Myanmar pledged on Wednesday "no restrictions" on journalists visiting the troubled state of Rakhine this week, in the first official trip to include foreign reporters to mostly Rohingya Muslim villages affected by violence since October.
18 Myanmar nationals and foreigners representing international media arrived in the state capital of Sittwe on Wednesday ahead of a government-escorted visit to the northern areas of Buthidaung and Maungdaw, where most residents are stateless Rohingyas.
"There are no restrictions regarding the areas that you can report from," said Thet Swe, a director at the Ministry of Information's News and Periodicals Enterprise. "We didn't arrange any 'for show' places for news reporting," he said.
Last year, Myanmar's army unleashed a crackdown in the area after Rohingya militants attacked posts near the Bangladesh border, killing nine police officers.
Some 75,000 people fled across the nearby border to Bangladesh, according to the United Nations, which has documented allegations of gang rape, torture, arson and killings by security forces.
Myanmar's government, led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has denied most of the allegations, and has denied entry to a UN fact-finding mission tasked with looking into the allegations.
The government has blocked independent journalists and human rights monitors from going to the area in the far north of the state for the past nine months.
Suu Kyi has said a UN fact-finding mission would only heighten tension in the region. Many in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, see the Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
Myanmar officials say a domestic investigation, led by Vice President Myint Swe, a former lieutenant general in the army and a commission headed for former UN chief Kofi Annan, which is not mandated to investigate human rights abuses - are the appropriate ways to address problems in Rakhine State.
