Five mass graves found in Myanmar
FINDINGS SUGGEST NOT ONLY THE MILITARY’S SLAUGHTER OF CIVILIANS BUT THE PRESENCE OF MANY MORE GRAVES
Discovery suggests not only the military’s slaughter of civilians but the presence of many more graves |
The faces of the men half-buried in the mass graves had been burnt away by acid or blasted by bullets. Noor Kadir could only recognise his friends by the colours of their shorts.
Kadir and 14 others, all Rohingya Muslims, had been choosing players for the football-like game of chinlone when the gunfire began. By the time the soldiers stopped shooting at the Myanmar village of Gu Dar Pyin, only Kadir and two teammates were still alive.
Days later, Kadir found six of his friends lying among the bodies in two graves.
They are among more than 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 timestamped mobile phone videos. The Myanmar government regularly claims massacres like Gu Dar Pyin never happened, and has acknowledged only one mass grave containing 10 “terrorists” in the village of Inn Din. The AP’s findings, however, suggest not only the military’s slaughter of civilians but the presence of many more graves with many more people.
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. The UN special envoy on human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, said yesterday that the military’s operations against the Rohingya bear “the hallmarks of a genocide”.
‘Demand accountability’
Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement that the AP report “raises the stakes for the international community to demand accountability from Myanmar”.
Repeated calls Wednesday and yesterday to Myanmar’s military communications office were unanswered. 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 show a village decimated. Community leaders 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.
Herded and killed
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, and smaller graves scattered around the village.
In the videos 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 out from the earth, skeletal hands seeming to claw at the ground.
Survivors said soldiers planned the August 27 attack, and 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 recognised.
After more than 200 soldiers swept into Gu Dar Pyin around noon, Mohammad Sha, 37, a shop owner and farmer, hid in a grove of coconut trees near a river with more than 100 others. They watched as the military searched Muslim homes and dozens of Buddhist neighbours, their faces partly covered with scarves, loaded the possessions they found into about 10 pushcarts. Then the soldiers burnt down the homes, shooting anyone who couldn’t flee, Sha said.
Mohammad Younus, 25, was crawling on his hands and knees after being shot twice when his brother 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 towards 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 pitching the young and the elderly into fires.