YANGON: Myanmar has started shutting down three displacement camps in strife-torn Rakhine state, a senior official said Tuesday, although it was not immediately clear where the inhabitants would go.
Tens of thousands of people from Rakhine’s Muslim and Buddhist communities ended up in internal displacement camps after sectarian violence ripped the impoverished region apart five years ago.
The move to shutter the first of those camps comes after a commission led by former UN chief Kofi Annan last month called on the government to close them as part of a series of measures designed to heal simmering ethnic tensions.
National Security Adviser Thaung Tun said the government had begun with three camps named in the commission’s report, including one sheltering ethnic Rakhines and one that houses Kaman Muslims.
The largest of the three includes more than 200 houses full of Rohingya Muslims, a heavily persecuted minority.
“We have initiated the process to close down three IDP (internally displaced persons) camps,” Thaung Tun told a briefing, without giving details of where people would be moved.
“In Kyauk Phyu, there are IDP camps for Rakhines... Sittwe for the Rohingya group and Ramree... mostly for Kamans.”
Myanmar has long faced international condemnation for its treatment of Rakhine’s more than one million Rohingya, who many from the Buddhist majority reject as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
The vast majority are not granted citizenship and face severe restrictions on their access to education, health care, food and movements despite many living there for generations.
The issue has reached boiling point in recent months after the army launched a bloody crackdown in the north of Rakhine thought to have claimed hundreds of lives after attacks on several police border posts in October.
UN investigators say Myanmar’s security forces may have carried out crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya during that crackdown.
UN probe unwanted
A top Myanmar official says a UN agency’s resolution to have an international mission probe alleged human rights abuses by government security forces in troubled Rakhine state is unwanted and unconstructive.
Thaung Tun said in a briefing Tuesday to foreign diplomats and representatives of UN agencies that the UN Human Rights Council’s recent decision failed to recognize Myanmar’s efforts to deal with the situation and address its root causes.
Soldiers and police launched aggressive counterinsurgency operations in Rakhine in October after shadowy insurgents killed nine border guards. Government forces were accused of perpetrating rape, torture and other abuses against residents of the Muslim Rohingya minority during their sweeps.
The Rohingya have faced widespread discrimination in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar, which led to deadly inter-communal violence in 2012.
