Chapter 5. June 2012: Akyab/Sittwe Burns
Section 1. Violence Reaches Akyab/Sittwe
While northern Arakan was passing through the violence and security crisis described in the previous chapters, a second major centre of destruction was developing in Akyab, officially known as Sittwe, the capital of Arakan State. The city was fundamentally different from the rural and border geography of Maungdaw and Buthidaung. Akyab had long contained substantial Muslim and Buddhist populations living in adjoining neighbourhoods and participating in the commercial life of the capital. Rohingya and other Muslims owned homes, shops and businesses and formed an important part of the city's markets and economy. The violence of June 2012 would profoundly alter that urban landscape.
By 10 June, tension and violence had reached the capital. Human Rights Watch documented attacks by members of both Muslim and Rakhine communities during the initial period, including killings and the burning of homes and property. Residents armed themselves with rudimentary weapons as fear spread through adjoining neighbourhoods. The city's mixed geography meant that fires and attacks could rapidly threaten civilians from both communities. Rakhine families as well as Rohingya and other Muslim families suffered deaths, injuries, destroyed property and displacement during these days. This early reciprocal violence forms part of the record, but it does not by itself explain what subsequently happened to Akyab's Muslim population.
Rohingya testimony collected by Human Rights Watch describes killings occurring in the presence of police. One 65-year-old Rohingya witness reported that his two brothers-in-law were stabbed to death at the junction of Htee Twan Road and Aung Than Road on 10 June. According to his testimony, police were nearby but did not intervene. Such accounts contributed to a growing conviction among Rohingya residents that the authorities could not be relied upon to protect them. Human Rights Watch also interviewed Rakhine residents who believed that the authorities had failed to protect civilians. The failure of protection therefore affected both communities during the initial disorder, even though subsequent allegations concerning direct security-force violence would fall particularly heavily on the Rohingya.
The most consequential target was becoming Narzi quarter, known locally among Muslims as a major centre of Muslim life in Akyab. Human Rights Watch estimated that approximately 10,000 Muslims, predominantly Rohingya, lived there alongside a much smaller Rakhine population. Narzi was not merely a residential settlement. It was described as the city's largest and economically most important Muslim neighbourhood. Its houses, shops, religious buildings and commercial networks represented generations of Muslim presence in the capital. Destroying Narzi would therefore mean far more than burning individual houses: it would remove one of the principal physical centres of Rohingya and Muslim life from Akyab.
Later testimony indicates that Narzi was already under severe threat by 11 June. Rohingya survivors recalled armed groups approaching Muslim areas with machetes, iron weapons and other arms while houses were set on fire. One Rohingya who had been a teenager in Narzi in 2012 later recalled that attackers set homes alight and attacked people as they attempted to escape the burning neighbourhood. Human Rights Watch subsequently documented reports that Rakhine villagers from outside central Akyab were brought toward Muslim areas during the violence. These accounts are significant because they suggest that the destruction cannot be understood solely as spontaneous fighting between immediate neighbours.
Contemporary Rohingya reporting portrayed the situation still more starkly. Kaladan Press Network reported that thousands of Rohingya had already been displaced in Akyab by 10 June and described Muslim residents as facing attacks and destruction while security forces failed to provide equal protection. Such reporting was produced during an exceptionally confused period and individual claims require careful attribution. Nevertheless, its central picture—that large numbers of Rohingya were becoming homeless in Akyab while the violence was still unfolding—is consistent with the displacement subsequently documented by international human-rights organisations.
Fear of fire became particularly acute because Muslim and Rakhine neighbourhoods were often situated close to one another. Human Rights Watch recorded testimony from a Rakhine man who acknowledged participating in discussions about burning Muslim areas considered important centres of the Rohingya population. He specifically identified Bhumi, near Sittwe University, and Narzi among the locations regarded as Muslim strongholds. His account also described deliberate consideration of where houses could be burned without the fire spreading into nearby Rakhine property. This testimony is important because it provides evidence from a Rakhine participant himself that at least some attacks involved discussion and selection of Muslim areas rather than being entirely uncontrolled outbreaks of fire.
Rohingya residents were simultaneously confronting the problem of escape. Remaining inside a threatened quarter exposed families to fire and armed attackers, while leaving could expose them on roads or in neighbouring areas. Families became separated as people sought safer locations. Some moved toward Muslim-majority areas on the outskirts of the city; others eventually joined the growing displaced population outside central Akyab. The flight that began during these days would later become far more than temporary evacuation. Many Rohingya would never be permitted to return to the neighbourhoods from which they had fled.
The presence of the army eventually contributed to suppressing open violence in parts of Akyab, but this did not prevent the city's largest Muslim neighbourhood from being devastated. The crucial moment came on 12 June. Human Rights Watch documented that Rakhine mobs attacked Narzi while police and the paramilitary Lon Htein opened fire with live ammunition on Rohingya. Rohingya residents attempting to protect their homes or extinguish fires therefore faced danger not only from the advancing attackers but, according to multiple testimonies, from the security forces themselves.
What followed on 12 June would become one of the defining episodes of the entire first wave of the 2012 violence: the destruction of Narzi quarter and the displacement of thousands of its Rohingya and Muslim inhabitants.
Section 2. 12 June: The Burning and Destruction of Narzi
On 12 June 2012, Narzi became the centre of one of the most consequential episodes of the June violence in Akyab/Sittwe. What had been the city's largest Muslim neighbourhood was subjected to extensive burning, armed attacks and shootings that drove thousands of residents from their homes. Human Rights Watch's subsequent investigation concluded that the destruction of Narzi occurred while state security forces were present and documented testimony alleging that police and Lon Htein fired on Rohingya as Rakhine mobs advanced into the area. By the end of the destruction, a neighbourhood that had housed approximately 10,000 Muslims, predominantly Rohingya, had been devastated.
Narzi's significance made its destruction particularly consequential. It was not an isolated settlement on the outskirts of Akyab but a major Muslim residential and commercial quarter within the capital. Rohingya and other Muslim families had homes, shops and community institutions there, and the neighbourhood represented an established Muslim presence within the economic geography of the city. Its destruction therefore removed not merely houses but much of the physical foundation upon which thousands of Muslim residents had built their lives.
According to testimony collected by Human Rights Watch, groups of Rakhine attackers entered or approached Narzi while fires spread through the quarter. Witnesses described attackers carrying machetes, swords, sticks and other weapons. Rohingya residents attempted to defend their homes and extinguish fires, while families sought routes through which women, children and elderly residents could escape. The density of the neighbourhood and the rapid spread of fire made evacuation extremely dangerous. Once houses began burning in succession, families could be forced from one street only to encounter violence or further fires elsewhere.
The role of the security forces was one of the most serious elements documented by subsequent investigations. Human Rights Watch reported testimony that police and Lon Htein personnel fired live ammunition at Rohingya in Narzi on 12 June. One Rohingya witness told the organisation that security personnel shot toward Rohingya residents while Rakhine attackers were burning houses. Another described Rohingya being fired upon as they attempted to protect their neighbourhood. The precise conduct of individual units and officers varied, and evidence does not establish that every member of the security forces behaved identically. Nevertheless, the repeated testimony concerning shootings was sufficiently consistent for Human Rights Watch to identify security-force involvement as an important component of the abuses committed against Rohingya during the June violence.
For Rohingya survivors, this fundamentally altered the nature of their predicament. If they remained in Narzi, they faced fire and armed attackers; if they attempted to resist the destruction, they risked being shot; and if they fled, they could lose their homes and possessions with no assurance that they would ever be permitted to return. The institutions that should have separated attackers from civilians were therefore, according to multiple witnesses, themselves perceived as a source of danger.
Rakhine property was also destroyed during the fighting. Narzi contained a smaller Rakhine population, and Human Rights Watch documented the destruction of both Muslim and Rakhine homes in the wider June violence. Rakhine neighbourhoods elsewhere in Akyab also suffered arson and attacks by Muslims. These losses form part of the historical record and should not be excluded. Yet the physical destruction of Narzi was distinctive in both its concentration and its long-term consequence: the overwhelming majority of its population was Muslim, and the destruction effectively eliminated one of the principal Muslim quarters of the capital.
The scale of destruction was subsequently visible from space. Human Rights Watch commissioned analysis of satellite imagery covering Akyab/Sittwe and other affected areas. Its assessment identified extensive destruction in the city and found approximately 2,558 destroyed structures in Sittwe across the areas examined following the June violence. Narzi was among the most severely affected locations. Satellite images showed large contiguous areas where dense housing had existed before the violence and where structures had disappeared after the fires. This evidence is particularly important because access for independent observers during the violence had been heavily constrained. The satellite record provided physical confirmation that the destruction was not limited to a handful of buildings or isolated fires.
The devastation also had a cultural and religious dimension. Muslim residential areas contained mosques, religious schools and other community institutions alongside homes and businesses. Contemporary Rohingya accounts reported the destruction and damage of Muslim religious property during the wider violence. The full inventory of religious buildings destroyed across Arakan requires separate assessment, but the disappearance of entire Muslim residential zones inevitably damaged the institutional as well as residential foundations of those communities.
For families escaping Narzi, material loss could be almost total. Many fled without being able to collect documents, money, clothing or household possessions. Houses and businesses represented accumulated family wealth in a population already subjected to extensive economic and citizenship restrictions. Once those structures burned, families did not merely become temporarily homeless; they lost property, commercial assets and evidence of established residence within the city. Subsequent restrictions on return would make these losses increasingly permanent.
Survivor testimony describes the flight as chaotic. Families became separated as crowds moved away from burning streets. Parents attempted to move children and elderly relatives to safety while smoke and fire reduced visibility. Some Rohingya escaped toward other Muslim areas; many ultimately moved toward locations outside the central city where displaced Muslims were gathering. The number of people uprooted increased rapidly as neighbourhood after neighbourhood became unsafe.
The destruction also altered relations between communities that had previously lived within the same urban space. Before June 2012, Akyab contained mixed or adjoining Muslim and Rakhine areas linked through markets, employment, transport and everyday commerce. The burning of Narzi physically severed part of that shared geography. Empty and destroyed zones began replacing neighbourhoods where Muslim families had lived within the city.
This transformation is central to understanding why the destruction of Narzi cannot be viewed only as another episode of arson during several days of communal violence. The fires created a physical reality that would later be reinforced by administrative restrictions: thousands of Muslim residents had been removed from a strategically important urban neighbourhood, and returning to their former homes would become extraordinarily difficult or impossible.
Human Rights Watch later argued that the authorities had possessed the capacity to intervene more effectively and that state forces failed to prevent serious abuses. Rohingya testimony went further, alleging active participation by elements of the security forces in shootings and assistance to attackers. The broader question of how responsibility should be apportioned among security forces, local authorities, nationalist actors and political organizations is reserved for later chapters of this series. For the chronology of 12 June, what can already be established is that Narzi was devastated in the presence of substantial state security forces and that credible testimony documented security personnel firing on Rohingya during the destruction.
By the time the fires subsided, the physical map of Akyab had begun to change. Narzi's destruction displaced thousands of Rohingya and other Muslims from an area that had been one of the centres of their social and economic life. The crucial question was no longer simply where survivors could shelter during the violence. It was whether they would ever be allowed to return.
The answer that emerged in the weeks and months that followed would transform Akyab permanently. Temporary flight hardened into displacement, displacement developed into segregation, and large sections of the Muslim population were progressively removed from the ordinary social and economic life of the capital.
Section 3. Flight, Displacement and the Transformation of Akyab/Sittwe
The burning of Narzi and other affected areas did not end when the fires subsided. Its most enduring immediate consequence was the removal of thousands of Rohingya and other Muslims from neighbourhoods in which they had lived, worked and traded. Families who fled burning houses initially sought safety wherever it could be found—among relatives, in surviving Muslim areas, in temporary gathering places and eventually in displacement sites outside the centre of Akyab. What began as flight from immediate physical danger was rapidly developing into a fundamental reordering of the city's population.
Human Rights Watch found that by the aftermath of the June violence, most Muslims had either fled or been forcibly relocated from central Akyab. Areas that before June had contained substantial Muslim populations were emptied or destroyed, while surviving Muslims became increasingly concentrated in a smaller number of locations. This was not merely a change in residential patterns produced by families voluntarily choosing to move. Homes had been burned, neighbourhoods destroyed and residents displaced under conditions of violence. Restrictions imposed after the violence then made return increasingly difficult.
The destruction of Narzi was particularly important to this transformation because of the neighbourhood's size and economic significance. Approximately 10,000 Muslims, predominantly Rohingya, had lived there before its destruction according to Human Rights Watch. Once the quarter was devastated, thousands of residents lost not only shelter but their physical place within the city. Their shops, houses, community networks and proximity to Akyab's commercial life disappeared with the neighbourhood. The destruction therefore created the physical conditions for a more segregated capital.
The loss of property was profound. Rohingya families fleeing burning neighbourhoods frequently had little opportunity to remove possessions. Household goods, savings, business stocks and personal documents could disappear together with the houses in which they were kept. For shopkeepers and traders, destruction meant the simultaneous loss of home and livelihood. For families whose ability to acquire property and travel had already been constrained by discriminatory state policies, rebuilding elsewhere was especially difficult.
Flight also separated families. People escaped in different directions as fires spread and routes became unsafe. Some family members did not immediately know whether relatives had been killed, detained, displaced elsewhere or had reached another Muslim neighbourhood. Reports of missing people therefore formed part of the uncertainty surrounding the June violence. The problem of establishing the overall number killed and missing will be examined separately in Chapter 7 rather than assigning an unsupported definitive figure here.
Rakhine civilians had also been displaced during the June violence, and Rakhine homes and businesses were among those destroyed. The suffering of these families forms part of the record of Akyab's upheaval. Yet the post-violence trajectory of the Muslim population became markedly different. Rather than returning to a restored mixed urban environment, Rohingya and other Muslims increasingly found themselves separated from the city's predominantly Rakhine population and prevented from freely resuming their former lives.
The transformation was visible in the physical landscape. Satellite imagery examined by Human Rights Watch identified extensive destruction across Akyab, including approximately 2,558 destroyed structures in the areas assessed after the June violence. In places such as Narzi, dense residential areas visible before the violence had largely disappeared. The resulting empty or devastated spaces represented more than evidence of fire. They recorded the disappearance of communities from sections of the capital.
The economic consequences extended beyond the owners of destroyed houses. Before 2012, Rohingya and other Muslims participated in markets, trading networks, transport and other sectors of Akyab's economy. Removing large numbers of Muslims from central neighbourhoods disrupted those relationships. People who had previously travelled through the city for employment or commerce increasingly faced restrictions preventing ordinary movement. Economic separation therefore accompanied residential separation.
The terminology used to describe this transformation matters. In the immediate aftermath, authorities and humanitarian agencies frequently described the affected population as internally displaced persons. That description accurately reflected the fact that people had been forced from their homes but remained inside Myanmar. From the Rohingya perspective, however, displacement increasingly appeared less temporary as return to destroyed neighbourhoods failed to occur and restrictions hardened around the displaced population.
Human Rights Watch later described the authorities as maintaining policies that segregated displaced Muslims from the Buddhist population. International humanitarian organisations confronted a situation in which emergency shelter and assistance were necessary because people had lost their homes, while the political and security environment prevented many of those same people from simply returning to where they had lived. Humanitarian relief could keep displaced families alive, but it could not restore the neighbourhoods, property rights or freedom of movement they had lost.
The emerging separation was particularly significant because Akyab was the capital of Arakan State. Excluding Rohingya and other Muslims from much of the capital had consequences beyond residential geography. Access to hospitals, markets, education, government offices and economic opportunities was concentrated in the city. Removing a population from the urban centre therefore also restricted its access to institutions and services essential to ordinary civic life.
This process should not be projected backward to suggest that the entire system of long-term segregation was fully established during the few days of June violence itself. The permanent camp structure, increasingly severe movement restrictions and institutionalization of separation developed over subsequent months and years. Those developments require their own examination and are treated in Chapter 12 — Camps, Segregation and the Destruction of Rohingya Freedom After 2012. What June created was the physical and demographic foundation upon which that system could subsequently be built.
The transformation of Akyab also demonstrates why the historical significance of the 2012 violence cannot be measured solely by counting deaths. A community can suffer a profound historical rupture even when the exact number of people killed remains disputed. The destruction of homes, removal of populations, loss of property, destruction of commercial networks and prevention of return can permanently reshape a society. In Akyab, June 2012 accomplished precisely such a transformation.
Before the violence, Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists had lived within the same capital, although relations were shaped by longstanding political tension and discrimination. After the destruction, increasingly distinct zones emerged. Large numbers of Muslims who had previously lived within the urban fabric were displaced toward areas outside the central city, while central Akyab became overwhelmingly Rakhine Buddhist. The physical separation that followed would increasingly be enforced through restrictions on movement rather than merely maintained by fear between communities.
For Rohingya survivors, this meant that the burning of their neighbourhoods did not constitute a temporary interruption after which ordinary life resumed. The city to which they might have expected to return was being reorganized without them. Houses could be destroyed in a matter of hours, but the consequences of their destruction were reinforced by decisions governing movement, security and return long after the flames had disappeared.
The June violence therefore transformed Akyab on two interconnected levels. First came the immediate human catastrophe: killings, injuries, burning, flight and loss of property affecting both Muslim and Rakhine civilians. Second came a deeper demographic transformation in which much of the Rohingya and Muslim population was removed from central areas and increasingly confined outside the ordinary social and economic life of the capital.
For the Rohingya historical record, the destruction of Narzi stands at the centre of that transformation. A major Muslim neighbourhood containing thousands of residents disappeared from the urban landscape, and its population was scattered into displacement. The empty space left behind symbolized a wider change occurring across Akyab: violence had begun to produce physical separation, and physical separation was beginning to become institutionalized segregation.
The events of Akyab also raised a question that cannot be answered adequately by examining civilian mobs alone. Police, Lon Htein, NaSaKa, the Tatmadaw and local authorities occupied different positions during the June crisis, and evidence concerning their conduct is not identical. Some security personnel were accused of shooting or abusing Rohingya; others intervened in circumstances that protected civilians. Understanding those distinctions is necessary before assessing state responsibility.
Continue reading → Part 13, Chapter 6 — Security Forces During the June Violence