Mass graves confirmed in Myanmar
New evidence points to troops’ massacres of Rohingya Muslims
BALUKHALI REFUGEE CAMP, Bangladesh — The faces of the men half-buried in the mass graves had been burned away by acid or blasted by bullets. Noor Kadir could only recognize his friends by the colors of their shorts.
Kadir and 14 others, all Rohingya Muslims, had been choosing players for the soccer-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 alive.
Days later, Kadir found six of his friends 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 time-stamped cellphone 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.
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 U.N. special envoy on human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, said Thursday that the military’s operations against the Rohingya bear “the hallmarks of a genocide.”
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 Thursday 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 Digital Globe 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.
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 Aug. 27 attack and tried to hide what they had done. They came to the slaughter armed not only with weapons, but also with shovels to dig pits and acid to burn away faces and hands so that the bodies could not be recognized.
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.