Myanmar starts harvesting farmland abandoned by Rohingya Muslims
The government in Myanmar has embarked on harvesting rice from farmland abandoned by the Rohingya Muslim refugees, who have fled the military crackdown in the western state of Rakhine to neighboring Bangladesh.
The government announced on Saturday that harvesting had begun in 71,000 acres of rice paddy in Maungdaw, the Rohingya-majority area in Myanmar’s Rakhine State.
“We started harvesting today in Myo Thu Gyi village tract,” Thein Wai, the head of Maungdaw’s Agricultural Department, told AFP.
“We are going to harvest some paddy fields of Bengalis who fled to Bangladesh,” he said, using a pejorative term for the Rohingya Muslims, who are denied citizenship in Myanmar and branded as illegal Bangladeshi immigrants.
“We do not know when those Bengalis who fled to other side will come back. That’s why we have to harvest,” the official
The state-run Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper also confirmed the report and said workers had been bused in from other parts of the country to assist with the harvest.
The move is likely to raise concerns about the prospect of the return for more than half a million Muslim refugees who have fled the violence.
The Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine have been subjected to government-backed violence by soldiers and Buddhist mobs since October 2016.
The violence has seen a sharp rise since late August. The massive army crackdown across Rakhine has driven over 600,000 people into neighboring Bangladesh, according to the UN refugee agency.
Many of those fleeing Myanmar have recounted harrowing tales of rape, murder and arson at the hands of Myanmar’s forces and Buddhist mobs, in what has been branded “an ethnic cleansing campaign” against the Muslim minority group.
The brutality against the Rohingya has its roots in the very fact that Myanmar does not recognize them as citizens and has denied citizenship rights to more than one million members of the community for several decades, alleging they are Bengalis who have in the past migrated to the country from Bangladesh.
The Rohingya were stripped of their citizenship in 1982 despite having lived in the country for generations.
The United Nations says the refugees have testified a consistent and methodical pattern of killings, torture, rape and arson attacks taking place against the minority group in Myanmar.
The UN has said that the Rohingya are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world.
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