INSURGENTS
One-month ceasefire declared by rebels ends tomorrow
YANGON
MUSLIM Rohingya insurgents said yesterday they are ready to respond to any peace move by the Myanmar government, but a one-month ceasefire they declared to enable the delivery of aid in violence-racked Rakhine State is about to end.
The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (Arsa) did not say what action it would take after the ceasefire ended at midnight tomorrow, but it was “determined to stop the tyranny and oppression” waged against the Rohingya people.
“If at any stage, the Myanmar government is inclined to peace, then Arsa will welcome that inclination and reciprocate,” the group said in a statement.
Government spokesmen were not immediately available for comment.
When Arsa announced its onemonth ceasefire from Sept 10, a government spokesman said: “We have no policy to negotiate with terrorists.”
The rebels launched coordinated attacks on about 30 security posts and an army camp on Aug 25 with the help of hundreds of disaffected Rohingya villagers.
In response, the military unleashed a sweeping offensive across the north of Rakhine State, driving more than half a million Rohingya villagers into Bangladesh, in what the United Nations branded a textbook example of “ethnic cleansing”.
Myanmar rejected that. It said more than 500 people had been Rohingya refugees taking shelter from the rain at the registration centre in Teknaf, Bangladesh, on Friday. killed in the fighting, most of them “terrorists” who had been attacking civilians and torching villages.
The ability of Arsa, which only surfaced in October last year, to mount any sort of challenge to the Myanmar army was not known, but it did not appear to had been able to put up resistance to the military offensive unleashed in August.
Inevitably, there were doubts about how the insurgents could operate in areas where the military had driven out the civilian population, cutting the insurgents off from recruits, food, funds and information.
Arsa accused the government of using murder, arson and rape
as “tools of depopulation”.
Arsa denied links to foreign Is lamists.
In an interview with Reuters in March, Arsa leader Ata Ullah linked the creation of the group to communal violence between Buddhists and Muslims in Rakhine in 2012, when nearly 200 people were killed and 140,000, mostly Rohingya, displaced.
The group said it was fighting for the rights of the Rohingya, who have never been regarded as an indigenous minority in Myanmar and so have been denied citizenship under a law that links nationality to ethnicity.
The group repeated their demand that Rohingya be recognised as a “native indigenous” ethnic group, adding that all Rohingya people should be allowed “to return home safely with dignity... to freely determine their
political status and pursue their economic, social and cultural development”.
The Rohingya had long faced discrimination and repression in Rakhine State, where bad blood between them and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists goes back generations.
Arsa condemned the government for blocking humanitarian assistance in Rakhine State and said it was willing to discuss ceasefires with international organisations, so aid could be delivered.
Some 515,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh, but thousands remain in Rakhine State.
Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi had faced scathing criticism for not doing more to stop the violence, although a militarydrafted constitution gave her no power over the security forces. Reuters