No home to return to: Rakhine IDPs face mounting hardships

As the sky darkens and shows signs of impending rain, the expression on 61-year-old Aung Shwe Sein’s face also grows increasingly grim. During the summer, when severe heat dried up the water tanks, he longed for rain. But now that the rainy season has arrived, earlier than usual, he knows that it will only bring new hardships in the months ahead. Like hundreds of thousands of others in Rakhine State, he has been homeless for nearly two years. Ever since the Arakan Army (AA) launched its offensive against Myanmar’s military in November 2023, his life has been turned upside down. His native village, located in Ponnagyun Township, near the state capital Sittwe, was raided by junta forces on December 3, 2023, sending its inhabitants fleeing with only the clothes on their backs. At the time, he said, he was working in a nearby paddy field as drones dropped bombs all around him. From a navy boat, junta troops also opened fire on his village with machine guns. They then proceeded to torch people’s homes, destroying 140 of the 195 houses in Aung Shwe Sein’s village, including his. “Since then, I haven’t been able to return. But some people do go back to check on the village occasionally,” he said in the makeshift shelter that he shares with eight family members at a camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Ponnagyun Township. There are more than 2,000 people living in the camp, where most live in the same kind of six-by-eight-foot bamboo hut as Aung Shwe Sein and his family. Built when they first arrived, most are now in a state of disrepair, with their thatched roofs offering little protection from the rain. “The roof leaks when it rains. When it gets too bad, we have to find somewhere else to stay. We just don’t have the money to buy bamboo or thatch to repair the roof,” he said, adding that he can’t even find tarpaulin for a temporary fix. While the situation of IDPs in Myanmar has never been easy, it has only gotten worse since US President Donald Trump issued an order freezing aid to refugees and others displaced people earlier this year. Food and healthcare once provided by international relief organisations has now all but disappeared. It has been three months since Aung Shwe Sein’s IDP camp has received any foreign aid, and the AA’s administrative authority, the Arakan People's Revolutionary Government, has yet to fill this gap. A local civil society organisation has been providing 50,000 kyat a month to each household, but no other aid has been forthcoming. IDPs in Rakhine State struggle to stay dry through the rainy season (Photo: Myanmar Now) Foraging for foodWith no regular job or other source of income, Aung Shwe Sein has had to find other ways to make a living. Mostly, this means foraging for vegetables in the forest and cutting firewood that he can sell to buy food. But many others are doing the same thing to survive, and so these resources are becoming scarce. Fishing is another way to make money, but it involves taking the risk of being shot at from junta naval ships. This happened to Aung Shwe Win recently, when he and others were forced to cut their nets and flee after snipers opened fire on them, he said. “I lost more than a million kyat worth of equipment that day,” he lamented. Since the start of the conflict, the junta has blocked both land and water routes in Rakhine State, including those linking it to the rest of the country. This has resulted in commodity shortages and steep price hikes. This remains true even now, after the AA has taken control of areas bordering India and Bangladesh, which has allowed some goods to enter the state from those countries. Khin Htay Oo, a 43-year-old mother of two, struggles to feed her family every day. She can forage for vegetables, but meat and fermented fish paste, commonly used in Rakhine food, are rarely available. Some days, she says, her family has nothing to eat with their rice at all. “Just plain rice isn’t enough to live on, but there are days when that’s all we have. We gather wild vegetables from the mountains, but we have no fish paste or salt to go with them—that’s just how it is. To tell you the truth, it saddens me just to tell you this,” she says, her voice breaking as she wipes away her tears. Limited access to healthcare is another major issue for many IDPs. While the camp that Khin Htay Oo lives in has a charity clinic, she hesitates to go there unless she absolutely has to, as she knows how little medicine there is to go around. “The other day I was out gathering mushrooms, and I couldn’t stop coughing. But I had nothing to take for it. Life is hard, because we just don’t have enough money,” she said. Many children in the camp have nothing to wear except ragged clothes. While their parents do their best to provide them with an education, even school supplies such as pens and notebooks can be prohibitively expensive. A child at an IDP camp in Rakhine State (Photo: Myanmar Now) Fighting for the future Wai Ma Tha, 71, is one of three elderly sisters living together in the camp. They are all unmarried, and none of them have jobs. They depend on relatives and neighbours for their survival. “Relatives send us things. We ration that to get by, but we don’t have anything extra. When we don’t have rice, we borrow it from others—a little here and a little there, wherever we can get it. When the relief organisation brings rice, we use it to pay back what we borrowed,” she said. Kyaw Hlaing, 36, became an IDP in January 2024, after the AA told residents of his village on Kankaw Island in Sittwe Township to move so that they wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire of fighting with the regime. “They [AA officers] asked us to evacuate because when the junta shoots with tanks, they [the AA] can’t shoot back without hurting civilians. So that’s why we fled,” he said, adding that his family had to flee at night after junta forces surrounded his village. “We had to keep our children silent, or the military would have shot and killed us,” he added, explaining that once they reached nearby War Bo Island, the AA sent the villagers to various IDP camps. Kyaw Hlaing also survives mostly by foraging for food in the forest, both to feed his family and to earn a small income. “I can’t get enough to live on, but I have to keep climbing the mountains for my livelihood. There’s not enough rice, and there’s no fish. Sometimes we eat just rice with chilli paste,” he said. As much as they have suffered through this conflict, however, many IDPs say they believe that it will be worth it if they can achieve independence from Myanmar’s military rulers. The AA’s stated goal is to take full control of Rakhine State, and so far it has succeeded in capturing 14 of its 17 townships. It is still engaging in fierce clashes to take Sittwe and Kyaukphyu from the regime, while only Manaung, located on an island south of Kyaukphyu, has so far been spared the intense violence that has afflicted much of the rest of the state. “I want to see our flag raised in our place, our own region,” said Aung Shwe Sein. “Rakhine people will only be able to eat properly and prosper when we can govern ourselves.”

No home to return to: Rakhine IDPs face mounting hardships

Displaced civilians have mostly had to fend for themselves as fighting for control of Rakhine State rages on

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