Arakan News Agency
A high government official in Myanmar said on Tuesday that thousands of Rohingya Muslims, besieged by hostile Buddhists in the northwest, have enough to eat and would not be allowed to leave from two remote villages as they requested.
The Rohingya villagers said they wanted to leave, but they needed government protection from Buddhist Rakhines who threatened to kill them.
They also reported that their food has been running out since August 25th, when Rohingya rebel launched deadly attacks in Arakan state that led the Myanmar army to launch a violent campaign.
At least 420,000 Rohingyas fled to neighboring Bangladesh to escape what a senior UN official described as a text book example of ethnic cleansing.
“The requests from two villages to allow safe passage were rejected because there is enough rice and a nearby police station protects them,” said Tin Maung Swe, secretary of the Arakan state government.
“Their reasons are unacceptable. They must stay in their original place. “
Residents of Ah Nauk Pyin, one of the two Rohingya villages, said they hoped to move to the relative safety of a camp outside Sittwe, the nearby state capital.
About 90,000 Rohingya displaced by a previous bout of violence in 2012 are confined to camps in Arakan in squalid conditions.
But such a move was “impossible,” said state secretary Tin Maung Swe, since it might anger Rakhine Buddhists and further inflame communal tensions.
In a nationally televised speech on Tuesday, Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi vowed to punish the perpetrators of human rights violations in Arakan, but did not address U.N. accusations of ethnic cleansing by the military.
The Nobel Peace Prize laureate said that many Muslims had not fled and urged foreign diplomats to study why certain areas of Arakan state had “managed to keep the peace”.
“We can arrange for you to visit these areas and to ask them for yourself why they have not fled … even at a time when everything around them seems to be in a state or turmoil,” she said.
The Rohingya residents of Ah Nauk Pyin say they have no other choice but to stay, and their fraught relations with equally edgy Rakhine neighbors could snap at any moment.
About 2,700 people live in Ah Nauk Pyin, which sits half-hidden among fruit trees and coconut palms on a rain-swept peninsula.
Its residents said that Rakhine men have made threatening phone calls and recently congregated outside the village to shout, “Leave, or we will kill you all”.
