Myanmar invites MSF back to crisis-gripped Rakhine

The Ministry of Health has requested MSF to return to the strife-torn state, where hundreds of thousands of people have been left with limited access to healthcare after authorities told the group to leave in late February.

“As human beings we all commit errors and the errors usually lie on both sides,” President’s Office Minister Soe Thein told a press conference.

Listing the 24 international aid groups operating in Rakhine, he said “we invite all to join hands with us... especially MSF”.

The minister said that Myanmar would guarantee the safety of MSF’s staff in Rakhine, where it faced protests against its activities from ethnic Rakhine Buddhists who accused it of giving preferential treatment to stateless Rohingya Muslims.

But the government has yet to specify whether the group will be able to fully resume its work in the region. 

MSF, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 and has operated in Myanmar for 22 years, welcomed the move in a statement saying it hoped to expand “life-saving” care amid “a humanitarian crisis”.

Some 140,000 people, mainly Muslims calling themselves “Rohingyas”, are trapped in miserable camps in the state following violence between Buddhists and Muslims in 2012 that left around 200 dead.

The United Nation’s assistant secretary general Kyung-Wha Kang in June raised concerns about “appalling conditions” in the camps.

MSF provided primary healthcare services in several remote areas near the border with Bangladesh where Rohingya communities have long lived under severe restriction of movement and are largely unable to access state facilities.

In March Rakhine extremists attacked warehouses and property of other international groups in the state capital Sittwe, causing most humanitarian organisations to pull their staff from the region for a few weeks.

The UN estimates that 70 per cent of these workers have now returned, but this does not include the approximately 500 MSF staff who had been working in the state.