Three bombs hit capital of Myanmar’s Rakhine state

Three bombs exploded early Saturday in the capital of Myanmar’s Rakhine state, a cauldron of ethnic tensions roiled by insurgencies and a military crackdown on the Muslim Rohingya, injuring one policeman, officials said.

The three blasts at separate locations around Sittwe included one at the home of a high ranking official, police said. Besides the bloody campaign against the Rohingya, Rakhine has been struggling with a decade-long rebellion fought by ethnic Rakhine Buddhist insurgents but bombings in the state capital are rare. “Three bombs exploded and three other unexploded bombs were found. A police officer was injured but not seriously,” a senior officer said on condition of anonymity.

One was detonated in the compound of the state government secretary’s home, while the two others exploded in front of an office in the city and on a road leading to a beach. A local official from the state government confirmed the explosions. Photos of the sites showed shattered windows and scattered debris. “Some streets are being blocked by police already because of the bomb blasts,” Zaw Zaw, a resident of Sittwe, said.

In recent months, unrest in Rakhine has been concentrated in the state’s northern wedge, where a sweeping military crackdown on the Rohingya Muslim community last August pushed nearly 700,000 refugees across the border to Bangladesh.

But the restive state also hosts a simmering insurgency waged by a Rakhine Buddhist rebel group called the Arakan Army, which clashes with Myanmar troops. Unlike the Rohingya Muslims, the Rakhine are recognised by the government as an ethnic minority but are still marginalised in a country historically dominated by the Bamar (Burmese) majority.

Tensions between the community and local authorities shot through since after a police crackdown on an ethnic Rakhine mob left seven dead last month. That violence in Mrauk U Township prompted the Arakan Army’s political wing to warn of a “serious” retaliation for the deaths of the protesters.

Around two weeks later the town’s administrator was found murdered on the side of the road. David Mathieson, an independent analyst based in Myanmar, said Saturday’s Sittwe blasts were more likely tied to ethnic Rakhine tensions than the Rohingya crisis, whose epicentre is further north.

The Arakan Army is “the only armed group operating in central Rakhine that would have the sophistication to do something like this”, he said. Coordinated strikes in an urban area would however mark a “significant escalation” of that rebellion, which typically sees clashes outside the capital. He said it was unlikely that the bombs were linked to the Rohingya – who also have a militant wing – as very few Muslims have mobility in the capital.

Sittwe was once home to a sizeable Rohingya population but most were forced to abandon their homes by deadly communal violence in 2012. Today a small community of Rohingya are confined to a Muslim enclave in the city while more than 100,000 others are still trapped in squalid displacement camps outside the capital. Over the past six months, the vast majority of Myanmar’s 1.1-million Rohingya population have emptied out of northern Rakhine in the mass exodus to Bangladesh.

Refugees said they were fleeing a brutal army assault that saw troops team up with ethnic Rakhine mobs to torch homes, murder civilians and commit mass rape. The UN has accused Myanmar troops of waging an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya. Myanmar authorities deny committing any atrocities and say they were targeting Rohingya rebels who raided police posts in August, killing at least a dozen officers.

The government has blocked UN staff from investigating the conflict zone in northern Rakhine, where thousands of Rohingya are believed to have been killed.