Visiting Myanmar’s Threatened Rohingyas | Robert Mackey (New York Times)

Despite official obstacles barring most observers and aid workers from western Myanmar, two months after dozens were killed in sectarian clashes and tens of thousands of Muslims were forced from their homes into “resettlement camps,” a television crew from Britain’s Channel 4 News managed to report from the region on Tuesday.

As my colleague Thomas Fuller reported in June, Myanmar declared a state of emergency that month after violence between the Buddhist majority and a minority Muslim population known as Rohingyas swept Rakhine State, along the border with Bangladesh. The rape and murder of a Buddhist woman in May led to revenge attacks on the Rohingyas, who were blamed for the crime. In the following weeks, up to 60,000 Rohingyas were driven from their homes and a whole section of the regional capital Sittwe was burned to the ground.

The British crew managed to film at a camp for displaced Rohingyas outside Sittwe, and also interviewed Buddhists in the town who claimed, implausibly, that the Muslims had set their own homes on fire. The Buddhists also complained to the reporters that the United Nations and international aid groups are biased in favor of the Muslims.

A team from the UK's Channel 4 News gained access to Sittwe, which has been off limits to reporters for months.

They filmed an area once home to 10,000 that had been reduced to rubble.

Days of violence in Rakhine state began in late May when a Buddhist woman was raped and murdered by three Muslims. A mob later killed 10 Muslims.

Sectarian clashes spread across the state, with houses of both Buddhists and Muslims being burnt down.

Most Rohingya Muslims have been moved out of Sittwe into temporary camp.The Burmese government declared a state of emergency following the outbreak of violence and has since prevented foreign media from visiting the region

However, the Channel 4 News team filmed the area of Sittwe known as Narzi, which it reported was once home to an estimated 10,000.

Local Rakhine Buddhists were picking through the debris of the houses, which had once been the Rohingya area of the city.

One man told reporters that the Muslims had set fire to their own homes in an attempt to burn down the whole community.

The UNHCR has said that about 80,000 people have been displaced in and around the Sittwe and Maungdaw by the violence.

UN human rights chief Navi Pillay has said that forces sent to quash the unrest were reported to be targeting Muslims.She has called for an independent investigation.There is long-standing tension between Rakhine people, who are Buddhist and make up the majority of the state's population, and Muslims.

According to Moshahida Sultana Ritu, an economist at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh who wrote a New York Times opinion piece on the crisis in July, fears of an influx of refugees “have aroused anti-Rohingya sentiment among some Bangladeshis, and initially Bangladesh’s government tried to force the refugees back without assisting them.”

Ms. Sultana Ritu also said Myanmar’s government used its security forces “to burn houses, kill men and evict Rohingyas from their villages.” The attack on the Rohingyas, the professor said, “is not sectarian violence; it is state-supported ethnic cleansing.”

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