A group representing Rohingya in Europe claims Myanmar’s army manipulated members of the Muslim minority into taking part in an act of violence in which nine police officers were killed so the state could legitimize an ongoing clampdown.
The chairman of the European Rohingya Council (ERC) says around 400 Rohingya have been killed since the Oct. 9 attacks, women raped and houses and mosques destroyed — acts which he says stem from a growing frustration among Rohingya with the poverty and lack of legal recognition they face, and the initial entrapment.
“Obsolete weapons were sold by police to Rohingya youngsters, who attacked the police post because they thought they could get international attention or save their oppressed people,” Khairul Amin told Turkish state news agency.
“The police, military had knowledge what would happen when these people got these weapons, so we can say they set them up to be attacked.”
He says that in the subsequent military clampdown, more than 2,500 houses, mosques and religious schools were razed, three villages completely wiped out and 400 people killed — “although thousands who fled the attacks are still unaccounted for”.
“More than 30,000 people have been left homeless. Men and adults are hiding in the jungle, in paddy fields and mountains, and trying to flee across the border into Bangladesh, and women and children are left in [what is left of] their homes,” Amin says.
“They [the military] wanted to wipe them out, therefore they used helicopter gunships on them; they wanted to show the world that there are militants or terrorists at work in Myanmar, and by arming the Rohingya it gave them license to carry out this operation.
“We got information from our sources that people are dying everyday because of hunger, because of bullet wounds and many other types of wounds. They do not have any opportunity at all to get healthcare, or medicine.”
Since Oct. 9, the government has claimed that the group that carried out the attack was not from Myanmar, and then that confessions from Rohingya who participated show they only did so under threat of death from outsiders from neighboring Bangladesh.
Amin says such statements “just aren’t true”.
“The people who attacked the police post were the Rohingya residents… The people living under oppression in Arakan [Rakhine] State. By arming them, the military encouraged them to attack the police post so it could use this as a pretext to launch atrocities against Rohingya,” he says.
Likewise, the government has also claimed that destruction of homes was carried out by Rohingya to elicit international sympathy.
“There is no truth in what the government is saying,” says Amin. “Nobody with any common sense will burn down their own property, starve to death living and sleeping in paddy fields just to evoke sympathy. What more sympathy will it get them? Globally, people are already sympathetic to their [the Rohingya] cause.”
Myanmar has said that since Oct. 9, 86 people — 17 soldiers and 69 alleged “attackers” — have been killed, and property destroyed in the area — a figure vastly different to that quoted by Rohingya groups such as the ERC.
The efforts by the government to spin a different narrative have led humanitarian groups to call for an external independent probe into the initial deaths and subsequent attacks in an area that has since been sealed to anyone bar the military — a cry that the government has so far ignored.
It has, however, announced that a national-level investigation commission will soon be formed to probe the ongoing attacks.
“The commission will submit a report based on its findings in the investigation and will also give suggestions for the prevention of such kind of attacks in the future,” state media reported last week.
Since Aung San Suu Kyi’s party won the Nov. 8 election — subsequently becoming the country’s first fully democratically elected government in 50 years — she has been placed under tremendous international pressure to solve problems faced by Rohingya, but has had to play a careful balancing act for fear of upsetting the country’s nationalists, many of whom have accused Muslims of trying to eradicate the country’s Buddhist traditions.
The situation has been complicated by the division of resources in impoverished yet underdeveloped Rakhine — which the military has long sought to control — and efforts to resolve historic ethnic differences countrywide.
