Amnesty International points to cases where anti-personnel mines may have caused injuries on border with Bangladesh

Myanmar’s military has been accused of planting landmines in the path of Rohingya Muslims fleeing violence in western Rakhine state, with Amnesty International reporting that two people were wounded on Sunday.

Refugees’ accounts of the latest wave of violence in Rakhine have typically described shootings by soldiers and arson attacks on villages, but there are at least several cases that point to anti-personnel mines or other explosives as the cause of injuries on the border with Bangladesh, where 300,000 Rohingya have fled in the past two weeks.

Reporters from Associated Press on the Bangladesh side of the border said they had seen an elderly woman with devastating leg wounds: one leg with the calf apparently blown off and the other also badly injured. Relatives said she had stepped on a landmine.

Q&A Who are the Rohingya and what happened to them in Myanmar? Show Hide Described as the world’s most persecuted people, 1.1 million Rohingya people live in Myanmar. They live predominately in Rakhine state, where they have co-existed uneasily alongside Buddhists for decades. Rohingya people say they are descendants of Muslims, perhaps Persian and Arab traders, who came to Myanmar generations ago. Unlike the Buddhist community, they speak a language similar to the Bengali dialect of Chittagong in Bangladesh. The Rohingya are reviled by many in Myanmar as illegal immigrants and suffer from systematic discrimination. The Myanmar government treats them as stateless people, denying them citizenship. Stringent restrictions have been placed on Rohingya people’s freedom of movement, access to medical assistance, education and other basic services. Violence broke out in northern Rakhine state in August 2017, when militants attacked government forces. In response, security forces supported by Buddhist militia launched a “clearance operation” that ultimately killed at least 1,000 people and forced more than 600,000 to flee their homes. The UN’s top human rights official said the military’s response was "clearly disproportionate” to insurgent attacks and warned that Myanmar’s treatment of its Rohingya minority appears to be a "textbook example” of ethnic cleansing. When Aung San Suu Kyi rose to power there were high hopes that the Nobel peace prize winner would help heal Myanmar's entrenched ethnic divides. But she has been accused of standing by while violence is committed against the Rohingya. In 2019, judges at the international criminal court authorised a full-scale investigation into the allegations of mass persecution and crimes against humanity. On 10 December 2019, the international court of justice in The Hague opened a case alleging genocide brought by the Gambia. Rebecca Ratcliffe Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/AAP

Myanmar has one of the few militaries, along with North Korea and Syria, which has openly used anti-personnel mines in recent years, according to Amnesty. An international treaty in 1997 outlawed their use.

Lt Col SM Ariful Islam, the commanding officer of the Bangladesh border guard in Teknaf, said on Friday that he was aware of at least three Rohingya injured in explosions.

Bangladeshi officials and Amnesty researchers believe new explosives have been recently planted, including one that the rights group said blew off a Bangladeshi farmer’s leg and another that wounded a Rohingya man. Both incidents occurred on Sunday. It said at least three people including two children had been injured in the past week.

“It may not be landmines, but I know there have been isolated cases of Myanmar soldiers planting explosives three to four days ago,” Ariful said on Friday.

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Myanmar’s presidential spokesman, Zaw Htay, did not answer phone calls seeking comment on Sunday. Myat Min Oo, a military spokesman, said he could not comment without talking to his superiors. A major at the border guard police headquarters in northern Maungdaw near the Bangladesh border also refused to comment.

Amnesty said that based on interviews with witnesses and analysis by its own weapons experts, it believed there had been targeted use of landmines along a narrow stretch of the north-western border of Rakhine state that is a crossing point for fleeing Rohingya.

“All indications point to the Myanmar security forces deliberately targeting locations that Rohingya refugees use as crossing points,” Tirana Hassan, an Amnesty official, said in a statement on Sunday. “This a cruel and callous way of adding to the misery of people fleeing a systematic campaign of persecution.”

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The violence and exodus began on 25 August when Rohingya insurgents attacked Myanmar police and paramilitary posts in what they said was an effort to protect their ethnic minority from persecution by the security forces in the majority Buddhist country.

In response, the military unleashed what it called clearance operations to root out the insurgents. According to refugees, it has also targeted civilians with shootings and wholesale burning of villages in an apparent attempt to purge Rakhine state of Rohingya.

Anti-Muslim rioting that erupted in Rakhine state in 2012 forced more than 100,000 Rohingya into displacement camps in Bangladesh, where many still live today.

The Rohingya have faced decades of discrimination and persecution in Myanmar and are denied citizenship despite centuries-olds roots in the Rakhine region. Myanmar denies they exist as an ethnic group and says those living in Rakhine are illegal migrants from Bangladesh.