TEHRAN – The Associated Press confirmed the existence of 5 newly discoveredmass graves in Myanmar, and reports in vivid detail on massacres ofcivilians in an ongoing campaign of horrors by Myanmar’s military, “withhelp from Buddhist neighbors”, that the AP notes “looks increasingly like agenocide”.
The Associated Press on Wednesday published a report detailing theexistence of several previously undisclosed mass graves of Rohingya Muslimsin Myanmar along with shocking details of the systematic execution ofvictims and attempts to hide evidence of the crime.
The report relied on interviews with more than two dozen refugees whomanaged to escape from soldiers and flee to neighboring Bangladesh at thestart of a brutal military crackdown on the Rohingya in August 2017, assome of the survivors provided the news agency with time-stamped cellphonevideos supporting their claims.
The AP uncovered evidence of at least five mass graves at one location, GuDar Pyin, as the news agency reported that the mass graves, all previouslyunreported, kept corpses of men half-buried, with their faces burned awayby acid or blasted by bullets.
About 200 soldiers swept into the area on August 27, according to witnesses.
“The soldiers carefully planned the August 27 attack, and then deliberatelytried to hide what they had done. They came to the slaughter armed not onlywith rifles, knives, rocket launchers, and grenades, but also with shovelsto dig pits and acid to burn away faces and hands so that the bodies couldnot be identified,” the survivors of the attack were cited as recounting.
“Buddhist villagers then moved through Gu Dar Pyin in a sort of mopping-upoperation, using knives to cut the throats of the injured, and working withsoldiers to throw small children and the elderly into the fires,” theyadded.
In one case, a survivor named as Kadir, was quoted as saying that he and 14other civilians, all Rohingya Muslims in the Gu Dar Pyin Village, had beenpreparing to play a soccer-like game when the gunfire began and that by thetime the Myanmar military stopped shooting, only three, including him, wereleft alive.
Kadir added that he had found six of his friends among the dead bodies intwo graves, adding that “It was a mixed-up jumble of corpses piled on topof each other.”
One of them, Mohammad Sha, 37, a shop owner and farmer, told the newsagency that he “hid in a grove of coconut trees near a river with more than100 others, adding that they watched as the military searched Muslim homesand dozens of Buddhist neighbors, their faces partly covered with scarves,loaded the possessions they found into about 10 pushcarts. Then thesoldiers burned down the homes, shooting anyone who couldn’t flee.
“Myanmar has cut off access to Gu Dar Pyin, so it’s unclear just how manypeople died, but satellite images obtained by the AP from DigitalGlobe showa village decimated. Community leaders have compiled a list of 75 dead sofar, and villagers estimate the toll could be as high as 400, based ontestimony from relatives and the bodies they’ve seen in the graves andstrewn about the area,” the news agency wrote.
Almost every villager interviewed by the AP saw three large mass graves atGu Dar Pyin’s Northern entrance, near the main road, where witnesses saysoldiers herded and killed most of the Rohingya. A handful of witnessesconfirmed two other big graves near a hillside cemetery, and smaller gravesscattered around the village.
The AP reported that cellphone video shot by survivors show “blue-greenpuddles of acid sludge [surrounding] corpses without heads and torsos thatjut out from the earth, skeletal hands seeming to claw at the ground.”
Local officials contacted by the news agency claim to know nothing of massgraves and Myanmar’s government has repeatedly denied any organizedcampaign against the Rohingya.
More than 655,000 of Myanmar’s Muslim minority have fled across the borderto Bangladesh since late August when the Myanmar army launched a sweepingcrackdown on Rohingya Muslims in Northern Rakhine state.
The UN has already described the Rohingya as the most persecuted communityin the world, calling the situation in Rakhine similar to “a textbookexample of ethnic cleansing”.
The Myanmarese government, however, denies committing atrocities againstthe Rohingya people and has even rejected UN criticism for its“politicization and partiality”.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra‘ad al-Hussein stressed thatattacks on the Rohingya had been “well thought out and planned” and he hadasked Myanmar’s de facto leader to do more to stop the military atrocities.