Junta police, municipal personnel demolish beachside eateries in Sittwe

By Admin 05 Oct 2023

DMG Newsroom
5 October 2023, Sittwe

More than 100 regime police personnel and municipal staffers on Thursday bulldozed the eateries along the main stretch of beach in the Arakan State capital Sittwe.

“They came at around 4 a.m. and seized the phones of eatery owners. Some eatery owners who were sleeping in their shops could not even enter their shops,” said the owner of an eatery that was demolished.

A DMG reporter at the scene on Thursday saw more than 100 junta police officers providing security at three locations on the roads leading to the beach.

The township municipal committee on August 13 ordered eatery owners to vacate, saying they were squatting on the beach by building permanent structures there without permission. A notice delivered to the alleged squatters warned that their shops would be bulldozed if they failed to remove them by an August 26 deadline, and that legal action would be taken against noncompliant shop owners.

The allegedly squatting eatery owners, however, claim that their shops were opened at the urging of former Arakan State chief minister U Maung Maung Oo of the previous U Thein Sein government, who had hoped that such eateries would attract more visitors to the beach.
 
The affected shop owners on August 14 submitted a petition addressed to junta-appointed Arakan State chief minister U Htein Lin, and the chief of the Myanmar military’s Western Command, Major-General Htin Latt Oo.

The eatery owners asked the municipality to arrange an alternative location for them as having to remove their shops from the beach would deal a major, potentially debilitating blow to their bottom lines.

Department heads in response summoned eatery owners to the state municipal office on September 21, and reportedly told them that only those parts of shops encroaching on the boundaries of public roads would be demolished.

“After we submitted the petition, they told us that only parts of shops would be removed as necessary to broaden the road. We thought it was OK, and we were put at ease,” said a shop owner. “Then they appeared suddenly, and started destroying everything.”