In this Jan 13 photo, a newly arrived Rohingya refugee mother feeds her daughter at a transit camp in Nayaprar refugee camp near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. ─ AP
Even before August, aid agencies in 2017 predicted a spike in severe malnutrition in children. In a report released today, Amnesty International details evidence of forced starvation by the military, including stopping the Rohingya from harvesting their rice fields in November and December. The Food and Agriculture Organization has also warned that the lack of access to food and fuel are adding to hunger in Myanmar.
Buddhists in Rakhine state began blocking food aid when they noticed that the Muslims were getting more than they were, according to Thomas MacManus, a specialist in international state crimes at Queen Mary University of London who has researched the Rohingya since 2012. Tightened curfews meant people couldn’t harvest shrimp or rice, tend to their cattle, gather firewood or fish. Since August, an almost 24-hour-a-day curfew means no one is leaving their villages, he says.
MacManus says the Myanmar government has regularly employed a scorched-earth strategy that has denied food to other ethnic groups it has battled, including the Shan and the Kachin.
“What they’re trying to do is design a situation where life just doesn’t become livable anymore,” he says. “You just block off an area and they can’t get material or food. It is a time-honored way of doing genocide, and one of the easiest ways because you can do it slowly and without too much attention.”
In this war on food, rice paddies are a major battlefield.
Last fall the Myanmar military stopped farmer Rashid Ahmed, 60, from harvesting his rice fields, which were about a 15-minute walk outside a village he could no longer leave. He stood by helpless as his Buddhist neighbors, assisted by the military, collected his rice and took his six buffalos. Without food, he says, he could not stay.
“It would have been better if they had just shot us instead of starving us out,” says Ahmed, thin but wiry from years of field work, as he sat in a long hut with dozens of other new arrivals to the Bangladesh camps. “What they did was slower; it was crueler. They left us to imagine the worst, to wake up every day and think about what would happen when there was no food at all.”
His family ate so many banana stalks that by the time they left, all 20 plants in his compound were gone.
“I always grew my own food, and now suddenly I couldn’t feed myself or my family,” says Ahmed, who is from Zay Di Taung village.
Begging for food
After Aug 25, when he was trapped in his village, Mohammad Rafique, 25, a day laborer from Hpa Yon Chaung, survived on rice he’d stockpiled in his home. When that ran out in October, he sold family jewelry to get rice. When the money was gone, he begged from neighbors who still had rice stockpiles, often going without food so his children could eat.
“The market was closed; no one was harvesting,” he says. “I was eating only once a day, sometimes not at all [...] I felt shame that I had to beg for food, but I had no other choice.”
Without rice, things got very bad for the Rohingya very quickly.
Aid groups couldn’t reach them regularly. The Buddhists blockaded their villages and wouldn’t hire them; they put an embargo on Rohingya goods and even stopped selling them phone cards so they couldn’t communicate with the outside world, according to aid groups. The Muslims ate through their stockpiles; they borrowed from friends and neighbors; then they ran out.
Food became so hard to get for Mohammad Hashim, 25, a wood cutter from Pyin La village, that he and his family sometimes ate broken rice grains normally given to chickens.
“We sometimes went two days without food,” Hashim says. “They treated us like animals.”
Goni says that of the 500 families who lived near him, around 150 have fled to Bangladesh. Everyone else wants to leave, he said, but they either don’t have enough money or are too old.
“Some families have enough food because they stockpiled rice, but that can’t last forever,” he says. “If they can’t get to Bangladesh, and they run out of rice, the only option is death.”