As organisations appealed for broader humanitarian access to Rakhine State, the Arakan Army (AA) said late last month that it would welcome aid groups that crossed into Myanmar from Bangladesh rather than abiding by the military junta’s terms for delivering assistance.
A spokesperson for the AA—a powerful ethnic armed organisation currently fighting against the Myanmar military for control of Rakhine State—claimed many of the state’s people have been deprived of necessary aid because of the military junta’s restrictive conditions on international organisations’ access to communities in need.
Khaing Thukha, the AA spokesperson, said that the aid organisations could instead choose to cross the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, which is now mostly under the control of the AA, bypassing the military regime and receiving help from the Rakhine armed group in distributing food, medical supplies, and other forms of assistance.
“If they want to provide cross-border assistance, it would be more than welcome. We will fully cooperate as needed from our side,” Khaing Thukha said.
The group’s statement came after calls for humanitarian access and cooperation issued by various aid groups last month.
The Special Advisory Council for Myanmar (SAC-M), an aid organisation made up mostly of former United Nations officials, issued a statement on August 19 urging the AA to work with the Bangladeshi government to open a humanitarian corridor into Rakhine State and allow the delivery of aid to all the state’s ethnic and religious communities.
A joint statement issued four days later by more than 120 activist organisations called attention to the plight of the persecuted Rohingya religious minority in Rakhine State, especially Maungdaw Township, and echoed SAC-M’s recommendations for allowing humanitarian access.
The organisations directed the same recommendations to the government of Bangladesh.
When asked, Khaing Thukha confirmed he was aware of the groups’ appeals.
“We’ve heard about the cross-border aid discussions. But in reality, nothing has materialised yet,” he said.
There are more than one million Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh, mostly in refugee camps in areas near the Myanmar border. The largest wave fled to Bangladesh from Rakhine State at the peak of a campaign of genocidal, anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar seven years ago.
According to reports from regional media, some 10,000 more Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh during the recent, intense fighting in Rakhine State.
Touhid Hossain, the top foreign affairs official in Bangladesh’s interim government, said on September 3 that it would be necessary to establish communication with the AA to initiate a process for repatriating the refugees to Myanmar, according to a quote in the Bangladeshi newspaper The Business Standard.
On September 11, the commissioner of refugee relief and repatriation in Cox’s Bazar—the Bangladeshi city that has experienced the heaviest influx of refugees—told local media last Wednesday that so many Rohingya are now entering from Myanmar that Bangladesh may not have the capacity to take more.
Reports have emerged that Bangladeshi officials are sometimes intercepting and forcibly sending back Rohingya people newly arrived from Myanmar.
In August, the AA was accused of direct involvement in a massacre of fleeing Rohingya people near the Naf River, which forms part of the Bangladesh-Myanmar border.
The accusations followed a steady increase of interethnic tension in Rakhine State, largely provoked by the Myanmar military’s forcible recruitment of Rohingya men into the army to fight against the AA’s forces. Some 300,000 civilians have been displaced by fighting in the state.
Amid these dire conditions, the military has aggravated the hardship experienced by all ethnic and religious communities in Rakhine State by blocking roads and waterways between Rakhine State and the rest of Myanmar, choking off most transport of food and other necessary goods.
While smugglers are finding ways to pass the blockades, prices for basic commodities have skyrocketed in the state, making living conditions even harder.
(Photo: Myanmar Now)
ICRC President visits Rakhine State
Alongside its blockades and restrictions of ordinary commercial travel, regime authorities are also imposing travel limitations on international and civil society organisations, delaying or blocking the delivery of aid supplies to those displaced by conflict.
On a visit to Myanmar from September 5 to 9, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Mirjana Spoljaric Egger met with junta chief Sen-Gen Min Aung Hlaing to discuss the provision of humanitarian assistance where it was most urgently needed. Her trip included a visit to Rakhine State.
The ICRC released a statement the day after Spoljaric’s visit attesting to the people’s insufficient access to food, water, and sanitation as well as their inability to maintain a stable, adequate livelihood amid conditions of extreme insecurity and the constant threat of violence.
Two days earlier at her meeting with Min Aung Hlaing, Spoljaric had advocated for the ICRC to be granted broader access to the people most urgently in need of aid, especially in conflict areas.
With junta generals reluctant to allow aid into areas where it might fall into the hands of anti-junta armed groups, it remains unclear whether and how the ICRC or other international and civil society organisations will be able to provide effective assistance to conflict-impacted communities in Myanmar.
