The pattern of events in Rakhine State over just a few days at the end of last week and the beginning of this bears only one interpretation. Rakhine Buddhists are waging a systematic campaign against Rohingya Muslims, and by extension against institutions and individuals seeking to provide them with essential assistance. The clear aim is to ensure Rohingyas have no significant representation within the state. While the offensive can be traced across two years of sectarian violence (and has a pre-history stretching even further back in time), it is currently moving into a particularly ugly phase.

On Tuesday, Francis Wade posted an article on Asian Correspondent detailing the full extent of anti-INGO attacks in Sittwe in the middle of last week. More than 30 properties were attacked and seven warehouses were destroyed. Aid delivery infrastructure ranging from computers to vehicles to boats was wrecked. All foreign and non-Rakhine aid agency workers were evacuated. Rakhine aid agency staffers (“betrayers”) were subjected to open intimidation and warned by locals not to participate in humanitarian work. A small contingent of remaining UN workers was placed under heavy guard as soldiers turned the state capital into a militarized zone.

By the start of this week, it had also become apparent that the nationwide census launched on Sunday will not count Rohingyas. Bowing to intense and aggressive pressure from Rakhine Buddhists, and at the same time reneging on firm commitments previously made to UNFPA, the Myanmar government has instructed enumerators simply to pass on if they encounter a household claiming this ethnicity. In Monday’s Irrawaddy, presidential spokesman Ye Htut was quoted in these terms: “If we ask a family about their ethnicity and they say Rohingya, we will not carry out, [or] accept it.” Rohingyas thus have no place in the most important national documentation exercise conducted in recent decades.

One consequence is that aid agencies are warning of an unfolding humanitarian disaster as food and other supplies dwindle across the state, and access to basic healthcare is cut. Most exposed are undoubtedly some 800,000 Rohingyas living in IDP camps hosting at least 140,000 people, in the cordoned-off Aung Mingalar Muslim quarter in Sittwe, and in isolated towns and villages. The more frightening prospect that the ground is being prepared for large-scale ethnic cleansing or even genocide is also being spoken out loud (for instance by former US congressman Tom Andrews from advocacy group United to End Genocide), and certainly cannot be discounted.

The UN is now the indispensable institution in Rakhine State. On Sunday, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon phoned President Thein Sein to urge him to guarantee the safety of international aid workers in the state, and there have since been follow-up meetings. However, with almost all such workers already absent, and those who are left under close military supervision, events are in real danger of spiraling out of control. In these circumstances, the UN needs to look beyond mere assurances from the Myanmar government. It also needs substantially to boost its physical engagement in sensitive areas both to maintain aid supplies, and to save lives. It may need formally to consider the situation in Myanmar at the Security Council, Human Rights Council, or General Assembly.

To sustain its charge of “systemic failure” in UN operations at the end of the Sri Lankan civil war, the 2012 Petrie Report argued (in paragraph 16) that “The relocation of international staff out of the conflict zone made it much harder for the UN to deliver humanitarian assistance to the civilian population, to monitor the situation and to ‘protect by presence'”. Protecting by presence is an urgent requirement in Rakhine State.