Three years ago, the Myanmar army burned the village of Kan Kiya - one of the villages of the Rohingya Muslim minority - to its last, and used bulldozers to demolish all that was left of it. The United Nations says that the government last year erased the name of the village from official maps and described the matter as routine.

The village of Kan Kiya - 5 kilometers from the Naf River that marks the border between the state of Arakan in northwestern Myanmar and Bangladesh - was home to hundreds of Rohingya, before the army pushed 730,000 of this minority to leave the country in the summer of 2017. The United Nations claimed "a typical example of ethnic cleansing," while Myanmar authorities said they were carrying out cleansing operations targeting armed militants.

And satellite images on "Google Earth" and old photos obtained by Reuters from the company "Planet Labs" show that dozens of government and military buildings have now risen in the place where the village of Kan Kiya was located, and among these buildings is a large police station surrounded by a fence.

The village has no presence on Google Maps due to its small size, and it is located in a remote area that the authorities prevent foreigners from visiting.

The site of the destroyed village has become nameless on maps issued by the United Nations cartographic unit in Myanmar, and the village has been reclassified as part of the nearby city of Maungdaw, and the United Nations says its maps are derived from maps of the Myanmar government.

12 villages

Satellite images of villages captured by Human Rights Watch and analyzed by Human Rights Watch show that Kan Kiya is one of nearly 400 villages destroyed by the Myanmar army 3 years ago, and it is also one of at least 12 villages whose names have been erased from the maps.

Maps taken by Planet Labs - a private company in San Francisco founded by former NASA scientists, and Google Earth Maps - show that Myanmar began building on the sites of at least 12 destroyed villages, after its residents fled them in 2017. .

Commenting on the deletion of the village's name, Muhammad Rafiq - a Rohingya leader and former head of a village near Kan Kiya, who now lives in a refugee camp in Bangladesh - says, "Their goal is not to return," referring to the Myanmar authorities.

On the other hand, the Ministry of Social Affairs, which oversees reconstruction activities in Rakhine State, refrained from responding to Reuters' questions regarding the erasure of the names of villages, or about the government's policy regarding the return of the Rohingya to their villages, and the ministry referred inquiries to the public administration that did not respond.

Muhammad Rafiq: Erasing the names of the Rohingya villages after their displacement aims not to return to their homes (Reuters)

Change maps

The United Nations cartography unit has issued at least 3 maps since the beginning of this year, showing the disappearance of the names of a number of Rohingya villages, or the authorities in Myanmar have reclassified them.

The United Nations said that it removed some maps of the state of Arakan from its website last June, and began a study to assess the impact of government policies on villagers and the return of refugees, after the "Arakan Rohingya National" - a human rights organization based in Britain - submitted a complaint to the nations. The United Nations regarding erasing the names of villages.

The former UN envoy to Myanmar in the field of human rights, Yanji Lee, believes that the government is deliberately placing obstacles to the return of refugees to places that have no names, and there is no evidence that they were living in them. "This is a way to eliminate their basic identity completely," she added.

However, the spokesman for the United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said earlier that the reclassification of some Arakan villages is a "routine administrative procedure," adding that the United Nations cartography unit "uses the official government names of places in order to avoid confusion among aid workers." And government officials in the field. "

However, a spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General said that changing the legal status of villages may become an additional obstacle to the complexities faced by the refugees who are required to return to their former homes.