Is genocide unfolding in
Myanmar?
By Matthew Smith
Four years ago, I was in
Myanmar’s Rakhine State soon after deadly violence erupted between ethnic
Rakhine Buddhists and stateless Rohingya Muslims. It was a horrendous scene.
And it’s happening again.
Back then, Buddhist civilians
and state security forces unleashed coordinated attacks against Rohingya and
other Muslims. I documented pre-dawn raids and cold-blooded massacres.
In a small village in Mrauk-U
Township on October 23, 2012, 70 Rohingya were killed, including 28 children —
13 under the age of 5. Children were hacked to death. Some were thrown into
fires.
Entire villages were razed;
smoke billowed from homes and mosques in 13 of 17 townships statewide and
bodies were disposed in mass graves, none of which have been exhumed for
forensic purposes. I personally documented four separate mass gravesites.
At the time, an unpublished
United Nations investigation obtained by Al Jazeera’s investigative unit, found
more than 100 Rohingya women and girls were raped. The authorities then
corralled more than 130,000 Rohingya into more than 40 squalid internment
camps, where they remain confined today.
This all happened under former
President Thein Sein, a longtime military general lauded by the West as a
reformer.
Now Nobel-laureate Aung San Suu
Kyi is State Counselor, the de facto head of state –and the same atrocities are
happening again.