bangladesh when they were targeted by the Arakan Army, the activists said.
On the same day, a boat carrying some Rohingya across the river to Bangladesh was reportedly attacked by an AA drone. Two other overloaded boats carrying scores of fleeing Rohingya reportedly capsized, drowning most of the passengers.
In all, more than 200 Rohingya died as a result of the AA attacks, according to eyewitness accounts provided to VOA by Rohingya rights activists. Images on social media, apparently taken shortly after the incident, showed bodies of men, women and children strewn along the banks of the river that marks the border between the two countries.
VOA has not been able to independently verify the images, but Bangladeshi government officials said August 8 that they had found at least 34 bodies floating in the Naf River near its Shahpori island. They were believed to be some of those killed in the alleged AA attack three days earlier.
The Arakan Army denied its involvement in the incident in a statement on August 7.
In its statement, the AA expressed regret that “many Muslims” fleeing Maungdaw had “reportedly died from artillery or small arms fire, bombings, drownings, airstrikes, or massive explosions near the coast of Maungdaw, causing great distress.”
“We respectfully announce that these deaths did not occur in areas under our control and are not related to our organization,” the statement said, adding: “We are investigating the details of these incidents and will promptly release information as soon as we have verified the facts.”
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on August 5, artillery shelling and drone attacks are reported to have killed about 180 people, mostly Rohingya, near the banks of the Naf River as they tried to flee hostilities.
In its latest humanitarian update on Myanmar, released on Friday, OCHA said an estimated 20,000 people were reportedly displaced from three central Maungdaw wards on the same day. Since August 5, displaced Rohingya have moved to the coastal area as their only available escape route in the hope of reaching Bangladesh.
According to the international humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, MSF), an escalating number of Rohingya with violence-related injuries crossed the border into Bangladesh in the week following August 5, where its teams in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, treated dozens of people for violence-related injuries.
Rohingya activist Nay San Lwin, co-founder of the Free Rohingya Coalition, told VOA on Thursday that the AA has been violently targeting Rohingya villages since April, torching thousands of homes and leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless.
“In June, the AA began violently targeting Rohingya in Maungdaw township. Over the past weeks, they dropped drone bombs and fired artilleries on the Rohingya villages. When the attacks began increasing, Rohingya decided to flee to Bangladesh. Now, the AA is targeting the Rohingyas who are fleeing for life, too,” said Lwin, who said he had spoken to many witnesses from Maungdaw.
“In Maungdaw, the AA killed at least 400 Rohingya, including children and women, in the past weeks. On the afternoon of August 5, the AA dropped dozens of bombs on the bank of Naf and a boat, massacring over 200 Rohingya,” Lwin said.
For more than 50 years, minority Rohingya Muslims have fled to neighboring countries, including Bangladesh, to escape persecution and discrimination in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. In August 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya sought refuge in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, to escape violence and persecution in Myanmar. They joined hundreds of thousands of other Rohingya who had previously fled.
More than one million Rohingya are now in Bangladesh, having fled in 2017 and previous waves of atrocities. More than 630,000 Rohingya remain in Rakhine State. Although they have lived in Myanmar for generations, the government considers them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and denies them citizenship.
Myanmar has been embroiled in a bloody civil war that has killed thousands of civilians since 2021, when the country's military seized power in a coup. In recent months, a coalition of ethnic rebel forces, including the AA, has escalated its offensive to oust the junta, which has been driven from vast areas of Shan, Chin, and Rakhine states.
In many different parts of Myanmar, ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) and people's defense forces (PDFs) have been on the offensive against the junta since October 2023. According to the UN, this escalation is the largest and most geographically widespread since the military took power in 2021.
The ongoing intensification of conflict in the Southeast Asian nation - including the worst levels of violence since 2021 - is severely affecting people in almost every corner of the country. Armed conflict has spread to many parts of the country, particularly in Rakhine State, the northwest, Kachin and the southeast.
While launching its offensive against the junta forces in Rakhine, the AA leadership expressed its commitment to respect the human rights of the Rohingya, said activist Lwin.
“The Rohingya community then believed that, unlike the Myanmar military, the AA would not attack them. But in recent months, while taking control of vast areas of Rakhine, the rebel group began violently targeting the Rohingya,” Lwin said.
“In Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships, where most Rohingya are concentrated, the AA rebels burnt villages, looted houses and carried out massacres. In April – May, the rebels killed around 2,100 Rohingya in Buthidaung. In a horrific massacre, on May 2, the AA killed 600 Rohingya, including women and children, in Htan Shauk Khan village of Buthidaung.”
According to the Free Rohingya Coalition, more than 250,000 Rohingya have been made homeless in Buthidaung and Maungdaw since April.
Fortify Rights, an international human rights group based in Southeast Asia, says it has documented killings and arson by the AA in Rohingya villages in Rakhine.
“In Buthidaung and Maungdaw, Rohingya are left to survive in fields and rural areas without adequate shelter, food, health care, and hygiene facilities, after their homes were destroyed by junta attacks and razed by the AA,” said Ejaz Min Khant, a human rights associate at Fortify Rights.
Khant told VOA on Thursday that humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and UN agencies are barely functioning in Rakhine, leaving the Rohingya in a desperate situation. Many have fled to Bangladesh seeking safety, he said.
“The Arakan Army has positioned itself near Rohingya villages, drawing junta attacks, and has been involved in indiscriminate attacks on civilians, forced labor, forced recruitment, and movement restrictions against Rohingya.”
Fortify Rights Director John Quinley said his group has seen an increase in human rights violations against the Rohingya since November.
“Although the AA has taken control of large parts of Rakhine state from the Myanmar junta, they are acting like a perpetrator of violence, not a revolutionary armed group trying to uphold human rights and democracy,” he told VOA.
Noor Hossain, a Rohingya teacher in the sprawling refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, said that the AA is trying to “erase the Rohingya’s long-standing identity, land, and homes, to subjugate the community as slaves.”
“Rakhine has become a graveyard for Rohingyas. The AA is targeting us violently the way the Myanmar military has done for many years. It will be extremely difficult for us to live there in the future, as there is no guarantee of safety for any Rohingya under the control of Rakhine people or the AA,” Hossain told VOA.
“Unless the international community intervenes and reins in the AA immediately, no Rohingya will be able to live in Myanmar in the near future.”
In a related development this week, a newly released report by a group of independent human rights experts says there is "substantial evidence" that Myanmar's military junta has committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, with civilians deliberately targeted in violation of international human rights law.
“Our mandate is to collect evidence of the most serious international crimes in Myanmar. Our report shows that the number of these crimes is only increasing. The armed conflict is increasing in intensity and brutality,” Nicholas Koumjian, head of the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), told journalists in Geneva on Tuesday.
“We have collected substantial evidence showing horrific levels of brutality and inhumanity across Myanmar. Many crimes have been committed with an intent to punish and induce terror in the civilian population,” he said at the launch of IIMM’s annual report.
Investigators say the report is based on evidence gathered from more than 900 sources, including more than 400 eyewitness testimonies, along with additional evidence such as photographs, videos, geospatial imagery, social media posts, and forensic evidence.
The report's authors say that since the military overthrew the country's democratically elected government in February 2021, "the number of serious international crimes in Myanmar has continued to increase in frequency and scale."
They note that in the civil war, the military has lost territory in outlying regions to ethnic armed organizations and people’s defense forces causing it to increasingly rely “on aerial and artillery bombardments of populated areas, resulting in numerous injuries and fatalities among the civilian population.”
The report focuses on the period from July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024 - a time when armed conflict increased across Myanmar as a growing challenge to military rule.
The report states that the Mechanism is seeking information on the current conflict in Rakhine State between the Myanmar security forces and the Arakan Army and serious allegations of crimes committed against both Rohingya and Rakhine civilians in Buthidaung, Maungdaw and surrounding areas, including recent crimes committed in northern Rakhine State, particularly since May 2024.
The Independent Investigative Mechanism on Myanmar was established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2018 to collect and analyze evidence of the most serious international crimes and other violations of international law committed in Myanmar since 2011.
Some information for this report provided by VOA.
Further information
Full text: Myanmar: Armies Target Ethnic Rohingya, Rakhine, Human Rights Watch, report, released August 12, 2024
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/08/12/myanmar-armies-target-ethnic-rohingya-rakhine
Full text: Myanmar Humanitarian Update No. 40, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, report, released August 16, 2024
https://reliefweb.int/report/myanmar/myanmar-humanitarian-update-no-40-16-august-2024
Full text: Report of the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar, report to the UN Human Rights Council, released August 13, 2024
https://iimm.un.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/2411995E.pdf