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Rohingya from Myanmar at a refugee camp in Teknaf,
Bangladesh, in December. An estimated 65,000 Rohingya
have fled across the
border, according to the International
Organization for Migration.
Credit A.M.
Ahad/Associated Press
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‘There Are No Homes Left’: Rohingya Tell of Rape, Fire and
Death in Myanmar
KUTUPALONG CAMP, Bangladesh — When the Myanmar military closed in on
the village of Pwint Phyu Chaung, everyone had a few seconds to make a choice.
Noor Ankis, 25, chose to remain in her house, where she was
told to kneel to be beaten, she said, until soldiers led her to the place where
women were raped. Rashida Begum, 22, chose to plunge with her three children
into a deep, swift-running creek, only to watch as her baby daughter slipped
from her grasp.
Sufayat Ullah, 20, also chose the creek. He stayed in the
water for two days and finally emerged to find that soldiers had set his family
home on fire, leaving his mother, father and two brothers to asphyxiate inside.
These accounts and others, given over the last few days by
refugees who fled Myanmar and are now living in Bangladesh, shed light on the
violence that has unfolded in Myanmar in recent months as security forces there
carry out a
brutal counterinsurgency campaign.
Their stories, though impossible to confirm independently,
generally align with reports by human rights organizations that the
military entered villages in northern Rakhine State shooting at random, set
houses on fire with rocket launchers, and systematically raped girls and women.
At least 1,500 homes were razed, according to an analysis of satellite images by
Human Rights Watch.
The campaign, which has moved south in recent weeks, seems
likely to continue until Myanmar’s government is satisfied that it has fully
disarmed the militancy that has arisen among the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic
group that has been persecuted for decades
in majority-Buddhist Myanmar.
“There is a risk that we haven’t seen the worst of this
yet,” said Matthew Smith of Fortify Rights, a nongovernmental organization
focusing on human rights in Southeast Asia. “We’re not sure what the state
security forces will do next, but we do know attacks on civilians are
continuing.”
A commission appointed by Myanmar’s government last week denied
allegations that its military was
committing genocide in the villages, which have been closed to Western
journalists and human rights investigators. Officials have said Rohingya forces
are setting fire to their own houses and have denied most charges of human
rights abuses, with the exception of a beating that was captured on video.
Myanmar’s leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the recipient of a Nobel
Peace Prize, has been criticized for
failing to respond more forcefully to the violence.
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A destroyed house near Maungdaw in RakhineST.
At least 1,500 homes have been razed, according to HRW.
Credit Nyien Chan
Naing/European Pressphoto Agency
|
The crackdown began after an attack on three border posts in
Rakhine State in October, in which nine police officers were killed. The attack
is believed to have been carried out by an until-then-unknown armed Rohingya
insurgent group.
The military campaign, which the government describes as a
“clearing” operation, has largely targeted civilians, human rights groups say.
It has sent an estimated 65,000 Rohingya fleeing across the border to Bangladesh,
according to the International Organization for Migration.
“They started coming in like the tide,” said Dudu Miah, a
Rohingya refugee who is chairman of the management committee at the Leda
refugee camp, near the border with Myanmar. “They were acting crazy. They were
a mess. They were saying, ‘They’ve killed my father, they’ve killed my mother,
they’ve beaten me up.’ They were in disarray.”
Soldiers were attacking villages just across the Naf River,
which separates Myanmar from Bangladesh, so close that Bangladeshis could see
columns of smoke rise from burning villages on the other side, said Nazir
Ahmed, the imam of a mosque that caters to Rohingyas.
He said it was true that some Rohingya, enraged by years of
mistreatment by Myanmar forces, had organized themselves into a crude militant
force, but that Myanmar had dramatically exaggerated its proportions and
seriousness.
Rohingyas are “frustrated, and they are picking up sticks
and making a call to defend themselves,” he said. “Now, if they find a farmer
who has a machete at home, they say, ‘You are engaged in terrorism.’”
An analysis released last month by the International Crisis
Group took a serious view of the new militant group, which it says is financed
and organized by Rohingya émigrés in Saudi Arabia. Further violence, it warned,
could accelerate radicalization among the Rohingya, who could become willing
instruments of transnational jihadist groups.
In interviews in and around the Kutupalong and Leda refugee
camps here, Rohingya who fled Myanmar in recent weeks said that military
personnel initially went house to house seeking adult men, and then proceeded
to rape women and burn homes. Many new arrivals are from Kyet Yoepin, a village
where 245 buildings were destroyed during a two-day sweep in mid-October,
according to Human Rights Watch.
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BGB at a common transit point for the Rohingya on the
banks of the Naf River, which separates Myanmar
from
Bangladesh. Credit A.M. Ahad/Associated Press
|
Muhammad Shafiq, who is in his mid-20s, said he was at home
with his family when he heard gunfire. Soldiers in camouflage banged on the
door, then shot at it, he said. When he let them in, he said, “they took the
women away, and lined up the men.”
Mr. Shafiq said that when a soldier grabbed his sister’s
hand, he lunged at him, fearful the soldier intended to rape her, and was
beaten so severely that the soldiers left him for dead. Later, he bolted with
one of his children and was grazed by a soldier’s bullet on his elbow. He
crawled for an hour on his hands and knees through a rice field, then watched,
from a safe vantage point, as troops set fire to what remained of Kyet Yoepin.
“There are no homes left,” he said. “Everything is burned.”
Jannatul Mawa, 25, who is from the same village, said she
crawled toward the next village overnight, passing the shadowy forms of dead
and wounded neighbors.
“Some were shot, some were killed with a blade,” she said.
“Wherever they could find people, they were killing them.”
Dozens more families are from Pwint Phyu Chaung, which was
near the site of a clash between militants and soldiers on Nov. 12.
According to Amnesty International, the militants scattered
into neighboring villages. When army troops followed them, several hundred men
from Pwint Phyu Chaung resisted, using crude weapons like farm implements and
knives, the report said. A Myanmar army lieutenant colonel was shot dead, and
the troops called in air support from two attack helicopters.
Mumtaz Begum, 40, said she was awakened at dawn when
security forces approached the village from both sides and began searching for
adult men in each house.
She said she and her daughter were told to kneel down
outside their home with their hands over their heads and were beaten with
bamboo clubs.
Mumtaz Begum, 40, told of members of her
family who were
arrested, beaten, shot in the
leg or killed. Her daughter described being
grouped with young women to be raped.
Credit Ellen Barry/The New York Times
She said her 10-year-old son was shot through the leg, her
daughter’s husband was arrested, and her own husband was one of dozens of men
and boys in the village who were killed by soldiers armed with guns or machetes
that night. Villagers, she said, “laid the bodies down in a line in the mosque
and counted them.”
Ms. Begum’s daughter, Noor Ankis, 25, said the next morning
soldiers went from house to house looking for young women.
“They grouped the women together and brought them to one
place,” she said. “The ones they liked they raped. It was just the girls and
the military, no one else was there.”
She said the idea of trying to escape flickered through her
head, but she was overcome by fatalism. “I felt there was no point in being
alive,” she said.
Ms. Ankis pulled her head scarf low, for a moment, removing
a tear. She said she had been thinking about her husband.
“I think about how he took care of me after we got married,”
she said. “How will I see him again?”
Sufayat Ullah, 20, a madrasa student, said that he was home
with his family on the morning of the attack and that the first thing he
registered was the sound of gunfire. He realized quickly, he said, that he
could only survive by escaping. “When they found people close by, they attacked
them with machetes,” he said. “If they were far away, they shot them.”
Mr. Ullah ran from the house and bolted for the creek at the
edge of town, and he dived in, swimming as far as he could. He said he spent
much of the next two days underwater, finally scrambling onto the bank near a
neighboring village. Only then did he learn that his mother, father and two
brothers had burned to death inside the family house.
“I feel no peace,” he said, covering his face with his hands
and weeping. “They killed my father and mother. What is left for me in this
world?”
Source: http://nyti.ms/2jnRTLW