By Foster Klug, Associated Press
BALUKHALI REFUGEE CAMP, Bangladesh (AP) — The faces of
the men half-buried in the mass graves had been burned away by acid or blasted
by bullets. Noor Kadir finally recognized his friends only by the colors of
their shorts.
Kadir and 14 others, all Rohingya Muslims in the Myanmar
village of Gu Dar Pyin, had been choosing players for the soccer-like game of
chinlone when the gunfire began. They scattered from what sounded like hard
rain on a tin roof. By the time the Myanmar military stopped shooting, only Kadir
and two teammates were left alive.
Days later, Kadir found six of his friends among the
bodies in two graves.
They are among at least five mass graves, all previously
unreported, that have been confirmed by The Associated Press through multiple
interviews with more than two dozen survivors in Bangladesh refugee camps and
through time-stamped cellphone videos. The Myanmar government regularly claims
such massacres of the Rohingya never happened, and has acknowledged only one
mass grave containing 10 "terrorists" in the village of Inn Din.
However, the AP's reporting shows a systematic slaughter of Rohingya Muslim
civilians by the military, with help from Buddhist neighbors — and suggests the
presence of many more graves with many more people.
"It was a mixed-up jumble of corpses piled on top of
each other," said Kadir, a 24-year-old firewood collector. "I felt
such sorrow for them."
The graves are the newest piece of evidence for what
looks increasingly like a genocide in Myanmar's western Rakhine state against
the Rohingya, a long-persecuted ethnic Muslim minority in the predominantly
Buddhist country. Repeated calls to Myanmar's military communications office
went unanswered Wednesday and Thursday. Htun Naing, a local security police
officer in Buthidaung township, where the village is located, said he
"hasn't heard of such mass graves."
Myanmar has cut off access to Gu Dar Pyin, so it's
unclear just how many people died, but satellite images obtained by the AP from
DigitalGlobe, along with video of homes reduced to ash, reveal a village that
has been decimated. Community leaders in the refugee camps have compiled a list
of 75 dead so far, and villagers estimate the toll could be as high as 400,
based on testimony from relatives and the bodies they've seen in the graves and
strewn about the area. A large number of the survivors carry scars from bullet
wounds, including a 3-year-old boy and his grandmother.
Also read here: 'They couldn't hide all the death.' Five
more Rohingya mass graves found in Myanmar http://ti.me/2Fyuwdt
Almost every villager interviewed by the AP saw three
large mass graves at Gu Dar Pyin's northern entrance, near the main road, where
witnesses say soldiers herded and killed most of the Rohingya. A handful of
witnesses confirmed two other big graves near a hillside cemetery, not too far
away from a school where more than 100 soldiers were stationed after the
massacre. Villagers also saw other, smaller graves scattered around the
village.
In the videos of the graves obtained by the AP, dating to
13 days after the killing began, blue-green puddles of acid sludge surround
corpses without heads and torsos that jut into the air. Skeletal hands seem to
claw at the ground.
THE MASSACRE
Survivors said that the soldiers carefully planned the
Aug. 27 attack, and then deliberately tried to hide what they had done. They
came to the slaughter armed not only with rifles, knives, rocket launchers and
grenades, but also with shovels to dig pits and acid to burn away faces and
hands so that the bodies could not be identified. Two days before the attack,
villagers say, soldiers were seen buying 12 large containers of acid at a
nearby village's market.
The killing began around noon, when more than 200
soldiers swept into Gu Dar Pyin from the direction of a Buddhist village to the
south, firing their weapons. The Rohingya who could move fast enough ran toward
the north or toward a river in the east, said Mohammad Sha, 37, a shop owner
and farmer.
Sha hid in a grove of coconut trees near the river with
more than 100 others and watched as the soldiers searched Muslim homes. Dozens
of Buddhists from neighboring villages, their faces partly covered with
scarves, loaded the possessions they found into about 10 pushcarts. Then the
soldiers burned down the homes, shooting anyone who couldn't flee, Sha said.
At the same time, another group of soldiers closed in
from the north, encircling Gu Dar Pyin and trapping villagers in a tightening
noose.
When Mohammad Younus, 25, heard explosions from hand
grenades and rocket launchers, he ran to the road. He was shot twice while
trying to call his family. One of the bullets, still in his hip, can be seen
when he pinches the skin.
His brother found him crawling on his hands and knees and
carried him to some underbrush, where Younus lay for seven hours. At one point,
he saw three trucks stop and begin loading dead bodies before heading off
toward the cemetery.
Buddhist villagers then moved through Gu Dar Pyin in a
sort of mopping-up operation, using knives to cut the throats of the injured,
survivors said, and working with soldiers to throw small children and the
elderly into the fires.
"People were screaming, crying, pleading for their
lives, but the soldiers just shot continuously," said Mohammad Rayes, 23,
a schoolteacher who climbed a tree and watched.
Kadir, the chinlone player, was shot twice in the foot
but managed to drag himself under a bridge, where he removed one of the bullets
himself. Then he watched, half-delirious, for 16 hours as soldiers, police and
Buddhist neighbors killed unarmed Rohingya and burned the village.
"I couldn't move," he said. "I thought I
was dead. I began to forget why I was there, to forget that all around me
people were dying."
Near dawn, three boys creeping toward the bridge from
another village to see what had happened heard Kadir's groans and brought him
back with them.
For days, Rohingya from the area stole into Gu Dar Pyin
and rescued people who'd been left for dead by the soldiers. Thousands of
people from the area hid deep in the jungle, stranded without food except for
the leaves and trees they tried to eat. More than 20 infants and toddlers died
because of the lack of food and water, villagers said.
A day after the shooting began, another group of
survivors watched from a distant mountain as Gu Dar Pyin burned, the flames and
smoke snaking up into a darkening sky.
THE MASS GRAVES
Six days after the massacre, Kadir risked his life to
dodge the dozens of Myanmar soldiers occupying the local school so he could
look for his four cousins. That's when he found his teammates half-buried in
the mass graves. He also saw four plastic containers that turned out to contain
acid.
In the next days and weeks, other villagers braved the
soldiers to try to find whatever was left of their loved ones. Dozens of bodies
littered the paths and compounds of the wrecked homes; they filled latrine
pits. The survivors soon learned that taller, darker green patches of rice
shoots in the paddies marked the spots where the dead had fallen.
As monsoon rains pounded the sometimes thin layer of dirt
on the graves to mud, more bloated bodies began to rise to the surface.
"There were so many bodies in so many different
places," said Mohammad Lalmia, 20, a farmer whose family owned a pond that
became the largest of the mass graves. "They couldn't hide all the
death."
Eleven days after the attack, Lalmia set out to see if the
soldiers had destroyed the Quran in the village mosque. He walked quickly along
the edge of the jungle to the mosque, where he found torn pages from the Muslim
sacred book scattered about.
As he tried to clean up, someone shouted that the
soldiers were coming. He fled through an open window, looking back over his
shoulder at about 15 patrolling soldiers.
When he turned back to the path, he stopped abruptly: A
human hand stuck out of a cleared patch of earth.
Lalmia counted about 10 bodies on the grave's surface.
Although he was worried about the military finding him, he used a six-foot
bamboo stick to check the pit's depth. The stick disappeared into the loose
soil, which made him think that the grave was deep enough to hold at least
another 10 bodies.
"I was shocked to be that near so many bodies I
hadn't known about," Lalmia said. He and other villagers also saw another
large grave in the area.
He estimates that soldiers dumped about 80 bodies into
his family's pond and about 20 in each of the other four major graves. He said
about 150 other bodies were left where they fell.
Three of the big graves were in the north of the village.
Two of those pits were about 15 feet wide and 7.5 feet long, villagers said.
The pond, which Lalmia had helped dig, measured about nine feet deep and 112
square feet.
Many other smaller graves with three, five, seven, 10
bodies in them were scattered across Gu Dar Pyin. During a short walk, Abdul
Noor, an 85-year-old farmer, saw three dead bodies stuffed into what might have
been a latrine hole and covered with soil. He saw another two near some banana
plants, and three in the corner of a compound.
"I tried to see more, but the stench was
overwhelming and the soldiers were still at the school," he said.
Two other men separately said they saw another latrine
filled with bodies and covered with a thin layer of soil. They said it
contained between five and 10 bodies on the top, and thought there were at
least five more corpses below.
After 12 days, Younus went to try to find four family
members who'd been killed. He saw people in the graves without hair or skin who
he thought had been burned with acid, and dozens of decomposing bodies in the
rice fields.
The next day, on Sept. 9, villager Mohammad Karim, 26,
captured three videos of mass graves that were time-stamped between 10:12 a.m.
and 10:14 a.m., when he said soldiers chased him away. When he fled to
Bangladesh, Karim removed the memory card from his phone, wrapped it in plastic
and tied it to his thigh to hide it from Myanmar police.
In the Bangladesh refugee camps, nearly two dozen other
Rohingya from Gu Dar Pyin confirmed that the videos showed mass graves in the
north of the village. They easily picked out details from a geography they knew
intimately, such as the way certain banana plants were positioned near rice
paddies.
The videos show what appear to be bones wrapped in
rotting clothing in a soupy muck. In one, the hands of a headless corpse grasp
at the earth; most of the skin seems melted away by acid that has stained the
earth blue. Nearby are two bloated legs clad in shorts. A few paces away, the
bones of a rib cage emerge from the dirt.
The AP saw several other videos that appeared to show
graves in the village, but only Karim's contained the original time stamps. In
some cases, villagers said Myanmar soldiers took their phones and memory cards,
sometimes at knife and gun point, at the checkpoints they had to pass through
on the way to Bangladesh.
Some survivors never found the bodies of their loved
ones.
Rohima Khatu, 45, recounted her story as tears streamed
down the face of her 9-year-old daughter, Hurjannat, who sat silently by her
mother's side.
Khatu was determined to find her husband, even though
women risked not only death but rape if they were caught by the soldiers.
Villagers said her husband was shot after he stayed home to protect their 10
cows, five chickens and eight doves, along with their rice stockpiles.
So 15 days after the massacre, she searched for him in
the graves at Gu Dar Pyin's northern entrance, trying to identify him by the
green lungi and white button-down shirt he had been wearing. Only 10 minutes
passed before someone shouted that about 20 soldiers were coming.
"There were dead bodies everywhere, bones and body
parts, all decomposing, so I couldn't tell which one was my husband,"
Khatu said. "I was weeping while I was there. I was crying loudly, 'Where
did you go? Where did you go?'"
"I have lost everything."