Adults were shot, babies thrown into water: Rohingya refugees recall horror of Myanmar army attack
By The Guardian
It was the fast-flowing river that doomed the inhabitants of Tula Toli.
Snaking around the remote village on three sides, the treacherous waters allowed Burmese soldiers to corner and hold people on the river’s sandy banks. Some were shot on the spot. Others drowned in the current as they tried to escape.
Zahir Ahmed made a panicked dash for the opposite bank, where he hid in thick jungle and watched his family’s last moments.
“I was right next to the water,” he recalled in an interview a week later at a refugee camp in neighbouring Bangladesh, his eyes bloodshot and his shirt stained with sweat and dirt.
Ahmed said teenagers and adults were shot with rifles, while babies and toddlers, including his youngest daughter, six-month old Hasina, were thrown into the water.
“The soldiers used rocket-propelled grenades, and they set fire to the houses with matches. Once they had gone past, I went back. All the houses were burned. In the road, I saw a dead man I recognised called Abu Shama. He had been shot in the chest. He was 85,” recalled a Rohingya man who managed to flee to Bangladesh.
He cried as he described seeing his wife and children die, meticulously naming and counting them on both hands until he ran out of fingers.
More than 160,000 of Myanmar’s 1.1 million ethnic Rohingya minority have fled to Bangladesh, bringing with them stories that they say describe ethnic cleansing.
During interviews with more than a dozen Rohingya from Tula Toli, the Guardian was told of what appeared to be devastating carnage as Myanmar’s armed forces swept through the village on 30 August and allegedly murdered scores of people.
Those who escaped fled to the hills in the west to make the three-day trek to Myanmar’s border with Bangladesh. The rest were buried in a mass grave, villagers said.
Myanmar, where the majority of people are Buddhist, has blocked access to the area, meaning the Guardian cannot independently corroborate the villagers’ accounts.
Many of the interviews were conducted separately over two days, however, and the villagers confirmed details of each other’s statements without prompting.
The story of Tula Toli, while horrific, is not unique. The army, in retribution for guerrilla-style ambushes on 25 August by an emergent Rohingya militant group, has led a huge counteroffensive across northern Rakhine state.
Many Rohingya had already escaped. Communal clashes with Buddhists in Rakhine prompted 140,000 Rohingya to leave their homes in 2012. Thousands have since died either at sea or in brutal jungle camps run by people smugglers.
A United Nations report released this year detailed what happened to those that stayed. The report described mass killings and gang rapes by the armed forces in actions that “very likely” amounted to crimes against humanity.
The current wave of violence is the worst so far, and rights groups have said it could constitute a final campaign to rid Myanmar of the Rohingya. Satellites have recorded images of whole villages burnt to the ground.
All UN aid work in the conflict area has been blocked . Aung San Suu Kyi’s administration, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, has said it is fighting “extremist terrorists” who are burning their own villages. Accounts of cruel sectarian attacks by Rohingya militants on Hindus and Buddhists in Rakhine have also surfaced. Around 26,000 non-Muslims have been displaced in the violence.
The subsistence farmers of Tula Toli, who spent their lives growing rice and chillies, said there were no militants in their village when the army attacked.
“Their leader had two stars on his shoulder. He told us: ‘Rumours are being spread around by people in the village that soldiers have been killing people in Rakhine. But you should all keep farming and fishing. The one thing we ask is that if you see soldiers, you don’t run away. If you run, we will shoot.’
“After the speech, the soldiers went from house to house. They were with [local Rakhine Buddhists] and took everything they could find that was valuable: gold, cash, clothes, potatoes and rice. They smashed up houses of three or four people they said had been spreading rumours. They were looking for fighters. The Buddhists had told them about fighters, but there were none there.”
A day before the attack, people from a village across the river called Dual Toli swam over to escape the army. More than 10 died in the river, according to Petam Ali, who sheltered some of the displaced in his family home. They watched their village burn from across the river.
At 3.30am the next day, Ali heard shooting but was not sure of the direction.
“I live on the north side of the village and the army had crossed the river further north and were marching down. I left my family to run out to the jungle to try and spot the soldiers. We waited until 8am and then they moved in, wearing dark green clothes. All of them were on foot.
“I ran back to get my family, but we were too rushed and my grandmother was too old to run. From the forest, we watched them burn our house. It was the first in Tula Toli to be burned.”
Ali’s home, an eight-bedroom wooden structure that he built with his three brothers for 16 members of their extended family, went up in flames fast. Its roof was covered in straw and leaves.
“The soldiers used rocket-propelled grenades, and they set fire to the houses with matches. Once they had gone past, I went back. All the houses were burned. In the road, I saw a dead man I recognised called Abu Shama. He had been shot in the chest. He was 85.”
In the ruins of his house, Ali saw the singed and decapitated corpse of his grandmother. “Her name was Rukeya Banu. She was 75. When I returned to the jungle, I described the whole incident to the rest. They burst into tears. We walked for three days.”.......(incomplete)