Rohingya insurgent ceasefire ends in Myanmar

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Myanmar authorities said there was no sign of attacks by Rohingya Muslim militants on Tuesday as a one-month insurgent ceasefire came to end.

The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) announced the ceasefire from September 10 in order, they said, to facilitate aid deliveries to Rakhine State, where their attacks on the security forces on August 25 triggered a ferocious government crackdown.

The government offensive in the north of Rakhine State has sent some 520,000 Rohingya civilians fleeing to Bangladesh and has drawn international condemnation and UN accusations of ethnic cleansing.

Reuters Photo

The government denies ethnic cleansing. It had rebuffed the insurgents' ceasefire, saying it did not negotiate with terrorists.

Myanmar says more than 500 people have been killed in the violence since late August, most of them insurgents.

Even before the government offensive, the small, lightly armed ARSA had only appeared capable of hit-and-run raids on security posts, unable to mount any sort of sustained challenge to the army.

Authorities had been on guard over recent days and tightened security in the state capital of Sittwe as the end of the ceasefire approached, a state government spokesman said.

The insurgents said on Saturday they were ready to respond to any peace move by the government, even though the ceasefire was ending at midnight on Monday.

Reuters Photo‍

They also reiterated their demand for rights for the Rohingya, who have never been regarded as an indigenous minority in Myanmar and so have been denied citizenship under a law that links nationality to ethnicity.

Instead, Rohingya are seen as illegal immigrants with freedoms restricted and rights denied, and are derided by ethnic Rakhine Buddhists, and much of the wider popular in Myanmar, which has seen a surge in Buddhist nationalism in recent years.

Thousands more Rohingya villagers have arrived in Bangladesh this week in a new surge of refugees, now also driven by fears of starvation and telling of bloody attacks by Buddhist mobs on people trekking towards the border.

Villagers in Rakhine said food was running out because rice in the fields was not ready for harvest and the state government had closed village markets and restricted the transport of food, apparently to cut supplies to the militants.

The government has cited worry about food as one of the reasons people have been giving for leaving, but a senior state government official on Monday dismissed any suggestion of starvation.

Source(s): Reuters