As she tries to gather enough food to feed her 4-year-old kid in a makeshift camp for internally displaced people at a packed monastery in western Myanmar, Khin Mar Cho worries about him.
She and her family were forced to flee their houses when soldiers raided their hamlet in Byine Phyu, Rakhine state. She claimed that they shot her brother and other neighbours and detained all the males.
Khin Mar Cho and other survivors ran away to a monastery located outside of Sittwe, the regional capital. Around 300 people have taken up residence in the camp, where a lone monk is fighting to feed them as a three-year civil war between the military government of Myanmar and armed resistance rages outside. “There are days that we have no food, even though we are hungry,” Khin Mar Cho said. “I cannot feed my kid anything more than meals donated by people because I don’t have a job or income, and all the male family members have been taken away.”
Disturbing accounts from multiple aid workers suggest hunger is being used as a weapon of war in Rakhine state. The junta is preventing aid from reaching desperate people by imposing checkpoints, blocking roads and waterways, and refusing to issue access permits to humanitarian groups, multiple senior United Nations officials, and local and international aid workers in Rakhine told CNN on condition of anonymity because most weren’t authorized to speak.
Rakhine has become a focal point of the conflict, where a powerful ethnic minority armed rebel group, the Arakan Army (AA) — which is accused of human rights abuses — has seized control of at least 10 of the state’s townships since a year-long ceasefire with the military collapsed in November. The aid officials said the junta is trying to “starve” civilians in AA-held territory, using tactics that have repeatedly been described as war crimes and crimes against humanity by UN officials and rights groups. Aid workers say they don’t know the full extent of the suffering due to telecoms and internet blocks coupled with restrictions on access to affected areas.
But they say the crisis is acute. The situation unfolding across the country is desperate, but in Rakhine — which is almost entirely dependent on food aid — the UN says that fewer than a quarter of the 873,000 people who need food assistance have received it. “There is a very real possibility that the most vulnerable… may die if they do not receive support,” a UN report warned in June. It is now August, and the situation has deteriorated.Displaced residents in Rakhine told CNN they are growing increasingly desperate as they and their families struggle to cope with escalating violence and dwindling supplies of food and medicine.
Prices for basic staples, like rice, fuel and cooking oil, have skyrocketed partly due to shortages created by the junta’s control of supply routes north from Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, aid officials said. Requests to transport goods, including food, into the region are being refused, they added. Meanwhile, food production in the state has plummeted, with farmers predicting a 50% drop in this year’s rice harvest, independent Myanmar news outlet The Irrawaddy reported.
Source: Here