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(Reuters) – Three years ago, the Myanmar military burned the Rohingya village of Kan Kya to the ground and razed its remains. Last year, the government erased his name from official maps, according to the United Nations.
About 3 miles (5 km) from the Naf River that marks the border between Myanmar’s Rakhine State and Bangladesh, Kan Kya was home to hundreds of people before the army expelled 730,000 Rohingya from the country in 2017, according to which the United Nations described as “an example of an ethnic cleansing textbook.”
Myanmar’s military, now facing genocide charges, said it was conducting “cleansing operations” against militants.
Where Kan Kya once stood, there are now dozens of government and military buildings, including an expanding and fenced off police base, according to satellite images publicly available on Google Earth and historical images provided to Reuters by Planet Labs. The village, in one region remote in the northwest of the country closed to foreigners, it was too small to be named on Google Maps.
In maps produced in 2020 by the United Nations mapping unit in Myanmar, which it says are based on maps from the Myanmar government, the site of the destroyed village is now unnamed and reclassified as part of the nearby city of Maungdaw. The unit produces maps for use by UN agencies, such as the refugee agency UNHCR, and humanitarian groups working with the United Nations on the ground.
Kan Kya was one of nearly 400 villages destroyed by the Myanmar military in 2017, according to satellite images analyzed by New York-based Human Rights Watch. And he’s one of at least a dozen whose names have been erased.
“His intention is that we do not return,” said religious leader Mohammed Rofiq, a former president of a village near Kan Kya who now lives in a refugee camp in Bangladesh, referring to the Myanmar government.
The Ministry of Social Welfare, which oversees Myanmar’s reconstruction activities in Rakhine State, declined to respond to questions from Reuters about the erasure of village names or government policy on the return of Rohingya refugees. . The ministry referred the questions to the General Administration Department (GAD), which did not respond.
A Myanmar government representative, led by State Councilor Aung San Suu Kyi, also did not respond to a request for comment.
The United Nations department of maps has produced at least three maps since the beginning of the year showing that various Rohingya village names have either disappeared or been reclassified by Myanmar.
The United Nations said it removed some maps of Rakhine state from its website in June and began a study to assess the impact of government policies on returning villagers and refugees after the Arakan Rohingya National Organization, a group of Rohingya rights based in the United Kingdom, complained to the United Nations about the removal of the village names. The United Nations said the study has reached no conclusion.
Yanghee Lee, a former UN human rights envoy to Myanmar, said the government was purposely making it difficult for refugees to return to places with no name and no evidence that they ever lived there. “This is a way to exterminate their basic identity,” he said.
Lee said the United Nations was complicit in allowing that to happen by not challenging the Myanmar government: “There has been no leadership that says, ‘Wait a minute, the ball stops here, we are not going to let this continue. ‘”
Several UN officials interviewed by Reuters declined to directly address why the United Nations had not raised objections or tried to stop him.
Ola Almgren, head of the UN mission in Myanmar, said that he had not raised the issue of erasing village names with the Myanmar government, but said that he had urged the Myanmar government to create “enabling conditions” for the return of refugees.
Stephane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, said the reclassification of some villages as neighborhoods was a “routine administrative procedure.” The UN mapping unit “uses the official government names of the places to avoid confusion between humanitarian workers and government officials in the field,” he said. “The permanent practice of the United Nations around the world is to use officially designated place names for all publicly distributed maps and products.”
Dujarric said changing the legal status of villages can become “an additional layer of complexity” for refugees claiming their former homes, without providing details.
BUILDING QUICKLY
The Buddhist-majority Myanmar denies citizenship to Rohingya Muslims, whom many view as outsiders from neighboring Bangladesh despite their presence in the country for centuries. Myanmar has said it is open to the return of Rohingya refugees who fled repression in 2017, but said it must be done through an orderly process.
Talks about that process between Myanmar and Bangladesh, where more than a million Rohingya live in refugee camps, have stalled. In recent months, the few dozen refugees who have tried to return have been arrested for illegal entry by Myanmar officials who cited concerns about the spread of the novel coronavirus by refugees.
Satellite images taken by Planet Labs, a private San Francisco-based satellite operator founded by former NASA scientists, and Google Earth show that Myanmar began building on the sites of at least a dozen destroyed villages shortly after they residents will flee in 2017. Myanmar is building bases for security forces, buildings for government departments and homes for Buddhists, according to people in the area.
Satellite images show that the base built at the Kan Kya site doubled in size in the last year and two helipads were added. A new road has been built on the site of another nearby devastated village called Gone Nar, which has also been reclassified as part of the expanded city of Maungdaw.
An army spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on the construction of security bases at the sites of destroyed Rohingya villages. Local officials could not be reached for comment.
In September 2019, an order from the GAD, part of the military-led Interior Ministry, reclassified 16 villages, most of them formerly Rohingya, as Maungdaw neighborhoods, according to the UN mapping unit in Myanmar. Six of the village names were preserved in the names of the new districts to which they were reclassified as belonging, but 10 village names disappeared from the maps, according to the United Nations.
Five of these villages were destroyed in 2017. GAD figures show that the Rohingya, whom it classifies as “foreigners” from Bangladesh, now make up about 60% of Maungdaw’s population, up from 93% in 2017, before the crackdown.
Hundreds of other destroyed villages have not changed or erased their names, according to UN maps.
WALLS AND WATCHTOWERS
The United Nations said 11 other villages had been reclassified in the past five years as slums of a new city called Myin Hlut, where a Myanmar government minister proposed a beach and seafood resort area.
(Click to see the map https://tmsnrt.rs/3bn383q)
These small villages along the coast were mostly destroyed in the 2017 crackdown, although two remained intact until authorities toppled them in 2018. Six new guard stations with watchtowers have been erected in the area, according to an Amnesty International satellite imagery analyst.
As Rohingya villages disappeared from the maps, in 2020 two villages for Buddhist settlers were added to the UN maps.
In Inn Din, a village where Myanmar soldiers killed 10 Muslim men in an incident during the 2017 crackdown, the 6,000 Rohingya who lived there have fled and their homes have been destroyed.
(To read Reuters SPECIAL REPORT on Inn Din, click here https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-rakhine-events).
The Rakhine state government has built new housing for Buddhists in the area, Reuters reported in 2018. Satellite images show the site has expanded further since then, while in neighboring Kyauk Pandu, a Buddhist settlement in Rakhine has doubled in size.
Dujarric, the UN spokesman, noted that the International Court of Justice, which is investigating charges of genocide against Myanmar for the 2017 crackdown, ordered the government to retain any evidence related to the charges, which Myanmar has agreed to do.
He did not say whether the United Nations believed that the removal of the village names contravened that order or what the United Nations was doing to stop it.
A Bangladeshi official with knowledge of the process of repatriation of Rohingya refugees told Reuters that Myanmar showed no change in its policy towards the Rohingya.
In March, the official said, Myanmar sent Bangladesh a list of names of 840 Rohingya that it had approved to return to two areas in northern Rakhine: Hla Poe Kaung and Thet Kay Pin.
But the refugees were not from that area, the official said, and the list included single members of large families, including women unlikely to travel alone.
A representative from Myanmar’s Ministry of Social Welfare told Reuters there were “some communication gaps” between Myanmar and Bangladesh on the issue of returning refugees, which the representative attributed to the postponement of a meeting due to the coronavirus.
Satellite images of the areas Myanmar proposed to return to showed a large settlement surrounded by walls and watchtowers and a smaller one nearby. Both were built on razed Rohingya villages. Rohingya leaders have said they will return only to the original village plots where they can build their own houses, not to the camps.
In a closed-door address to the UN General Assembly last month, a transcript of which was seen by Reuters, the UN special envoy to Myanmar raised the issue of the stalled repatriation of Rohingya refugees, saying they were needed ” increased confidence-building measures “to allay the fears of refugees.
“It’s alarming,” said Jafar Ahmed, another former resident of the area. “I don’t know if we will ever get our land back.”
(Reporting by Poppy McPherson; Additional reporting by ASM Suza Uddin in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, Michelle Nichols in New York, Stephanie Ulmer-Nebehay in Geneva, and Simon Lewis in Washington; Editing by Matthew Tostevin and Bill Rigby)
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