The Arakan Liberation Party (ALP) submitted evidence of alleged Burma Army human rights violations following threats to arrest the ALP information officer after the allegations were made in an ALP statement on 24 April.
The ALP statement accused the Burma Army of forcibly recruiting local residents as porters, driving the local residents out of their villages, bringing them onto battlefields and executing prisoners of war.
The Arakan State Border Affairs and Security Minister Colonel Htain Linn threatened the ALP Information Officer, Khaing Myo Tun, with arrest when he summoned him and Major Khaing Ye Linn, the ALP Kyauk Taw Relations Officer to the government offices on 27 April.
According to Khaing Myo Tun, Col. Htain Linn told him: “The ALP Information Department released [the statement] without strong evidence. Can you show strong evidence? Give me the evidence. If you don’t have it, you can be arrested.”
The colonel also told him that if the ALP had credible evidence of human rights violations action would be taken against those responsible for the violations.
The ALP submitted their evidence on 1 May, but has not yet heard anything back.
Khaing Myo Tu said to Narinjara News on 2 May: “We submitted [the evidence] about the human rights violations of the Burma Army on 1 May. They sent someone to pick them up from my home. This evidences included 20 cases of [people forcibly recruited as] porters, some of whom still have not returned home. Four of them have been beaten and tortured. No responses have been made up until today,”
The ALP is the political wing of the Arakan Liberation Army (ALA). It signed a state-level ceasefire with the Burmese government in 2014 and is one of the eight ethnic armed groups that signed the nationwide ceasefire agreement (NCA) in 2015.
Translated by Thida Linn
Edited in English by Mark Inkey for BNI
