Arakan News Agency
Three camps for internally displaced persons will be closed, according to a proposal made by an advisory committee appointed by Aung San Suu Kyi, the state councilor and Foreign minister of Myanmar, to help resolve religious and ethnic divisions in the unstable region, a government official in the western Arakan state government said.
These camps are inhabited by ethnic Muslims from Kaman and Rohingya from Arakan, since 2012 when they were displaced by sectarian violence.
“They need cars and trucks to get out of the camps, and we discussed this with the military colonel in charge of the camps,” said Min Aung, the municipal minister of Arakan state.
Min Aung did not give a timetable for the closure of these camps or provide details about the whereabouts of camp residents after exiting them.
Last week, the committee headed by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to find “durable solutions” to the conflict in Arakan state submitted a progress report to the Myanmar government containing 30 tips to begin solving the chronic problem of the Rohingya minority
Mr. Ghassan Salama, a member of the committee, said the advice provided was quick-to-implement solutions that could be started immediately: allowing returnees displaced from October 2016 and removing the 130,000 Rohingyas-locked camps in Akyab, Arakan state capital, and allowing them to return to their homes and re-establish their freedom of movement within Myanmar.
