Evidence is mounting that a prominent ethnic armed group was responsible for a massacre of Rohingya civilians close to Myanmar’s border with Bangladesh earlier this month.
On August 5, reports emerged that a large number of Rohingya civilians had been killed along the border between Bangladesh and Myanmar’s Rakhine State, as they sought to flee to safety in Bangladesh. When I wrote about the initial reports at the time, responsibility was difficult to determine; civilian eyewitnesses blamed the Arakan Army (AA), an ethnic Rakhine nationalist group that is fighting to establish an independent Rakhine polity in western Myanmar.
The AA, which has made significant gains in Rakhine State since the collapse of a ceasefire with the military junta in November, flatly denied responsibility for the attack. It instead accused the military of the massacre and attacked the credibility of overseas Rohingya activists who had helped to amplify the eyewitness reports from Maungdaw. It also accused Rohingya militant groups of collaborating with the regime.
However, a new report released yesterday by the advocacy group Fortify Rights makes a convincing case that the AA was responsible for the attack on August 5. The report also accused AA soldiers of shooting to death “dozens of fleeing Rohingya civilians along the border, also in Maungdaw Township” on August 6 and displacing thousands of civilians as AA forces closed in on the township center.
According to the report, which was based on interviews with 23 Rohingya eyewitnesses and “open-source video and photographic evidence” of the massacre, a crowd estimated in the thousands of Rohingya civilians gathered on the banks of the Naf River on the morning of August 5. The group had fled an AA offensive on Maungdaw and were seemingly “waiting for boats to cross over into Bangladesh.”
As the group waited, the report says, they were closely surveilled by AA drones. They were then subject to “multiple drone and shelling attacks” launched from territory controlled by the AA, which killed “over one hundred Rohingya women, children, and men.”
Witnesses testify that drones and mortars came from Pan Taw Pyin, Shwe Zar, and Maung Ni villages, where the AA held positions. “Suddenly, a drone came from Shwe Zar. I don’t know what it looked at, but it returned [to its base],” it quoted one eyewitness as saying. “Then, a few other drones came and began dropping bombs on us. Those drones came from the Shwe Zar side.”
The Fortify Rights report also effectively debunks some of the claims presented by the United League of Arakan (ULA), the political wing of the AA, in a “fact-checking and incident analysis report” that it released on August 17. This report denied responsibility for the attack, claiming that the AA was not using drones at the time. It also described Rohingya activists’ claims to the contrary as “an effort to blame resistance groups like the AA while obscuring the atrocities committed by the Myanmar junta and Muslim militant groups” and promised to investigate the incident when the AA “has taken control of the town and incident location.”
The claim of AA responsibility is not hard to imagine based on its actions over the previous several months. In May, after the AA captured neighboring Buthidaung township, arson attacks reduced large parts of the town to ash, forcing tens of thousands of Rohingya to flee. Rohingya eyewitnesses claimed that the AA was responsible for the attacks; the group denied it, blaming junta air and artillery strikes.
However, the most thorough independent assessments again seem to point to AA responsibility. According to an analysis by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the AA carried out the attacks in retaliation for earlier arson attacks by the military junta and Rohingya militants on Buthidaung’s Buddhist- and Hindu-majority neighborhoods.
Fortify Rights also offers a likely explanation for why the AA might have chosen to target the crowd gathered on the banks of the Naf River. It cites Rohingya eyewitnesses as stating that they saw armed fighters from the Rohingya Salvation Organization (RSO), a Rohingya militant group allied with the military junta, among the crowd. These fighters were also reportedly seeking to escape to Bangladesh at the time of the attack.
As well as offering a plausible rationale for the AA’s actions, this also points to the ways in which the actions of the Myanmar military have embittered sectarian relations in Rakhine State. Most of the Rohingya trapped in and around Maungdaw were survivors of the genocidal “clearance operation” launched by the Myanmar military in August 2017, which ended up driving more than 740,000 Rohingya civilians across the border into Bangladesh.
In its desperation to stop the AA’s onslaught, the junta has recently partnered with Rohingya militant groups including the RSO, and Fortify Rights cited eyewitness testimony to the effect that “the military junta and RSO are coordinating their military activities around Maungdaw.” Past reporting by Fortify Rights also reveals that Rohingya armed groups including the RSO have abducted Rohingya refugees from refugee camps in Bangladesh and forced them to join the Myanmar military and fight the AA.
While the Myanmar military arguably bears the ultimate responsibility for the situation facing the Rohingya, Fortify Rights noted that “the vast majority of the people gathered on the beach were Rohingya civilians with well-founded fears of violence, all trying to flee the fighting.” It also stated “the presence of RSO fighters among the fleeing civilians does not justify the AA’s attack on the group” and called on the International Criminal Court to open investigations into the AA’s attacks on civilians. As the group’s Chief Executive Officer Matthew Smith noted, “the very same culture of impunity that led to the Rohingya genocide is now facilitating the AA’s deadly attacks against civilians.”
Whether this appeal to international law will do much to convince the AA’s leaders, or its allies in the broader resistance to the military junta, is unlikely. As one long-time observer put it this morning on X, “No one wants Rohingya atrocities. But no one wants AA to stop winning against [the] junta.”
For this reason, the National Unity Government (NUG), which is coordinating the nationwide resistance, has largely been silent on the mounting evidence of abuses against the Rohingya. In a statement on August 25, marking the seventh anniversary of the military’s campaign of ethnic cleansing in Rakhine State, the group condemned the military’s forceful recruitment of soldiers, “including from the vulnerable Rohingya population.” It also said that “all revolutionary forces must respond with caution and intelligence” to the military’s attempts to “incit[e] ethnic and religious conflicts.” But it did not mention the latest atrocities, nor the AA’s likely responsibility.
The awkward phrasing of the NUG statement reflects the difficulty of its current position: namely, the possibility that its open condemnation of the AA could alienate one of the most powerful members of the resistance coalition.
One could argue that the military is the root cause of the country’s suffering and that its permanent removal from Myanmar’s political and economic life should be the first order of business for the resistance. At the same time, recent events in Rakhine State do raise questions about what sort of state might eventually replace the military.
As Andrew Nachemson noted in a recent article for Foreign Policy, it is an awkward reality that the most militarily effective groups in the resistance – this includes the AA and its ally, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army, which has made stunning gains in northern Shan State close to the Chinese border – have an ambiguous attitude toward the democratic principles for which the NUG claims to be fighting.
“Powerful ethnic armed groups are key to overthrowing the military dictatorship,” Nachemson argued, “but dependence on militant, ethnonationalist armies that abuse civilians may not usher in such a different future.” Indeed, as the evidence of its atrocities mount, it is not hard to see the ULA/AA as representing a sort of mirror version of the Bamar chauvinism evinced by successive military juntas – a fact with disquieting implications for a post-revolutionary Myanmar.