Their actions – murdering “informants,” forced recruitment and extortion for their cause – may be war crimes, Fortify Rights says.
Shailaja Neelakantan and Zia Chowdhury/Washington and Dhaka
On New Year’s day last year, a Rohingya community leader, Mohammad Faisal, shared a poem he wrote about fear and violence in Bangladesh refugee camps and shared it on social media.
Three days later, suspected militants from his own community abducted him under the cover of darkness and shot him dead for doing so, Southeast Asian NGO Fortify Rights said in a report released Tuesday.
“Rohingya rebel members in Bangladesh are killing, abducting, torturing, and threatening Rohingya refugees arriving from Myanmar, which may amount to war crimes,” Fortify Rights said in a press statement accompanying the report.
Its 78-page report, “I May Be Killed Any Moment,” noted that three key elements must be present to establish a war crime – an armed conflict, a prohibited act committed against a protected person and a nexus between the conflict and the act committed.
“[F]ortify Rights has reasonable grounds to believe that all such elements are satisfied.”
The new report documents killings, abductions, torture, and other violations against Rohingya refugees committed, Fortify Rights says, by mainly two rival militant groups, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO).
The report draws on interviews with 116 people, including Rohingya survivors and eyewitnesses, Rohingya militants, U.N. officials, humanitarian aid workers, and others, about the ongoing violence in the camps.
It said that killings of Rohingya refugees by Rohingya militant groups in Bangladesh’s refugee camps had doubled year-on-year since 2021, with a total of at least 219 from then until last year.
However, the more than 90 people killed in 2023 included dozens of reported members of the two rival militant groups killed in clashes between them, Fortify Rights said.
Why would Rohingya militants strike fear among their own community of refugees who fled decades of persecution and terror in their homeland in Myanmar?
“[The] militant groups intimidate, threaten, and harass Rohingya refugees to forcibly recruit new members, prevent them from reporting abuses to the authorities, and gain political control of the camps,” the report said.
“Militants have also abducted Rohingya refugees for refusing to join or collaborate with them and for opposing militant groups in the camps,” Fortify Rights said, noting that the militants use abductions and torture to extort money for their activities.
In 2022, refugees told BenarNews that ARSA was also against the repatriation of the Rohingya to Myanmar, but they did not elaborate on the reason.
ARSA and RSO both have said they are fighting to liberate the Rohingya people in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State from junta-aligned military forces and the Arakan Army, an armed separatist group.
Rakhine is where most of the Rohingya Muslim ethnic minority community lives.
However, Fortify Rights said, RSO had been collaborating since last year with the Burmese junta against the Arakan Army rebels.
The junta comprises the same security forces whose brutal 2017 crackdown led to some 740,000 Rohingya fleeing across the border to Bangladesh and now staying in camps in Cox’s Bazar in the southeastern part of the country. The junta launched the offensive in response to coordinated attacks by ARSA rebels in Rakhine.
“While barely mentioning the Myanmar military junta,” ARSA’s leader, in a May 2024 video, focussed on combatting the Arakan Army, which wants to “liberate” the state of Rakhine from the army, Fortify Rights said.
Comprising mainly Rakhine Buddhists, the Arakan Army claimed it respects the rights of Rohingya, but experts say they carried out mass arson attacks on Rohingya villages last year.
After the military toppled an elected government in Myanmar in 2021, the country descended into a civil war with junta security forces battling a variety of armed ethnic groups.
ARSA chief arrested
ARSA and RSO, though, continue to publicly deny responsibility for any wrongdoing, said the report.
Attaullah Abu Ammar Jununi, then commander-in-chief of ARSA, said in 2017 that “atrocity, violence, and injustice against any innocent civilians is not in [our] principles or policy,” the NGO said.
ARSA had also denied responsibility for specific incidents of violence in the Bangladesh refugee camps, including the killings of camp leaders and a prominent community leader, Muhib Ullah, whose assassination in September 2021 caused outrage outside Bangladesh as well.
But Bangladesh authorities, who after years of denying ARSA’s presence in the camps finally admitted in June 2022 that Muhib Ullah’s killing had been ordered by ARSA’s Ataullah.
And Bangladesh police on Tuesday said that he and other accomplices had been arrested the previous evening in a town near Dhaka. They had been conducting secret meetings to plan “sabotage and criminal activities,” police said.
The arrested were found in possession of around U.S. $175,000 and some steel weapons.
Of 29 people accused of links to Muhib Ullah’s killing, 18 accused have been arrested so far, while 11 others are absconding, police told BenarNews on Tuesday.
Murder and a slew of other criminal activities were common occurrences in the camps where nearly 1 million refugees are sheltering, some Rohingya in Cox’s Bazar told BenarNews.
Muhammed Jubair, acting president of the Arakan Rohingya Society for Peace and Human Rights, said several armed groups were involved in the crimes.
“Various crimes, including murder, are being committed in the camps,” he said.
“It is difficult to say whether the crimes that occur are war crimes or not.”
A former ARSA member told Fortify Rights in November 2023 that the group didn’t work “according to humanitarian principles” for the community.
One especially brutal incident is detailed in the report.
A 23-year-old Rohingya man was abducted, tortured, dismembered, and left to die in the refugee camps – but he survived. He spoke to Fortify Rights about what happened to him.
“[T]hey cut off my leg first. I was able to hear the sound that they were cutting off the bones of my leg with a big knife,” he told Fortify Rights.
[‘They] took half an hour to cut me. My arm was cut just above my elbows.”
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