Summary executions, and rape as a ‘tool of terror’
Survivors from one Rohingya village, Tula Toli, say that thousands of people may have been killed there alone. They say soldiers rounded up residents along the village’s riverbanks and summarily executed them.
Bangladesh and Myanmar are negotiating an agreement to repatriate refugees, but Rohingya people are still fleeing Myanmar, and most potential returnees would find only ash and rubble in the villages they once inhabited.
More than one million ethnic Rohingya Muslims have lived in Myanmar for generations. They have been stripped of their citizenship, denied almost all rights and labelled stateless.
Since the Myanmar’s military conducted operations against the Rohingya in Rakhine state, the civilian government has barred most journalists, international observers and humanitarian aid workers from independently travelling to the region.
Meanwhile, the rape of Rohingya women by Myanmar’s security forces has been sweeping and methodical, the Associated Press has found in interviews with 29 women and girls who fled to neighbouring Bangladesh. These sexual assault survivors from several refugee camps were interviewed separately and extensively. They ranged in age from 13 to 35, came from a wide swath of villages in Myanmar’s Rakhine state and described assaults between October 2016 and mid-September.
The testimonies bolster the United Nations contention that Myanmar’s armed forces are systematically employing rape as a “calculated tool of terror” aimed at exterminating the Rohingya people.
The Myanmar armed forces did not respond to multiple requests from the AP for comment, but an internal military investigation last month concluded that none of the assaults ever took place. And when journalists asked about rape allegations during a government-organized trip to Rakhine in September, Rakhine’s minister for border affairs, Phone Tint, replied: “These women were claiming they were raped, but look at their appearances — do you think they are that attractive to be raped?”
Doctors and aid workers, however, say that they are stunned at the sheer volume of rapes, and suspect only a fraction of women have come forward. MSF doctors have treated 113 sexual violence survivors since August, a third of them under 18. The youngest was nine.