Myanmar forces ‘supported raids’

BANGKOK — A leading international rights group yesterday accused Myanmar security forces of supporting some of the brutal anti-Muslim violence last month that forced 35,000 people from torched homes.

The government rejected the allegations, which came one day before President Barack Obama’s visit to the Southeast Asian nation after a year and a half of unprecedented democratic reforms there.

Human Rights Watch said soldiers in some parts of western Rakhine state also tried to stop Buddhist attacks and protect Muslim civilians, known as Rohingya.

But the group said the government needs to do much more to protect the stateless minority, who are denied citizenship because they are considered foreigners from Bangladesh.

Evidence

The New York-based rights group also released new satellite imagery detailing the extensive destruction of several Muslim areas, including a village attacked by Buddhist mobs armed with spears and bows and arrows where adults were beheaded and women and children killed.

Violence in June, and again in late October, has killed around 200 people on both sides and displaced more than 110,000 people, the vast majority of them Muslims.

“The satellite images and eyewitness accounts reveal that local mobs, at times with official support, sought to finish the job of removing Rohingya from these areas,” Human Rights Watch’s Asia director, Brad Adams, said in a statement.

“The central government’s failure to take serious action to ensure accountability for the June violence fostered impunity, and makes it responsible for later attacks not only when security forces were directly involved, but also when they weren’t,” he said.

“This is crunch time because Burma’s failure to contain sectarian violence ... calls into question the Burmese government’s stated goal of becoming a rights-respecting, multi-ethnic state.”