Episode #249: Fighting Fire with Fire
“What we can see is that there's a very clear pattern after April 24 of whenever the Arakan Army captured a military position, within days the neighboring villages would all be burned,” says Nathan Ruser, a satellite imagery analyst. “You could almost track the Arakan Army's military gains across the township by those fires. That's why I titled the report that ‘They Left a Trail of Ashes,’ as they moved through and conquered big parts of Buthidaung town. The arson followed.”
This is Ruser’s second interview with Insight Myanmar. In his initial appearance, he described his ground-breaking geo-mapping of the conflict, and now he returns to discuss horrifying evidence of an arson campaign against Rohingya villages. His review of the data shockingly reveals that the destruction may well have been carried out by the Arakan Army (AA), an Ethnic Armed Organization (EAO) that gained significant public support as part of the “Three Brotherhood Alliance” behind the successful Operation 1027 against the Burmese army.
The relationship between the AA and the Rohingya has historically been characterized by violence. Ruser describes the AA as having a nationalist and irredentist stance over Rakhine state, and while they have made some public overtures towards peace and cooperation, he feels that fundamentally, they still see the Rohingya as interlopers. “[The AA] have been willing to build up on narratives of communal harmony, and building the community together when it's been convenient for them,” he says. “There's also the undeniable fact that they've launched some pretty horrible diatribes against [the Rohingya] in their official statements and communications. I still don't think I've ever seen anyone from the Arakan Army use the word ‘Rohingya!’ They use ‘Bengali,’ or if they're feeling a bit more generous, ‘Muslim.’ The biggest truth in where Rohingya-Arakan Army relations really lie is [from] talking to Rohingya activists… There's a pretty universal dislike and distrust of the Arakan Army, and that speaks more than any of my analyst perspective to it could.”
The Rohingya have of course suffered terribly as well at the hands of the Burmese military, and have little love for either them or the AA. For their part, the AA would like to control Rakhine State, and of course they have long been bitterly opposed to the regime, but also have their own history of skirmishes with minorities such as Rohingya in the region. In other words, the three major players in Rakhine state mutually distrust each other, and this tension has at times boiled up over into direct conflict. But while direct alliances are rare, there have been instances where strategic interests have led to temporary alignments or indirect cooperation against a common adversary. And this is what continues to play out today.
Ruser notes that for the last few months, AA has been in ascendence. “For the better part of this year, we've seen the Arakan Army capturing huge parts of Rakhine State,” Ruser says. “Essentially … they've captured the entirety of the countryside. They've captured all the rural areas, they've besieged the military outposts and the military bases for weeks, if not months, and then one by one, they're going in and attacking and overrunning them. [At] the same time, the junta has been facing unprecedented defeats not just in Rakhine State, but throughout the country, and that's led to massive manpower issues; basically, it's the conscription law, it’s mass mobilization and recruitment. So for much of this year, the writing’s been on the wall for Rakhine State … that this is the Arakan Army marching, and they’re going to take it, essentially. It's a matter of how long it takes rather than if it happens.”
Returning to the machinations of military policy in ethnic regions, Ruser describes how it has long been standard practice for the military to deliberately sow discord between ethnic groups if they feel they can no longer hold onto a region. This is intended to incite inter-ethnic violence, and destabilize any possibility for stable governance and defense. The junta’s attempts to inflame tensions between the AA and Rohingya have been in full swing from at least February of this year, mostly in the form of Rohingya anti-AA rallies orchestrated by the military. “It's debatable how much it matched community sentiment… this is very obviously a junta-directed ploy to divide and sow sectarian conflict.” Nathan notes that the protests were written off as a failed junta psy-op in various resistance media, including the AA’s, but this did not prevent the very real violence which followed.
The military’s infamous conscription law, enforced in late March and early April in response to their defeats in Operation 1027, has pushed the situation into an even more complex, kaleidoscopic and unstable direction. “The junta has never recognized Rohingya people as citizens, it's never even recognized them as residents,” Ruser says. “But despite this, they were caught up in that forced mobilization and forced conscription moved by the junta. We started seeing hundreds of Rohingya youth across the state being conscripted not just by the military council, but also by Rohingya militant groups that had previously fought them!” He notes that the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) and the Rohingya Solidarity Organization (RSO)—both initially formed as insurgent groups fighting against the military (and deadly enemies of each other)—have also begun to collude with the junta; towards this effort, they been forcibly conscripting youth from Rohingya communities and refugee camps, including children as young as 14!
This forced recruitment of Rohingya was crucial in laying the groundwork for military-orchestrated ethnic violence. To begin this campaign, Ruser says that “from April 11th to 17,th the junta directed and was involved in a widespread arson campaign in Buthidaung town.” About 2,400 structures in Buddhist and Hindu neighborhoods, mainly multi-story apartment buildings, were targeted by the Rohingya units under its control. This appears to be an effort to stoke communal conflict into a spiraling escalation of violence reminiscent of 2015 and 2017. And so, tragically, the junta's initial arson attack using Rohingya units was not just mindless violence but a calculated strategy that succeeded in sowing further discord. But despite the military's clear involvement in this horrific campaign, Ruser notes that following the arson, the AA began to direct "increasingly violent rhetoric" towards the Rohingya community.
Words were converted to action on May 17th and 18th, as Ruser describes from eyewitness accounts: “Reports started coming of the rest of Buthidaung town being burned down, as the Arakan Army moved in and captured it. From our from our estimates, about 50 acres of Buthidaung town was burned in this overnight, [targeting] Rohingya neighborhoods.” However, Ruser adds that the true scale of the destruction was not then apparent. One detail that caught his eye included reports of some 200,000 people fleeing the violence. “Buthidaung is not a town of 200,000 people!” Ruser exclaims. Looking up census data, he saw that the city, itself, perhaps housed 20,000 residents, with more in villages in the broader township. So that left a question in his mind: “Why were there so many people in the town?!’”
He deduced from his online search was that, for whatever reason, as many as 150,000 Rohingya from villages in Buthidaung township may not have counted in prior censuses, because the “official” figures did not add up. Then the question was, “What were they fleeing from?” Using his satellite imaging techniques, he was able to complete the puzzle. He uncovered a disturbing pattern of violence, revealing that 50 to 60 predominantly Rohingya villages in the broader Buthidaung region had been burned within a span of three weeks, but which slipped “under the threshold of detectability.” The imagery further revealed AA’s modus operandi. “There's a very clear pattern after April 24, whenever the Arakan Army captured a military position, within days the neighboring villages would all be burned!” He notes the clear contrast to back when the AA captured a battalion in northern Buthidaung in early April, before the military-orchestrated arson attack by the Rohingya, there was no immediate AA attack in response. However, after that time, every subsequent capture of military positions by the AA was followed by nearby villages being burned within days. These attacks against Rohingya civilian settlements served no purpose, but were just arbitrary and punitive retribution for what the AA expected had been a regime-orchestrated arson campaign, and not a Rohingya-planned attack.
In the end, that initial attack by Rohingya conscripts in Buthidaung accounted for less than seven percent of the total destruction resulting from the junta’s machinations; the resulting AA campaign is estimated to have destroyed around 8,500 buildings and directly displaced over 150,000 people from the township villages!
The obvious question is, who exactly is responsible for ordering this egregious, destructive arson campaign? Was it the AA leadership? Or was it maybe a campaign led by overenthusiastic soldiers? To Ruser’s mind, fighters on the ground most likely undertook these actions on their own; at the same time, he finds it unlikely that local commanders or foot soldiers would act so drastically if they felt it was against the wishes of the leadership. He also doubts that the AA leadership would not have known about the attacks soon after they had started. Given this, Ruser has come to believe that soldiers were inspired by the AA’s inflammatory, anti-Rohingya rhetoric, which he now sees as effectively greenlighting the attacks. Ruser now speculates that while the AA leadership did not order the attacks, they must have known about them early on, choosing not to put a stop to them until negative press coverage began to leak out, forcing their hand. This indicates that they could have stopped them at any point earlier on if they had wanted.
Then there is the question of why the AA would knowingly fall into the strategic trap that the military had set for them, by allowing the attacks to go on until they felt pressured to stop them, thus fanning the flames of increased interethnic strife, which can only benefit the military. Ruser surmises that the AA was particular incensed that ARSA and RSO had joined up with the military in launching the original attack. “Of course,” Ruser says, “it's an atrocity to communally punish and retaliate against an entire community for the actions of a few militants, especially considering how many of those individual militants on the ground would have been coerced and co-opted into doing this.”
Ruser noted that the AA put a stop to the arson because of negative press, and he emphasizes that negative press is a powerful influence, though often underestimated. He stresses that messaging and image are invaluable assets for the revolution, crucial not only domestically but also for attracting international support. Therefore, the revolution must maintain what he calls the “moral high ground.” This is because Ruser says, “A lot of the Western world is looking for any excuse to not support a non-state resistance group! The international community for decades has been very hesitant to support anything that's not an established thing.” So, giving the international community any excuse to think that post-junta Myanmar would like be unstable and be prone to intergroup conflict would be a serious obstacle to garnering its support.
Ruser echoes the sentiments of many past guests, emphasizing that despite the extreme challenges faced by the NUG and revolutionary actors, they have the unfair standard to maintain a blemish-free and positive international image. Yet Ruser also insists that NUG leadership must publicly admit and take responsibility for transgressions against civilians, which in this case may mean confronting and pressuring the AA, or any strategic ally, to adhere to a code of conduct. While this may seem risky, especially after years of courting the AA and in the wake of their recent successes in the northeast, Ruser believes it is worth the risk. He suggests that the AA would likely prefer to comply rather than sever ties with the resistance.
“To say to the Arakan Army that if you want to be part of a future democratic federalized Burma, this is unacceptable! And to hope that despite the nationalistic take that the Arakan Army’s had, and their clearly nationalistic bent, [I would] like to think that they would rather play a role in a future federalized Burma then act as a pariah state sandwiched between India and Burma. And in their statements, that they have shown as much willingness to align themselves with the national resistance, [which] does show that they would prefer a role in a future without the military. What they said and what they do is a different matter, and they've quite explicitly said that they are only looking for autonomy within a federalized Myanmar. They're not looking for independence.”