Nazmul Islam watched as the army prepared to attack his
home in Tula Toli, where its Rohingya residents were raped and murdered
By Poppy McPherson in Cox's Bazar
After they finished burning the bodies, the soldiers
ordered chicken curry.
Nazmul Islam watched as local Buddhists set about
preparing food for the men he says raped and massacred scores of Rohingya
Muslims from the village of Tula Toli in the north of Myanmar’s Rakhine state.
Don’t miss to read: Massacre at Tula Toli:
Rohingya recall horror of Myanmar army attack: https://lnkd.in/gF7RNEx
By late afternoon it was quiet. The smell of burning hung
over the village. An officer barked, “We need 100 plates of rice and chicken
curry. Bring it to us.”
The soldiers’ savagery appalled but did not shock Islam,
the 60-year-old assistant village chairman. He used to be one of them.
A former soldier and Buddhist who became a Muslim after
falling in love with a Rohingya woman, Islam is an unusual sight in the
sprawling Bangladeshi refugee camps now home to close to one million people.
While his wife and their five children fled Myanmar
alongside their neighbours, Islam says he was detained for weeks in the Rakhine
part of the village where officers tried to convert him back to Buddhism. Taken
there before the violence, he says he witnessed the orchestration of a
slaughter first reported last year by the Guardian.
“Ufffft. I saw everything,” says Islam, who is thin with
sinewy, tattooed arms. “I couldn’t do anything but sit and look.”
His story, corroborated by more than half a dozen
Rohingya residents of Tula Toli interviewed separately, sheds new light on one
of the worst episodes of what the UN and global leaders have called an ethnic
cleansing campaign.
More than 650,000 Rohingya, members of a Muslim minority
long persecuted in Myanmar, have fled to Bangladesh since August. They say
Myanmar soldiers; police and Buddhist militias staged mass executions,
gang-raped women and children, and burned hundreds of villages to the ground
during “clearance operations” targeting militants.
Doctors Without Borders believes at least 6,700 were
killed. A list drawn up by Rohingya puts the estimated death toll in Tula Toli
at 1,179.
Last week the Associated Press reported it had found evidence
of five mass graves in the village of Gu Dar Pyin. Two Reuters journalists who
were investigating another grave are being tried under the Official Secrets
Act.
The Myanmar army and its commander, Min Aung Hlaing, say
the accusations are “fabrications” although it has admitted summarily executing
10 Rohingya men in another village and burying them in a mass grave. The army’s
True News Information unit could not be reached for comment for this story.
Meanwhile Myanmar and Bangladesh have signed an agreement
to send refugees back, but few want to return, saying they will face further
persecution.
Islam, who spent more than a decade as a soldier,
stationed mostly in Rakhine state, can understand that fear.
“In their mind, [the army] wants to wipe out the Muslim
people,” Islam says.
After leaving the force in 1983, he settled in Rakhine,
marrying a Buddhist woman from Tula Toli, a village also known as Min Gyi
nestled in the bend of the Purma River in the northern part of Maungdaw
township.
Rohingya lived down by the water’s edge; Rakhine
Buddhists mostly on higher ground. But they often worked together, farming and
fishing.
Islam began talking to a Rohingya woman in her twenties,
Marbiyar Khatun, who worked in his home as a maid.
She was bold and funny, but Islam noticed the grinding
oppression her people were facing. They had to get permission to marry or
travel. Security forces took away their documents and harassed them for bribes.
Despite the age difference, they grew close. “How can I define love? Sympathy
is also a kind of love,” he says.
In 2008, he divorced his first wife, married Marbiyar and
converted to Islam, a move he insists wasn’t solely for her sake.
They moved to the Rohingya part of the village and had
four sons and a daughter. Educated and polite, Islam was widely respected and
worked filling out forms in Burmese on behalf of Rohingya. Friends and
neighbours describe him and Marbiyar as a bridge between the two communities.
In the early hours of August 25th 2017, Rohingya armed
with guns, sticks and knives overran scores of police posts across northern
Rakhine. The insurgents, from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army [ARSA]
provided the pretext for soldiers to respond with brutal force across the
state.
Shortly after the attacks, according to several
witnesses, a group of Rakhine villagers came to Islam and took him to their
neighbourhood.
Residents say a village elder guaranteed their safety and
told them to gather by the river if soldiers came. “Maybe they played games
with the Rohingya villagers,” says Islam. The chairman could not be reached for
comment.
Soldiers swept into Tula Toli on the morning of August
30th. Islam and other Rohingya from the village say they were from a division
unit usually stationed in the northwest of the country but deployed to combat ARSA. http://www.janes.com/article/74306/myanmar-army-steps-up-troop-deployment-in-rakhine-state
“When I tell this story, I feel sick,” says Marbiyar,
beating her hand against her head.
She and the children managed to escape across the river
to a neighbouring village, but many Rohingya were trapped at the river’s edge,
surrounded by soldiers and Buddhists with knives. Some scrambled into the
water. Others ran and were shot at. The soldiers separated those who remained
into groups: men on one side; women on the other.
According to survivors interviewed by the Guardian, the
women were forced to stand in the shallows and watch as their husbands, sons
and fathers were shot.
Some pretended to be dead. Some tried to hide their male
relatives. Those who asked for water were cut with knives. So were children who
cried.
Later, the women were taken into houses in small groups
where they were raped and beaten. Then the houses were set alight.
“We have the order to kill everyone”
On the hill, detained in a military camp, Islam says he
was aware of what was going on. “At first, I couldn’t see anything but I heard
the sound of bullets and crying. I saw the fire and smoke,” he says.
At one point, a helicopter landed nearby, carrying some
senior officers. “They gave bullets and guns. They ordered the military not to
throw bodies into the water but to bury or burn them,” he says.
The task was delegated to the local Buddhists, he says.
“If anyone disagreed, they would shoot,” he says. “I heard a corporal saying,…
‘We have the order to kill everyone and will kill everyone who disagrees.’”
The soldiers and villagers looted the homes that were
still standing, taking rice, motorbikes and animals. He says he heard the locals
talking about the dead “Bengalis” and raped women. “We couldn’t bear to be
inside the village because of the smell from the burning bodies,” says Islam.
The soldiers beat and kicked him and tried to force him
to denounce Islam, he says. They told him, “You’re our brother” and “This is
our country. Kalars don’t live here anymore,” using a derogatory word for
Muslims.
One night, he says he seized a chance to escape when the
guards were drunk. He found his way into Bangladesh, where his wife and children
were waiting.
“I fainted when I saw him first,” Marbiyar says, with a
smile. “We thought he was dead.”
In Tula Toli, Islam and Marbiyar were well off. They had
a good house. They owned cows, buffalo, and chickens. Now they live at the
squalid edges of Kutapalong refugee camp. Flies buzz around their tent.
Myanmar and Bangladesh have agreed to send the Rohingya
back to Rakhine state but Islam is skeptical. Earlier this week Bangladesh said
the plan had been delayed because, among other reasons, there were difficulties
drawing up lists of Rohingya willing to go.
“They say now that they will call us back. I have no
house – it was burned down,” says Islam. “Who will pay me for my house and all
the things looted from me? Which court will do justice for us?”
As a former Buddhist, Islam has the documents required to
live freely in Myanmar. But he has turned his back on that life, in favour of
statelessness and exile with his family. He has no regrets.
“I had freedom in Myanmar. I could go and visit every corner,”
he says. “But I don’t want that, because my wife and children are here. They
are crying, and God won’t let me leave them.”