Civilians killed in Myanmar’s Rakhine crackdown

yangon — Muslim residents and rights activists say a military operation in northwestern Myanmar has killed more people than official reports have acknowledged, as a fresh bout of ethnic unrest threatens to undermine the country’s fledgling peace process.

The government, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, has said the army and police in Rakhine State are fighting a group of at least 400 insurgents, drawn from the Rohingya Muslim minority, with links to militants overseas.

While officials say the army has been conducting carefully targeted sweeps against the group behind attacks on police border posts on October 9, residents who spoke to Reuters accused security forces of killing non-combatants and burning homes.

With the area around Maungdaw Township, near the border with Bangladesh, under military lockdown it was not possible to independently verify either side’s version of events.

The violence has destabilised Myanmar’s most volatile state, where the relations between the Rohingya and majority Buddhists are at their lowest point since hundreds of people were killed and thousands displaced in ethnic violence in 2012.

Delicate efforts to rebuild fragile intercommunal ties since then have been shattered, marking a massive setback for the No.1 goal of Suu Kyi’s government - securing a lasting peace and unifying the country.

In videos posted online, armed men speaking the Rohingya language have claimed responsibility for the coordinated attacks on Oct. 9 that ignited the region, where Rohingya face severe restrictions on their movement and access to basic services. State-run media have reported that 30 “attackers” have been killed by security forces since October 9, including two women reported to have been armed with swords.

But Reuters interviews with six residents and community leaders in Maungdaw Township - as well as diplomats in Yangon and rights groups - paint a different picture.

“Clearly there are more than 30 killed,” said Chris Lewa of the Arakan Project, a monitoring group that says it has drawn information from a network of sources throughout Maungdaw Township. “And many of them are civilians, not attackers.” Lewa said the army was using “typical counter-insurgency measures against civilians”, including “shooting civilians on sight, burning homes, looting property and arbitrary arrests”.

Ye Naing, a director at the Ministry of Information, said the official reports coming out of Maungdaw could be trusted.

“The current operation is not blind searching. The military has the information from interrogations, so the target is very clear and the scope of the operation is narrow,” he said.

The military did not respond to requests for comment.