Arakan News Agency
Myanmar police will begin arming and training Buddhist residents in the troubled north of Arakan State, where officials say militants from the Rohingya Muslim group pose a growing security threat, police and civilian officials said.
Human rights monitors and a leader of the mostly stateless Rohingya told Reuters the move risked sharpening inter communal tensions in a region that has just seen its bloodiest month since 2012, when hundreds of people were killed in clashes between Muslims and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists.
Soldiers have poured into the Maungdaw area along Myanmar’s frontier with Bangladesh, responding to coordinated attacks on three border posts on Oct. 9 in which nine police officers were killed.
Security forces have locked down the area – shutting out aid workers and independent observers – and conducted sweeps of villages in Maungdaw, where the vast majority are Rohingyas.
Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi has urged security forces to exercise restraint and act lawfully, but residents say civilians have been killed, raped and arbitrarily detained and houses razed to the ground. The government has denied abuses by troops.
Ethnic Rakhine political leaders have urged the government to arm local Buddhists against what they say is rising militancy among the Rohingya.
Arakan State police chief Colonel Sein Lwin told Reuters his force had started recruiting new “regional police” from among the ethnic Rakhine and other non-Muslim ethnic minorities living in Maungdaw.
Candidates who did not meet the educational attainment standards, or criteria such as minimum height, required for recruitment by the regular police would be accepted for the scheme, he said.
“But they have to be the residents,” said Sein Lwin. “They will have to serve at their own places.”
Police Captain Lin Lin Oo said initially 100 recruits aged between 18 and 35 would undergo an accelerated 16-week training programme, beginning in the state capital Sittwe on Nov. 7.
“They will be given weapons and other equipment, like police,” said Lin Lin Oo, an aide to the commander of the border police in Maungdaw, who will oversee the auxiliary force.
Police and civilian officials said the auxiliary police recruits would not form a new “people’s militia”, like those that fight ethnic insurgencies elsewhere in Myanmar.
Such militias – which are often accused of abuses against civilians – raise their own funds and are overseen by the army. The new recruits in Arakan will be paid and come under the control of the border police.
Source : Reuters
