Food used as weapon in Rakhine
Myanmar govt was starving out my family, says Rohingya refugee
COX’S BAZAR: Abdul Goni says the Myanmar government was starving his family one stage at a time.
First, soldiers stopped the Rohingya Muslim from walking three hours to the forest for the firewood he sold to feed his family.
Then Buddhist neighbours and seven soldiers took his only cow, which he rented out to fertilise rice fields. Next, he says, they killed his uncle and strung him up on a wire for trying to stop the theft of his buffaloes.
By the time Goni saw bodies floating down the local river, of fellow Rohingya killed for illegal fishing, he knew his family would die if they didn’t leave. On bad days, they carved the flesh out of banana plant stalks for food. On the worst days, his children ate nothing.
“I felt so sorry that I couldn’t give them enough food,” the 25yearold says, tears running down his face, in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, just across the border from Myanmar.
“Everything just got worse and worse. ... Day by day, the pressure was increasing all around us. They used to tell us, ‘This isn’t your land. ... We’ll starve you out’.”
First, massacres, rapes and the wholesale destruction of villages by the Myanmar military in western Rakhine state forced nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee to Bangladesh, in reprisal for Rohingya militant attacks on Aug 25.
Now, the food supply appears to be another weapon that’s being used against the dwindling numbers of Rohingya in Myanmar.
The accounts of hunger could not be independently confirmed, as Myanmar’s government does not allow reporters into the northern part of Rakhine state, where most of the Rohingya lived.
However, more than a dozen interviews with the most recent refugees show growing desperation, as the noose tightens around their communities in what UN officials have said may be a genocide.
The UN and human rights groups such as Amnesty International have also warned of increasing hunger among the Rohingya in areas where conflict and displacement have been most rampant.
Repeated calls to Myanmar’s military weren’t answered, but the Myanmar government denies ethnic cleansing and says it is battling terrorists. Social Welfare Minister Win Myat Aye says the government has been distributing food aid to as many people as possible.
“There are many ways that we have been reaching out to villagers frequently,” he says. “And that’s why it’s not possible that there are people who are completely cut off from food or facing hunger.”
The Rohingya Muslims, who have been loathed by Myanmar’s Buddhist majority for decades, are locked down in their villages – sometimes even in their homes – and prevented from farming, fishing, foraging, trade and work, the refugees and aid groups say.
In other words, they can no longer do what they need to do to eat. While restrictions on freedom of movement and access to food have long been in place, they have tightened dramatically in recent weeks, the interviews show.
“It was worse than a jail. People at least get food twice a day in jail,” says Goni. — AP