Tag Archives: Myanmar

Nearly 400 die as Myanmar army steps up crackdown on Rohingya militants

Rohingya refugees stands in an open place during heavy rain, as they are hold by Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) after illegally crossing the border, in Teknaf, Bangladesh, August 31, 2017.

COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh (Reuters) – Nearly 400 people have died in fighting that has rocked Myanmar’s northwest for a week, new official data show, making it probably the deadliest bout of violence to engulf the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority in decades.

Around 38,000 Rohingya have crossed into Bangladesh from Myanmar, United Nations sources said, a week after Rohingya insurgents attacked police posts and an army base in Rakhine state, prompting clashes and a military counteroffensive.

“As of August 31, 38,000 people are estimated to have crossed the border into Bangladesh,” the officials said on Friday, in their latest estimate.

The army says it is conducting clearance operations against “extremist terrorists” and security forces have been told to protect civilians. But Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh say a campaign of arson and killings aims to force them out.

The treatment of Myanmar’s roughly 1.1 million Rohingya is the biggest challenge facing national leader Aung San Suu Kyi, accused by some Western critics of not speaking out for a minority that has long complained of persecution.

Police officers guard near a house that was burnt down in recent violence in Maungdaw, Myanmar August 31, 2017.

Police officers guard near a house that was burnt down in recent violence in Maungdaw, Myanmar August 31, 2017. RETUERS/Soe Zeya Tun

The clashes and ensuing army crackdown have killed about 370 Rohingya insurgents, but also 13 security forces, two government officials and 14 civilians, the Myanmar military said on Thursday.

By comparison, communal violence in 2012 in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine, led to the killing of nearly 200 people and the displacement of about 140,000, most of them Rohingya.

The fighting is a dramatic escalation of a conflict that has simmered since October, when similar but much smaller Rohingya attacks on security posts prompted a brutal military response dogged by allegations of rights abuses.

Myanmar evacuated more than 11,700 “ethnic residents” from the area affected by fighting, the army said, referring to the non-Muslim population of northern Rakhine.

More than 150 Rohingya insurgents staged fresh attacks on security forces on Thursday near villages occupied by Hindus, the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar said, adding that about 700 members of such families had been evacuated.

“Four of the terrorists were arrested, including one 13-year-old boy,” it said, adding that security forces had arrested two more men near a Maungdaw police outpost on suspicion of involvement in the attacks.

About 20,000 more Rohingya trying to flee are stuck in no man’s land at the border, the U.N. sources said, as aid workers in Bangladesh struggle to alleviate the sufferings of a sudden influx of thousands of hungry and traumatized people.

While some Rohingya try to cross by land, others attempt a perilous boat journey across the Naf River separating the two countries.

Bangladesh border guards found the bodies of 15 Rohingya Muslims, 11 children among them, floating in the river on Friday, area commander Lt. Col. Ariful Islam told Reuters.

That takes to about 40 the total of Rohingya known to have died by drowning.

 

(Reporting by Reuters staff; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

 

At least 71 killed in Myanmar as Rohingya insurgents stage major attack

FILE PHOTO: A Myanmar border guard police officers stand guard in Buthidaung, northern Rakhine state, Myanmar July 13, 2017. REUTERS/Simon Lewis/File Photo

By Wa Lone and Shoon Naing

YANGON (Reuters) – Muslim militants in Myanmar staged a coordinated attack on 30 police posts and an army base in Rakhine state on Friday, and at least 59 of the insurgents and 12 members of the security forces were killed, the army and government said.

The fighting – still going on in some areas – marked a major escalation in a simmering conflict in the northwestern state since last October, when similar attacks prompted a big military sweep beset by allegations of serious human rights abuses.

The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a group previously known as Harakah al-Yaqin, which instigated the October attacks, claimed responsibility for the early morning offensive, and warned of more.

The treatment of approximately 1.1 million Muslim Rohingya has emerged as majority Buddhist Myanmar’s most contentious human rights issue as it makes a transition from decades of harsh military rule.

It now appears to have spawned a potent insurgency which has grown in size, observers say.

They worry that the attacks – much larger and better organized than those in October – will spark an even more aggressive army response and trigger communal clashes between Muslims and Buddhist ethnic Rakhines.

A news team affiliated with the office of national leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, said that one soldier, one immigration officer, 10 policemen and 59 insurgents had been killed in the fighting.

“In the early morning at 1 a.m., the extremist Bengali insurgents started their attack on the police post … with the man-made bombs and small weapons,” said the army in a separate statement, referring to the Rohingya by a derogatory term implying they are interlopers from Bangladesh.

The militants also used sticks and swords and destroyed bridges with explosives, the army said.

The Rohingya are denied citizenship and are seen by many in Myanmar as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, despite claiming roots in the region that go back centuries, with communities marginalized and occasionally subjected to communal violence.

FIRE AND FEAR

The military counter-offensive in October resulted in some 87,000 Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh, where they joined many others who have fled from Myanmar over the past 25 years.

The United Nations said Myanmar’s security forces likely committed crimes against humanity in the offensive that began in October. On Friday, the United Nations condemned the militant attacks and called for all parties to refrain from violence.

The military said about 150 Rohingya attacked an army base in Taung Bazar village in Buthidaung township.

Among the police posts attacked was a station in the majority-Rakhine village of Kyauk Pandu, 40 km (24 miles) south of the major town of Maungdaw.

Police officer Kyaw Win Tun said the insurgents burned down the post and police had been called to gather at a main station.

Residents were fearful as darkness approached.

“We heard that a lot of Muslim villagers are grouping together, they will make more attacks on us when the sun goes down,” said Maung Maung Chay, a Rakhine villager from the hamlet.

The attack took place hours after a panel led by the former U.N. chief Kofi Annan advised the government on long-term solutions for the violence-riven state.

Annan condemned the violence on Friday, saying “no cause can justify such brutality and senseless killing”.

‘RUNNING FOR OUR LIVES’

Military sources told Reuters they estimated 1,000 insurgents took part in the offensive and it encompassed both Maungdaw and Buthidaung townships – a much wider area compared with October.

The leader of ARSA, Ata Ullah, has said hundreds of young Rohingya have joined the group, which claims to be waging a legitimate defense against the army and for human rights.

“We have been taking our defensive actions against the Burmese marauding forces in more than 25 different places across the region. More soon!” the group said on Twitter.

Chris Lewa of the Rohingya monitoring group, the Arakan Project, said a major concern was what happened to some 700 Rohingya villagers trapped inside their section of Zay Di Pyin village which had been surrounded by Rakhine vigilantes armed with sticks and swords.

“We are running for our lives,” said one of the Zay Di Pyin’s Rohingya villagers reached by telephone, adding that houses had been set on fire. The government said the village had been burned down but blamed the fire on the Rohingya.

Amid rising tension over the past few weeks, more than 1,000 new refugees have fled to Bangladesh, where border guards on Friday pushed back 146 people trying to flee the violence.

Mohammed Shafi, who lives in a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh, said his cousin in Myanmar had told him of the trouble.

“The military is everywhere. People are crying, mourning the dead,” Shafi said.

“Things are turning real bad. It’s scary.”

(Additional Krishna N. Das in DHAKA, Yimou Lee in YANGON, Nurul Islam in COX’S BAZAR, Ruma Paul in DHAKA; Writing by Antoni Slodkowski; Editing by Robert Birsel, Nick Macfie)

Myanmar floods kill two, displace tens of thousands

A woman carries water bottles and foods distributed by an aid organization during a flood in Kyaikto township, Mon state, Myanmar July 22, 2017.

By Wa Lone

YANGON (Reuters) – Flooding across large parts of Myanmar has displaced more than 100,000 people, causing two deaths, while dramatic riverbank erosion has washed away a Buddhist pagoda, officials, residents and state media said on Monday.

Water levels have risen steadily since unrelenting monsoon rain began to lash the heart of the Southeast Asian country in early July, driving some people to higher land or seek shelter in Buddhist monasteries, a disaster relief official said.

“The situation is under control, but what happens now will depend on the weather,” Ko Ko Naing, director general of the ministry of social welfare, relief and resettlement, told Reuters.

“We are prepared to support the flood-hit areas because flooding happens every year.”

The government has provided food and other assistance to a total of 116,817 displaced people by Monday, as well as longer-term shelter for those outside settlements where flood waters are not expected to subside immediately, he said.

One man drowned in the floods in the Sagaing region and another was swept away while crossing a stream in Chin state, said a resettlement official in the ministry, Kay Thwe Win.

On Saturday, images of the Buddha’s footprint that draw pilgrims to a pagoda in Magway region were submerged by the rising waters, although no damage was immediately apparent, the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported.

A small dam also collapsed in the Bago region on Saturday, it said.

Video provided to Reuters by a Buddhist monk near Pakokku, 520 km (323 miles) north of the commercial hub of Yangon, showed a gold-leaf-covered pagoda slipping into the raging waters of the Ayeyarwady on Thursday.

The abbott at the pagoda, U Pyinnya Linkkara, said flooding was common in the area during the monsoon that runs from May to October, but this year’s floods caused alarming erosion.

Some riverside villages have been washed away entirely, he said.

“The villagers are now scared to live here,” he said. “The flooding has now decreased, but erosion continues.”

 

(Reporting by Wa Lone; Writing by Simon Lewis; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)

 

Air and sea search for Myanmar army plane missing with 120 aboard

By Wa Lone and Shoon Naing

YANGON (Reuters) – Ships and planes were scouring the coast of southern Myanmar on Wednesday after a military aircraft vanished over the Andaman Sea with 120 soldiers, family members and crew on board, the army and civil aviation officials said.

The Chinese-made Y-8-200F transport plane left the coastal town of Myeik at 1:06 p.m (0636 GMT), heading north to Myanmar’s largest city of Yangon on a regular weekly military flight that stops at several coastal towns along the way, officials said.

The plane lost contact 29 minutes after take-off while flying at 18,000 feet (5,485 meters) over the sea, about 43 miles (70 km) west of the town of Dawei, the military said.

“We don’t know what exactly happened to this plane after the loss of contact,” said Kyaw Kyaw Htey, a civil aviation official at Myeik airport.

Civil aviation authorities initially said there were 105 people onboard. The military later said those on board included 106 soldiers and their family members and 14 crew. The maximum capacity of the aircraft was 200 people, said a military officer.

It is monsoon season in Myanmar, but Kyaw Kyaw Htey said the weather had been “normal” with good visibility when the plane took off.

The military launched a search soon after the plane went missing, mobilizing six navy ships and three military planes, said the army in a news release. The search continued as darkness fell.

Some 300-400 people, including firefighters, medics, emergency and welfare officials, gathered on the shore near the town of Launglon, close to the area where the navy search was concentrated, said Naing Myo Thwin, the chairman of the local funeral association, from the scene.

“We haven’t seen any trace of the plane yet,” Naing Myo Thwin told Reuters by telephone. He doubles as a member of the local hospital’s emergency team.

Aung Win, a local police officer also speaking from the scene by telephone, confirmed that there were a large number of people gathered on the beach. He said because they had not found any trace of the plane they were moving to other areas along the shore.

The aircraft was bought in March 2016 and had a total of 809 flying hours. It was carrying 2.4 tons of supplies, the military said.

Aircraft incidents, both civilian and military, are not uncommon in the Southeast Asian country.

A military helicopter crashed in June last year in central Myanmar, killing three military personnel on board.

Five military personnel were killed last February after an air force aircraft crashed in the country’s capital Naypyitaw, according to media reports.

Two people were killed and 11 injured after a small plane crashed in central Myanmar in 2012.

(Additional reporting by Yimou Lee; Writing by Antoni Slodkowski; Editing by Robert Birsel and Alex Richardson)

Myanmar trains midwives to tackle maternal death rate

Midwives attend pacients in Central Women's Hospital in Yangon, Myanmar March 17, 2017. REUTERS/Pyay Kyaw Aung

By Aye Win Myint

YANGON (Reuters) – Myanmar is training up hundreds of midwives in an effort to reduce the number of women who die in childbirth, one of many social policy reforms launched by the country as it emerges from decades of military rule.

Statistics show childbirth and pregnancy-related complications are the leading causes of death among women in Myanmar, mainly due to delays in reaching emergency care.

According to the most recent census, 282 women die per 100,000 births in the country, equivalent to about eight deaths every day, double the regional average and far above the mortality ratio of 20 deaths per 100,000 in neighboring Thailand or six per 100,000 in Singapore.

Nay Hnin Lwin, 19, is among 200 midwifery students currently studying at the Central Midwifery School in Yangon.

She said her parents, who live in a rural area, still do not recognize the importance of midwives, relying instead on traditional birth attendants.

“If there is an emergency situation, they cannot save lives. Mothers are losing their lives because of them. I’m proud to be a midwife to save them from these situations,” she told Reuters Television.

At the end of the two-year course, Nay Hnin Lwin and other trainee midwives will be deployed to remote clinics with poor infrastructure and bare-bones medical facilities.

“The role of midwives is very important because two thirds of our country is in rural areas. They are not only working on healthcare, but also documenting and compiling data for the country,” said Dashi Hkwan Nu, head teacher at the Central Midwifery School.

Myanmar’s healthcare — particularly in far-flung areas — is plagued by ramshackle services, with hospitals lacking basic equipment because the military junta diverted funds away from services benefiting the general population to the army.

The government of Myanmar’s first de-facto civilian leader in about half a century, Aung San Suu Kyi, has launched a series of social reforms such as national health and education plans, and the introduction of a bus transport system in Yangon.

A year after sweeping to power, however, Suu Kyi acknowledged earlier this week public frustration with the slow pace of reforms and development.

The midwives’ training program is being supported by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which says Myanmar must tackle maternal mortality in order to raise living standards.

“Maternal mortality needs to come down if Myanmar wants to graduate from the least developed into a middle-income country,” said Hla Hla Aye, assistant representative to the Fund.

(Reporting by Aye Win Myint; Writing by Antoni Slodkowski; Editing by Helen Popper)

Relief camp in China swells as thousands flee conflict in Myanmar

Refugee who fled fighting in neighbouring Myanmar washes dishes outside the house of a relative in the village of Baiyan near Nansan in the Yunnan province, China

By James Pomfret

NANSAN, China (Reuters) – Within earshot of mortar fire echoing from beyond a ring of hills, a sprawling relief camp in Southwestern China is swelling steadily after fighting erupted last week between a rebel ethnic army in Myanmar and government troops just across the border.

In a recent Reuters visit to the rugged area in southwestern Yunnan province, aid workers and those displaced expressed fears of a more violent and protracted conflict than a previous flare-up in the Kokang region in early 2015.

“Every day, more people come,” said Li Yinzhong, an aid manager in the camp, gesturing at the mostly Han Chinese refugees from Myanmar’s Kokang region trudging through the reddish mud earth around rows of large blue huts where they sleep on nylon tarpaulin sheets.

“We will look after them until they decide they want to go back.”

Blue disaster relief tents provided by the Chinese also dotted the terraced sugarcane, maize and tea terraces flanking the mountainous winding road to Nansan. The town, close to the Kokang region of Myanmar’s Shan State, is providing refuge for a stream of refugees that Chinese authorities estimate number more than 20,000.

The violence is a blow to efforts by Myanmar’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi, to reach a comprehensive peace agreement with Myanmar’s ethnic minorities, some of them in rebellions spanning decades.

The conflict is also fraying ties between China and Myanmar, which Beijing has hoped could be a key gateway in its multi-pronged “One Belt One Road” strategy to promote economic links between China and Europe.

Kokang has close ties to China. The vast majority are ethnic Chinese speaking a Chinese dialect and using the yuan as currency.

‘STATE OF WAR’

The Kokang began fleeing when the rebel Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) launched a surprise raid on Myanmar police and military targets in the town of Laukkai, resulting in the deaths of 30 people on March 6.

The Myanmar military has launched “56 waves of small and large clashes”, using cannons, armored vehicles and heavy weapons over the past two months, according to a statement published by the military on March 6 after the attack.

Rebel forces who lay historic claim to the Kokang region have attacked government troops with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other military hardware.

In an “urgent notice” posted on Sunday on its official website, the MNDAA said the Kokang area was now in a “state of war” as fighting worsened.

On the Chinese side, paramilitary police have sent in battalions of reinforcements, mostly in readiness for disaster relief, according to Chinese officials who spoke on background.

Reuters saw seven Chinese armored personnel carriers moving west along the hilly road towards Myanmar and the relief camp sprawled across a muddy wasteland the size of 10 football fields.

The fresh unrest comes after fighting in early 2015 and in 2009 involving the MNDAA, both flare-ups displacing tens of thousands of people.

Ordnance has occasionally strayed into China, with five people in China killed in 2015 during a round of fighting then.

This time round, the door to a village house was blown out, and the upper floor of the Anran hotel in Nansan was shelled forcing its closure, according to local residents and one official. Reuters was unable to corroborate these accounts.

China has lodged “solemn representations” with Myanmar over its citizens put at risk by the conflict, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a regular news briefing on Monday.

“The Chinese will be very angry if it escalates to the level of 2015,” said Sino-Myanmar expert Yun Sun, a senior associate with the Stimson Center in Washington D.C.

Beijing wants the Kokang to be included in the comprehensive peace negotiations that Aung San Suu Kyi initiated last August, she said.

The military has blocked that, saying the rebels can only join if they lay down arms first. “The Chinese actually tacitly and privately support the Kokang being included in the negotiations, but they can’t say that,” Sun said.

UNRESOLVED PEACE

At around three in the morning on the day of the rebel raids, loud explosions and gunfire woke the Cao family, prompting them to flee at first light with few possessions.

“I was scared,” said Cao Junxiang, who fled in a convoy of four rudimentary, three-wheel farm lorries tethered to powerful motorcycles — joining a nearly 15-hour snaking exodus of jeeps, trucks, buses, carts and motorcycles bound for China.

“More than half the people (in my village) left,” he said, as others crowded around an open sitting area of a Chinese village house transformed into a makeshift refuge.

Yao Xiao’er, the 49-year old head of the household, said she sent the farm vehicles across the border soon after hearing the first bursts of distant thudding.  She eventually got nearly 100 relatives and friends to safety including a two-year-old toddler and a nonagenarian, half-blind, family matriarch, who was dozing on a tatty sofa.

One young mother with a baby strapped to her back said many refugees were seeking out odd jobs to make ends meet.

“We have no money so some of us cut sugar cane,” she said. “We get around one yuan for every 20 sticks we chop, peel and uproot.”

A Chinese taxi driver plying the route between a Chinese airport in Lincang and the seedy frontier casinos of Myanmar’s Laukkai, said business was drying up.

“No one is coming here anymore.”

(Reporting by James Pomfret; Additional reporting by Christian Shepherd in BEIJING; Editing by Bill Tarrant and Clarence Fernandez)

Powerful Earthquake strikes Myanmar, at least 3 dead

Two men look at a collapsed entrance of a pagoda after an earthquake in Bagan

By Shwe Yee Saw Myint and Aung Hla Tun

YANGON (Reuters) – A powerful 6.8 magnitude earthquake shook central Myanmar on Wednesday, killing at least three people including two children, local officials said, and damaging some of the famous pagodas in the Southeast Asian nation’s ancient capital of Bagan.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said the quake hit near the town of Chauk, southwest of Mandalay. Tremors were felt as far away as Thailand, where witnesses reported high rise buildings swaying in Bangkok, and the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka.

A fire department official from regional capital Magwe said two young girls were killed when a riverbank gave way in Yenanchaung township, south of Chauk.

One person was killed and another injured when a tobacco processing factory collapsed in the town of Pakkoku, to the north, the duty officer at the local fire department said.

There were no other confirmed casualties, and early reports suggested limited damage overall.

“My house shook during the quake. Many people were scared and they ran out of the buildings,” said Maung Maung Kyaw, a local official of the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) party.

“Some of the old buildings have cracks. The biggest damage is to the bank building in the town. The damage to other buildings isn’t that significant.”

The quake struck at a relatively deep 84 km (52 miles), the USGS said.

Chauk is about 35 km (20 miles) from Bagan, known as the “City of 4 Million Pagodas” and a major draw for Myanmar’s nascent tourism industry.

Yangon-based travel agent Amy Saw, who had been in touch with her firm’s Bagan office, said some of the pagodas there had been damaged, and the Ministry of Religious Affairs put the number sustaining some kind of damage at 65.

According to the 2014 census, Chauk has a population of about 45,000, with around 185,000 living in the surrounding area. It was a thriving oilfield during the British colonial era.

“So far as we heard from our local staff, a three-storey building collapsed in Chauk and a pagoda was badly damaged in a Yenanchaung,” a fire department official in Magwe told Reuters.

Ko Tin Ko Lwin, a resident of Yenanchaung township, told Reuters that a pagoda that had been cracked before the quake had collapsed, while electricity poles and some trees were felled.

The quake shook buildings in Myanmar’s biggest city of Yangon and in other towns and cities, witnesses said.

Office buildings in the Thai capital Bangkok, to the east of Myanmar, shook for a few seconds, residents there said.

The quake was also felt in Bangladesh, to the west of Myanmar, where some people ran out into the street as buildings shook, residents said.

Myanmar is in a seismically active part of the world where the Indo-Australian Plate runs up against the Eurasian Plate.

In March, 2011, at least 74 people were killed in an earthquake in Myanmar near its borders with Thailand and Laos.

(This version of the story has been refiled to fix typo in headline)

(Reporting by Yangon and Bangkok bureaus; Writing by Robert Birsel and Antoni Slodkowski; Editing by Alex Richardson)

U.S. places Myanmar on worst offenders list in human trafficking

A boy walks among debris after fire destroyed shelters at a camp for internally displaced Rohingya Muslims in the western Rakhine Stat

By Matt Spetalnick, Jason Szep and Antoni Slodkowski

WASHINGTON/YANGON (Reuters) – The United States has decided to place Myanmar on its global list of worst offenders in human trafficking, officials said, a move aimed at prodding the country’s new democratically elected government and its still-powerful military to do more to curb the use of child soldiers and forced labor.

The reprimand of Myanmar comes despite U.S. efforts to court the strategically important country to help counteract China’s rise in the region and build a Southeast Asian bulwark against Beijing’s territorial assertiveness in the South China Sea.

Myanmar’s demotion, part of the State Department’s closely watched annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report due to be released on Thursday, also appears intended to send a message of U.S. concern about continued widespread persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority in the Buddhist-majority nation.

The country’s new leader, democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi, has been criticized internationally for neglecting the Rohingya issue since her administration took office this year.

Washington has faced a complex balancing act over Myanmar, a former military dictatorship that has emerged from decades of international isolation since launching sweeping political changes in 2011.

President Barack Obama’s diplomatic opening to Myanmar is widely seen as a key foreign policy achievement as he enters his final seven months in office, but even as he has eased some sanctions he has kept others in place to maintain leverage for further reforms.

At the same time, Washington wants to keep Myanmar from slipping back into China’s orbit at a time when U.S. officials are trying to forge a unified regional front.

The U.S. decision to drop Myanmar to “Tier 3,” the lowest grade, putting it alongside countries like Iran, North Korea and Syria, was confirmed by a U.S. official in Washington and a Bangkok-based official from an international organization informed of the move. Another person familiar with the matter said: “I’m not going to turn you away from this conclusion.” All spoke on condition of anonymity.

A Tier 3 rating can trigger sanctions limiting access to U.S. and international aid. But U.S. presidents frequently waive such action.

The decision on Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, was one of the most hotly contested in this year’s report, and followed concerns that some assessments in last year’s human trafficking report were watered down for political reasons.

There was intense internal debate between senior U.S. diplomats who wanted to reward Myanmar for progress on political reforms and U.S. human rights experts who argued that not enough was being done to curb human trafficking, the U.S. official said.

A Reuters investigation published last August found that senior diplomats repeatedly overruled the State Department’s anti-trafficking unit and inflated the grades of 14 strategically important countries. The State Department denied any political considerations but U.S. lawmakers called for reforms in the decision-making process.

This year’s decision on Myanmar marked a win for the State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, which was set up to independently grade countries’ efforts to prevent modern slavery, such as the illegal trade in humans for forced labor or prostitution.

Because Myanmar had been on the so-called “Tier 2 Watch List” for the maximum four years permitted by law, the State Department either had to justify an upgrade or else automatically downgrade it. A Tier 3 ranking means that anti-trafficking efforts do not meet “minimum standards” and it is “not making significant efforts to do so.”

State Department spokesman John Kirby said: “We will not comment on the contents of this year’s report until after the report is released.”

CHILD SOLDIERS

Deliberations on Myanmar’s record focused heavily on efforts to halt the military’s recruitment and use of child soldiers as well as forced labor, especially the coercion of local villagers to perform some work. Such practices have been documented by international human rights groups and are also outlined in last year’s State Department report.

A key issue that the U.S. administration considered before Myanmar’s downgrade was alleged government complicity in human trafficking, including its failure to prosecute any civilian officials for their involvement in it, according to the person familiar with the situation. While the Myanmar military is credited with significant progress toward curbing the use of child soldiers, such as allowing international inspections of military bases, there was no indication the problem had been completely eradicated as the U.S. anti-trafficking office had urged, the source said.Human rights groups had lobbied U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry against upgrading Myanmar, saying it would be unearned.

The diplomatic blow to Myanmar’s government could be softened by the fact that the TIP report covered efforts during the year ending in March, under the previous administration of former junta general Thein Sein.

Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace laureate, assumed her government role in April, after her party won the country’s first democratic elections in five decades.

But with the generals still controlling three security ministries and holding a lock on 25 percent of seats in parliament, U.S. officials grappled with whether a downgrade could undermine cooperation from the military against human trafficking.

For her part, Suu Kyi has recently unsettled U.S. officials by calling on them not to use the term “Rohingya” to refer to the Muslim minority in the country’s north. Many in Myanmar refer to them as “Bengalis,” insinuating that they are stateless illegal immigrants.

The United States has urged Myanmar to treat them as citizens.

The 2015 TIP report highlighted that the government’s denial of citizenship to an estimated 800,000 men, women and children in Burma — the majority of them ethnic Rohingya — “significantly increased this population’s vulnerability to trafficking”.

“The chronic, chronic abuse of the Rohingya has not been dealt with at all,” a U.S. congressional aide said, suggesting support on Capitol Hill for a downgrade this year.

(Additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle in Washington and Andrew R.C. Marshall in Bangkok; Writing by Matt Spetalnick; editing by Stuart Grudgings.)

Fire destroys shelters for internally displaced Muslims in Myanmar

Boys stand among debris after fire destroyed shelters at a camp for internally displaced Rohingya Muslims in the western Rakhine State near Sittwe

YANGON (Reuters) – A fire broke out on Tuesday in a camp for internally displaced Muslims in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, destroying shelters where about 2,000 people had lived and injuring about 14 of them, the United Nations said.

Camps in the area largely house members of the marginalized Rohingya Muslim minority, who were displaced by fighting between Buddhists and Muslims in 2012.

The fire at the Baw Du Pha 2 camp near the state capital of Sittwe started in the morning. Authorities were investigating the cause but initial reports indicated it was an accident from a cooking fire, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in a statement.

“Based on the current information available, at least 14 people were injured by the fire. There are unconfirmed reports of fatalities but this has not been verified,” it said.

The fire destroyed about 44 “long houses” and damaged up to nine, affecting 440 households, or about 2,00 people, it said.

Authorities in the area were not immediately available for comment.

Myanmar’s Rohingya population is stateless and thousands of them have fled persecution and poverty, often by boat to other parts of Southeast Asia.

Some 125,000 Rohingya remain displaced and face severe travel restrictions while living in camps.

(Reporting by Timothy Mclaughlin; Editing by Robert Birsel)