MAUNGDAW, Myanmar — We waded through floodwaters, past
soldiers hefting rifles, and climbed into a prefabricated hut.
Inside, a row of men sat huddled against the wall as
armed police and immigration officers stood over them. They were, we had been
given the impression, among the 700,000 Rohingya Muslims who had fled northern
Rakhine State in Myanmar for Bangladesh last year in an exodus that the United
States and other countries condemned as ethnic cleansing.
Now, dozens had been repatriated, officials said, thanks
to the good will of the Myanmar government, which wanted to show off its
commitment to welcoming back the Rohingya and the rows of barracks it had
prepared for the returnees.
But like nearly every interaction on a recent
government-led trip for journalists to the epicenter of the crisis, cracks
appeared in the official story line.
The men at one of the country’s three repatriation
centers shook their heads when asked if they had peacefully come back to
Myanmar from Bangladesh.
They said they had not been repatriated at all. In fact,
they said, they had never even left this waterlogged stretch of marsh and
mountain in Myanmar, and had been swept up in the government’s broad repression
of the Rohingya minority.
One day, last year, three of the men said, soldiers had
arrested them in their village in northern Rakhine State. Five and a half
months later, they were released and charged with illegal immigration.
“They accused us of coming from Bangladesh, but we have
never been to Bangladesh,” Abdus Salim said. “Rakhine is our home.”
U Win Khine, the lead immigration officer, looked
apologetic. Maybe they were liars, he said. He refused to call the men
Rohingya, referring to them as Bengali to imply they belonged in neighboring
Bangladesh.
“Bengalis are not from our country because they have
different blood, skin color and language from us,” Mr. Win Khine said. “We have
no Rohingya here.”
Outside of Myanmar, the tragedy of the Rohingya is clear.
Over the decades, the Muslim minority has been stripped of its rights — to
attend college, to access medical care, to move freely — by a
Buddhist-chauvinist, army-dominated government. Most have no citizenship.
When Rohingya insurgents attacked police posts and an
army encampment last August, killing a dozen security personnel, a paroxysm of
violence against Rohingya civilians followed within hours: mass executions,
rapes and village burnings by security forces that United Nations officials
have suggested could constitute genocide. Rakhine Buddhist mobs are abetted in
the bloodletting.
But on this rare trip to northern Rakhine, under the
watchful eye of armed guards, the official narrative diverged from the
internationally accepted reality. The Rohingya had burned their own residences,
we were told by officials and civilians alike. They were terrorists — and if
they were not terrorists, they were women and children manipulated by shadowy
groups in Bangladesh and elsewhere in the Islamic world.
Yet even as we were shepherded through the muddy, still
charred countryside of Rathedaung and Maungdaw, two townships in northern
Rakhine, the discussions grew sticky with contradictions.
We stopped in a village once populated by Rakhine
Buddhists, Rohingya Muslims and the Mro, a formerly jungle-dwelling ethnic
minority. Eight Mro were killed last August by Rohingya insurgents, the Myanmar
authorities have said. Why hadn’t the international media covered these
murders, local officials on our tour asked? But they didn’t address the thousands
of Rohingya who human rights groups say were killed last year.
Like everywhere else we went, officials in the village
insisted that the Rohingya here had torched their own houses in order to garner
global sympathy.
But at one point we spoke freely with local residents,
and a girl, who would be in danger if her name were revealed, said she missed a
Muslim friend who had lived a few houses down. “The Rakhine burned their houses
down,” she said, referring to civilians from the Buddhist ethnic group that
gives Rakhine State its name. “My friend is gone forever.”
A man corrected her quickly. “You’re supposed to say the
reverse,” he admonished. “You should say they burned their own houses down.”
Outside, another child, playing soccer barefoot in the
rain, was more emphatic.
“I saw it with my own eyes, how the Rakhine burned down
all the Muslim houses,” he said, detailing how a car belonging to a Rohingya
family was lit on fire because the looters didn’t know how to drive.
“Who would burn down their own houses?” the boy added.
“That’s stupid.”
A new school and Buddhist pagoda had been built on what
was once the village’s Muslim quarter. The remaining residents have been gifted
new homes by the government, rows of prefabricated houses that looked
incongruous in one of the poorest places in Asia.
In the town of Maungdaw, U Kyaw Win Htet, the assistant
director of the Maungdaw District General Administration Department, gave a
briefing on the area’s changing demographics. A year ago, Maungdaw District had
a population of 800,000. Now, there were 416,000 people. Before, the township
was 90 percent Muslim. Now it was barely half.
Why did the Muslims leave? Mr. Kyaw Win Htet, a Buddhist,
said he wasn’t sure. “I think they didn’t want to live here anymore,” he said.
“But the reason why, only they themselves know.”
Did the local government have death tolls from last
year’s violence, broken down by ethnicity? Mr. Kyaw Win Htet said he did not
know. Had he ever visited any of the hundreds of burned Rohingya villages? No,
he had not. Did he know of any Muslim employees of his government department,
given that nearly most of the district’s population had been Rohingya? No, he
did not.
Later, Mr. Kyaw Win Htet admitted that the “Bengali
issue” was not his bailiwick. His expertise was flood control. He had been
assigned to talk to us only because his boss was away.
Earlier this week, the Myanmar government formed yet
another commission to investigate what exactly had happened in northern
Rakhine. Half a dozen such committees have been convened so far; none has
determined anything substantive.
Meanwhile, the country’s leadership continues to deny there
was any state-sponsored campaign to remove the Rohingya from Myanmar.
At one swollen river crossing, a few Rohingya ventured
through the murky water. We had gotten out of the car because it wasn’t clear
whether the vehicle could manage the current, and an elderly woman, Suma Bibi,
and her husband splashed by. I wanted to talk to her so we ducked under the
roof of a border guard hut to escape the rain. She was shaking.
“I am afraid,” she whispered, jutting her chin at the
armed policeman standing behind me. “I don’t want to be close to people like
that.”
Ms. Bibi said she had tried unsuccessfully to escape to
Bangladesh when her village was destroyed by fire.
“I want to leave,” she said. “But I cannot.”
We had with us an armed guard, Cpl. Ko Hla Phyu, who
wasn’t pleased when we talked to Muslims or showed too much interest in the
scorched wrecks of mosques. The corporal said he knew all about the
“terrorists,” who had created havoc in northern Rakhine.
When the photographer with us, Adam Dean, defied his
instructions and jumped out of the car to take pictures of a charred village,
he remarked that if Adam’s head wasn’t bulletproof, it would be advisable to
return to the car.
“I will lay down my life to make sure the terrorists
don’t get my gun,” he said, cradling his battle rifle.
The final day of our government tour, we stopped at the
Taung Pyo border between Myanmar and Bangladesh, where thousands of Rohingya
have been caught behind barbed wire in a kind of buffer zone between the two
countries. The Myanmar government claims Muslim militants operate from this
narrow strip of territory, a charge these displaced Rohingya deny.
On earlier occasions, from the Bangladesh side, I had
talked with Dil Mohammed, the leader of this marooned community. Mr. Mohammed
had gone to the University of Yangon, Myanmar’s finest. He once had a nice
house. Now he was stateless, homeless and soaked by the monsoons and the
occasional surge of sewage.
But he laughed when he saw me peering through the fence
from Myanmar.
“Before, you were on that side,” Mr. Mohammed said in his
courtly English, pointing to Bangladesh. “Now you are on this side.”
“But I am still here in the same place,” he added. “Do
you think that will ever change?”