Discovery of mass graves confirms Rohingya massacre.
BRUTAL MYANMAR MASSACRE CONFIRMED WITH DISCOVERY OF SEVERAL MASS GRAVES
The faces of the men half- buried in the mass graves had been burned away by acid or blasted by bullets. Noor Kadir recognized his friends only by the colours 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 neighbours — and suggests many more graves hold 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. UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric called the AP report “extremely troubling,” and urged Myanmar to allow access to the region. Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, also said in a statement that the AP report “raises the stakes for the international community to demand accountability from Myanmar.”
Repeated calls to My anmar’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 j ust 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 wiped out. 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.
Almost ever y 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.
THE MASSACRE
Survivors said that the soldiers planned the Aug. 27 attack, and then 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 neighbouring villages, their faces partly covered with scarves, loaded the possessions they found into about 10 push carts. 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.
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.
For days, Rohingya from the area stole into Gu Dar Pyin and rescued people who had been left for dead. Thousands of people from the area hid deep in the jungle. 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 contained acid.
In t he 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.
“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.”
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.
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.
The next day, on Sept. 9, villager Mohammad Karim, 26, captured three videos of mass graves that were timestamped 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. 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.