Rohingya villagers tell visiting reporters of abuses from Myanmar army crackdown

KYAR GAUNG TAUNG (Reuters) – Rohingya Muslim women lined up to tell reporters of missing husbands, mothers and sons on Saturday as international media were escorted for the first time to a village in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state affected by violence since October.

“My son is not a terrorist. He was arrested while doing farm work,” said one young mother, Sarbeda. She had bustled her way – an infant in her arms – through several other women telling reporters their husbands had been arrested on false grounds.

In November, Myanmar’s army swept through villages where stateless Rohingya Muslims live in the area of Maungdaw.

Some 75,000 people fled across the nearby border to Bangladesh, according to the United Nations.

UN investigators who interviewed refugees said allegations of gang rape, torture, arson and killings by security forces in the operation were likely crimes against humanity.

Myanmar’s government, led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has denied most of the claims, and is blocking entry to a UN fact-finding mission tasked with looking into the allegations. The government has also kept independent journalists and human rights monitors out of the area for the past nine months.

This week, the Ministry of Information escorted more than a dozen foreign and local journalists representing international media, including Reuters, to the area under a guard of officers from the paramilitary Border Guard Police.

The reporters spent nearly two days in Buthidaung, a township in Maungdaw district of Rakhine state, where they were taken to sites of alleged terrorist activity.

They were taken to Kyar Gaung Taung, one of three settlements requested by the journalists. Officials cited time constraints for the limited access. When a group of journalists insisted on speaking to villagers away from security personnel, allegations of abuses by troops emerged almost immediately.

Kyar Gaung Taung resident Sarbeda, 30, had been able to visit her son, Nawsee Mullah, 14, at a police camp where he is being held separately from adult detainees. She was not sure if he had a lawyer, she said.

Reuters reported in March that 13 boys under the age of 18 were detained during security operations. They were included in a list of 423 people charged under the colonial-era Unlawful Associations Act, which outlaws joining or aiding rebel groups.

At least 32 people from Kyar Gaung Taung village had been arrested and 10 killed, said a village schoolteacher, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisals. He estimated that half the village’s 6,000 residents had fled during the clearance operation.

Another villager, Lalmuti, 23, pointed to a small pile of ashes where she said she found her father’s remains. She described how he was bound and thrown into a house and burned to death.

Her mother was later arrested when authorities deemed her complaint about the killings to be fabricated. She is serving a six-month jail sentence, Lalmuti and two other villagers said.

Reporters were not given a chance to put these allegations to authorities, and Reuters was unable to reach officials to confirm the details.