Rights group: Insurgents massacred Myanmar Hindus

Amnesty International said Wednesday Myanmar’s army was not the only group that has slaughtered civilians in the country’s volatile west. In a new report, it accused ethnic Rohingya insurgents of carrying out at least one brutal massacre when the long-running conflict in Rakhine state exploded last year.

The London-based rights organization said it had investigated the widely reported killing of dozens of minority Hindus on Aug. 25 in a village called Ah Nauk Kha Maung Sei, and concluded Rohingya militants were responsible.

Claims the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, or ARSA, had carried out a massacre there were first made by the government

and security forces just hours after it occurred. It was the same day Rohingya militants attacked 30 police posts and an army base in the volatile region, provoking a bloody army counteroffensive that eventually drove nearly 700,000 Rohingya civilians into Bangladesh.

At the time, Myanmar officials said they had discovered two mass graves containing dozens of bodies, and around 100 Hindus were missing in all. The story, though, became controversial after survivors who reached Bangladesh gave conflicting testimony to reporters, with some blaming ethnic Rakhine villagers instead.

Amnesty International said it based its findings on “a careful review of evidence” that included the testimony of dozens of people and imagery analyzed by

forensic pathologists.

“Our latest investigation on the ground sheds much-needed light on the largely under- reported human rights abuses by ARSA during northern Rakhine state’s unspeakably dark recent history,” said Tirana Hassan, the group’s crisis response director.

“Accountability for these atrocities is every bit as crucial as it is for the crimes against humanity carried out by Myanmar’s security forces,” Hassan said.

While nobody knows for sure how many people were killed in Rakhine state since August — the government generally prohibits independent reporting from the area — the vast majority of deaths are believed to have been inflicted on the Rohingya by security forces. The aid

group Doctors Without Borders estimates at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed during the first month alone.

ARSA could not be reached for comment on the Amnesty International report. There have been no new posts on a once-active Twitter account attributed to the group since January.

In its report, Amnesty International said Rohingya militants, clad in black and wielding guns and swords, attacked the Hindus in Ah Nauk Kha Maung Seik around 8 a.m. on Aug. 25.

It is unclear why, but some suspect the militants believed the Hindu community sympathized with the predominantly Buddhist government’s anti-Rohingya stance.

Amnesty International said the fighters blindfolded their

victims and marched them away before executing 53 of them, including men, women and children. When the army launched its ferocious counter- attack, many survivors ended up fleeing into Bangladesh along with the insurgents.

There, ARSA members threatened witnesses and told them to say Rakhine villagers were responsible, Amnesty International said. After the survivors returned to Myanmar in October, however, they “unambiguously asserted that Rohingya, believed to be ARSA fighters, were responsible.”

Amnesty International said the changing testimony was “largely explained by the pressures and threats to personal safety that they faced while in Bangladesh.”