Attachments
Executive Summary
On August 23-24, 2017, security forces from the Myanmar military, Border Guard Police (BGP), and police, as well as Rakhine civilians, attacked an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp of Rohingya people, located within Ah Htet Nan Yar village in Rathedaung, Rakhine State. The 400- 500 assailants besieged the IDP camp from their deployment stations at two BGP camps and other locations. They killed and injured Rohingya civilians with indiscriminate gunfire. Security forces raped Rohingya women, unlawfully arrested Rohingya people, burned down Rohingya homes, and looted Rohingya property.
Three points stand out from the attack on this IDP camp: the forcible expulsion of the Rohingya from their native village of Pan Khaine in 2012, the large number of arrestees during the August 2017 onslaught, and, most importantly, the fact that the attacks occurred before mass-scale violence in other villages in Rakhine state. The other blitzes did not begin until August 25, 2017, with the Myanmar government using ARSA activity as a pretext. Yet the attack on the IDP camp two days before this date demonstrates the premeditation and planning of the governmental offensive.
In the terror after such mass-scale violence and killing, the IDP camp residents escaped to Bangladesh, where they now live in temporary tents inside precarious refugee camps.
Yet the systematic destruction of the Rohingya people began far earlier than August 2017. Starting from decades earlier, the government confiscated land from the Rohingya and appropriated it for their own purposes and allocated it to Rakhine settlers.
And during the time period of 2012-2016, Rohingya experienced multiple and successive forms of religious discrimination and persecution. This included prohibitions on practicing daily prayers at the mosque, holding religious events, and on providing Islamic education to their children at the madrasa. Security forces physically beat, arrested, and extorted money from those found in prayer or religious practice.