Myanmar deploys more troops on border

Tensions escalated further on Friday morning as fresh Myanmar troops arrived on the Tumbru border with Bangladesh, report agencies and our correspondents.
Some BGB officials said at least 10 vehicles carrying Myanmar soldiers arrived at Tumbru carrying heavy arms and ammunition.
Meanwhile, a flag meeting between the Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) and the Border Guard Police (BGP) of Myanmar was held in Tumbru area on the Bangladesh side on Friday afternoon.
Myanmar at the flag meeting said the build-up of troops along the troubled frontier where Bangladesh shelters Rohingya refugees from the neighbouring country was done for the sake of security as Dhaka called for an immediate retreat to lower tensions.
The increased security presence this week has centred around a strip of "no man's land" between the two countries where some 6,000 Rohingya sought shelter after fleeing a brutal Myanmar army crackdown last August.
The military campaign drove some 700,000 Rohingya across the border in total, with most travelling on to sprawling refugee settlements in Bangladesh's southeastern border district of Cox's Bazar.
The UN has accused Myanmar of waging an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Muslim minority.
Yet Myanmar has staunchly defended the crackdown as an effort to snuff out Rohingya militants who raided police posts last year.
The 34th battalion Commanding Officer of BGB Lt Col Monzurul Hasan Khan led the seven-member Bangladesh team and the Commanding officer of BGP in Mongdaw area Lt Col Saw Zayar Lew led the six-member Myanmar team during the flag meeting.
After the one hour-long meeting Bangladesh team leader Lt Col Monzurul Hasan Khan told reporters that BGP officials said in the meeting that they deployed additional army personnel along the Tumbru border on Thursday only for the sake of security of their country. They said their army or BGP men never crossed no-man's land near the Bangladesh border.
The Myanmar officials again assured Bangladesh at the flag meeting that they would take back trapped Rohingya from the Konar Para Zero Line area any time, Monzurul Hasan Khan said. BGP officials also said that they would inform the BGB authority before firing in the border area in future.
Deployment of additional force on the border is a routine work of BGP, the Myanmar team also said at the flag meeting.
"We discussed various border issues in the meeting and good results may come soon", the Bangladesh team leader said. The flag meeting started at 3:30 pm and ended at around 4:40 pm.
Lt Col Monzurul Hasan Khan said that the BGB installed three close-circuit television cameras (CCTV) on the Tumbru border and in Konar Para area of Ghundhum. There were no CCTV cameras on the border.
On the other hand, Rohingya leaders Dil Mohammad, Arif Ahmed and Jasim Uddin told reporters that Myanmar army and BGP men were continuously threatening the trapped people to leave Konarpara no-man's land.
The recent spike in security along the border is a response to new intelligence about the movement of Rohingya militants, said Myanmar government spokesman Zaw Htay.
"We acted this way based on the information we got regarding terrorism, especially the ARSA movement," he told AFP, using an acronym for the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, a militant group, and declining to elaborate further.
"It was not aimed at antagonising Bangladesh," he added.
On Thursday Bangladesh's foreign ministry said it summoned Myanmar's envoy to call for an "immediate pullback of Myanmar security forces along with military assets from the area."
On Thursday some 100 Myanmar soldiers arrived near the refugee camp in heavy military vehicles, according to Bangladesh border guards and Rohingya.
Washington is watching "carefully" the situation on the Bangladesh-Myanmar border after Burma's deployment of additional troops on their side.
"I can just tell you that we're watching that carefully. I can certainly understand that would be a concern of the government of Bangladesh, but we're watching that one closely," Department of State's Spokesperson Heather Nauert said, replying to a query at the regular briefing in Washington on Thursday.
Around 17,000 Rohingyas have been living in no man's land between the countries, including nearly 7,000 in Tambru, since Myanmar launched a military operation dubbed "ethnic cleansing" in the Rakhine State on Aug 25 last year.
"We also heard a hullabaloo in the Rohingya camp on the zero line at the time [firing]. No one was injured," BGB 34 Battalion Commander Lt Col Manjurul Hasan said. Earlier on Thursday night Myanmar soldiers fired shots in the air hours after Dhaka protested against deployment of additional troops.
Myanmar's Border Guard Police or BGP personnel fired two shots in the air on their side of the Tambru border at Naikkhyangchharhi in Bandarban around 8:00 pm on Thursday, a Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) official said.