Delegates at the conference, the first of its kind in Rakhine since 1947, said residents of the state capital, Sittwe, had been made to feel like scapegoats after riots there in late March during which offices and warehouses used by UN agencies and humanitarian organisations were ransacked and their staff evacuated.

“If the government had chosen to take control of the situation in Sittwe, it need not have got so out of hand,” U Aung Maung Oo, director of the Rakhine Civil Rights and Development Organisation, told the conference on April 29.

“I think the government manipulated the situation because it coincided with the national census,” U Aung Maung Oo said.

Another participant at the conference, U Tun Aung Thein, accused aid agencies of helping “immigrants” to acquire farmland in the Buthidaung-Maungdaw area in northern Rakhine.

“The UN has provided seeds as well as agricultural subsidies to those immigrants and then made arrangements to control and monopolise 90 percent of the yield,” U Tun AungThein said.

“They have intentionally created divisions; the UNHCR and the government are responsible for this situation,” he said.

Conference participants said peace and stability in Rakhine was deteriorating and called on the state’s leaders to find their own solutions to its deep-seated problems.

“Daw Aung San Su Kyi has said the problems in Rakhine stem from a lack of adherence to the ‘rule of law’. President TheinSein said that poverty is the cause. The UN agencies say it is an issue of human rights violations but what do the people of Rakhine say? They must speak out,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Kyaw Han of the Arakan Army, which was established in Kachin State in 2008 and operates in areas controlled by the Kachin Independence Army.

Many conference delegates proposed that a resolution to the tensions in the state would require the implementation of policies based on the 1982