By TODD PITMAN
Sept. 30, 2012 9:50 PM EDT
SITTWE, Myanmar (AP) — There are
no Muslim faithful in most of this crumbling town's main mosques anymore, no
Muslim students at its university.
They're gone from the market,
missing from the port, too terrified to walk on just about any street
downtown.
Three-and-a-half months after
some of the bloodiest clashes in a generation between Myanmar's ethnic Rakhine
Buddhists and stateless Muslims known as Rohingya left the western town of
Sittwe in flames, nobody is quite sure when — or even if — the Rohingya will
be allowed to resume the lives they once lived here.
The conflict has fundamentally
altered the demographic landscape of this coastal state capital, giving way to
a disturbing policy of government-backed segregation that contrasts starkly
with the democratic reforms Myanmar's leadership has promised the world since
half a century of military rule ended last year.
While the Rakhine can move
freely, some 75,000 Rohingya have effectively been confined to a series of
rural displaced camps outside Sittwe and a single downtown district they dare
not leave for fear of being attacked.
For the town's Muslim population,
it's a life of exclusion that's separate, and anything but equal.
"We're living like prisoners
here," said Thant Sin, a Rohingya shopkeeper who has been holed up since
June in the last Rohingya-dominated quarter of central Sittwe that wasn't
burned down.
Too afraid to leave, the
47-year-old cannot work anyway. The blue wooden doors of his shuttered
pharmaceutical stall sit abandoned inside the city's main market — a place
only Rakhine are now allowed to enter.
The crisis in western Myanmar
goes back decades and is rooted in a highly controversial dispute over where
the region's Muslim inhabitants are really from. Although many Rohingya have
lived in Myanmar for generations, they are widely denigrated here as foreigners
— intruders who came from neighboring Bangladesh to steal scarce land.
The U.N. estimates their number
at 800,000. But the government does not count them as one of the country's 135
ethnic groups, and so — like Bangladesh — denies them citizenship. Human
rights groups say racism also plays a role: Many Rohingya, who speak a
distinct Bengali dialect and resemble Muslim Bangladeshis, have darker skin
and are heavily discriminated against.
In late May, tensions boiled over
after the rape and murder of a Rakhine woman, allegedly by three Rohingya, in
a town south of Sittwe. By mid-June, skirmishes between rival mobs carrying
swords, spears and iron rods erupted across the region. Conservative estimates
put the death toll at around 100 statewide, with 5,000 homes burned along with
dozens of mosques and monasteries.
Sittwe suffered more damage than
most, and today blackened tracts of rubble-strewn land filled with knotted
tree stumps are scattered everywhere. The largest tract, called Narzi, once
was home to 10,000 Muslims.
Human Rights Watch accused
security forces of colluding with Rakhine mobs at the height of the mayhem,
opening fire on Rohingya even as they struggled to douse the flames of their
burning homes.
Speaking to a delegation of
visiting American diplomats earlier this month, Border Affairs Minister Lt.
Gen. Thein Htay described Sittwe's new status quo. Drawing his finger across a
city map, he said there are now "lines that cannot be crossed" by
either side, or else "there will be aggression ... there will be
disputes."
"It's not what we
want," he added with a polite smile. "But this is the reality we
face."
While police and soldiers are
protecting mosques and guarding Rohingya in camps, there is much they cannot
control. One group of 300 local Buddhist leaders, for example, issued
pamphlets urging the Rakhine not to do business with the Rohingya or even talk
to them. It is the only way, they say, to avert violence.
Inside Sittwe's once mixed
municipal hospital, a separate ward has been established to serve Muslim
patients only; on a recent day, it was filled with just four patients whose
families said they could only get there with police escorts.
At the town's university, only
Rakhine now attend. And at the main market, plastic identity cards are needed
to enter: pink for shopkeepers, yellow for customers, none for Rohingya.
The crisis has posed one of the
most serious challenges yet to Thein Sein's nascent government, which declared
a state of emergency and warned the unrest could threaten the country's
nascent transition toward democracy if it spread.
Although the clashes have been
contained and an independent commission has been appointed to study the
conflict and recommend solutions, the government has shown little political
will to go further.
The Rohingya are a deeply
unpopular cause in Myanmar, where even opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and
former political prisoners imprisoned by the army have failed to speak out on
their behalf. In July, Thein Sein himself suggested the Rohingya should be
sent to any other country willing to take them.
"In that context, we're
seeing them segregated into squalid camps, fleeing the country, and in some cases
being rounded up and imprisoned," said Matthew Smith, a researcher for
Human Rights Watch who authored a recent report for the New York-based group
on the latest unrest.
In places like Sittwe,
"there is a risk of permanent segregation," Smith said. "None
of this bodes well for the prospects of a multi-ethnic democracy."
In the meantime, the government's
own statistics indicate the crisis is worsening — at least for the Rohingya.
While the total number of
displaced Rakhine statewide has declined from about 24,000 at the start of the
crisis to 5,600 today, the number of displaced Rohingya has risen from 52,000
to 70,000, mostly in camps just outside Sittwe.
The government has blamed the
rise on Rohingya it says didn't lose homes but who are eager to gain access to
aid handouts. Insecurity is also likely a factor, though. Amnesty
International has accused authorities of detaining hundreds of Rohingya in a
post-conflict crackdown aimed almost exclusively at Muslims. And in August,
3,500 people were displaced after new clashes saw nearly 600 homes burned in
the town of Kyauktaw, according to the U.N.
Elsewhere in Rakhine state, the
army has resumed forced labor against Muslims, ordering villagers to cultivate
the military's paddy fields, act as porters and rebuild destroyed homes,
according to a report by the Arakan Project, an activist group.
In Sittwe, mutual fear and
distrust runs so high that most of the 7,000 Rohingya crammed inside a
dilapidated quarter called Aung Mingalar have not set foot outside it since
June. It's the last Muslim-inhabited block downtown, a tiny place that takes
about five minutes to cross by foot.
Thant Sin, the Rohingya
shopkeeper who lives in Aung Mingalar, said the government delivers rice but
getting almost everything else requires exorbitant bribes and connections.
There is just one mosque. There are no clinics, medical care or schools, and
Thant Sin is worried his savings will run out in weeks.
The married father of five has
been unable to open his market stall since authorities ordered it shut three
months ago. One told him, "This for the Rakhine now," he recalled.
"All we want to do is go
back to work," he said. "The government is doing nothing to help us
get our lives back."
All four roads into Aung Mingalar
are guarded by police, and outside, past the roadblocks of barbed wire and
wood that divide the district from the rest of town, Rakhine walk freely —
sometimes yelling racial slurs or hurling stones from slingshots.
Across the street, a 57-year-old
Rakhine, Aye Myint, leaned back in a rusted metal chair and peered at a group
of bearded Muslim men in Aung Mingalar.
"I feel nothing for those
people now," he said. "After what happened ... they cannot be
trusted anymore. To tell the truth, we want them out of here."
Hla Thain, the attorney general
of Rakhine state, denied there was any official policy of forced segregation,
saying security forces are deployed to protect both sides, not keep them
apart. But he acknowledged that there were not enough police or soldiers to
make the two communities feel safe, and that huge obstacles to reconciliation
remain.
"We want them to live
together, that is our goal, but we can't force people to change," he
said. "Anger is still running high. Neither side can forget that they
lost family members, their homes."
For now, he said, the government
is studying every possibility to make life "normal" again. For
example: having Rakhine students attend university in the morning, while
Rohingya go each afternoon.
Thein Htay, the border minister,
was more blunt.
"We may have to build
another market center, another trading center, another port" for the
Rohingya, he said, because it will be "very difficult otherwise."
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