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The Survivors of the Rohingya Genocide
By JASON MOTLAGH > AUGUST 9, 2018
After five decades of military rule nominally came to an end in Myanmar in 2011, ethnic tensions intensified across Rakhine, one of the country’s poorest states and the heartland of the Rohingya, a minority long oppressed by the country’s Buddhist majority. A ruthless military crackdown had left scores dead in October 2016, and forced 87,000 Rohingya to seek refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. Tula Toli, a sleepy farming community nestled in a fertile river bend, had been spared much of the bloodshed, until late last summer. Openly hostile Rakhine villagers had begun stealing Rohingya crops and livestock at will, while security forces came to loot Muslim homes and tear down farm fences. The Rohingya could not walk to the nearest market without paying bribes to Rakhine officials, and if found congregating in groups or outside after curfew, Rohingya were beaten up. “We couldn’t eat because of the tension,” Rajuma says.
Rajuma had spent her entire life in the village. Working in the rice-paddy fields, she caught the eye of Rafiq, a shy neighbor with a boyish grin. They flirted with each other in passing, until one day Rafiq told his parents he wanted to marry Rajuma. His parents arranged the marriage on their son’s behalf, offering five grams of gold to seal the deal. The wedding was low-key, given the prohibition against large Rohingya gatherings. Rajuma was soon pregnant with their first son, Sadiq, and the young family moved in with her parents.
She now found herself trying to save what heirlooms she could as she prepared to flee her home. Five days earlier, on August 25th, 2017, small groups of Rohingya militants had stormed police outposts, killing 12 officers. The army was all too ready. A massive, scorched-earth military operation backed by helicopters and civilian death squads razed dozens of Rohingya -hamlets. As panic swept Tula Toli, the village chairman, an ethnic Rakhine Buddhist, called an emergency meeting to assure Rohingya elders there was no need to flee if the army came. “Nothing will happen to you,” he pledged. A peace agreement was signed for good measure.
Desperate Rohingya dived into the fast-running current. Some managed to swim across hanging onto banana-tree branches, but many families were gunned down where they stood. Eyewitnesses say stray children caught by the attackers were beheaded and tossed into the river. Rajuma says she and about 200 other women and children were forced to kneel in the shallows while uniformed soldiers carried out systematic murder. Over the next three hours, the survivors say, males were lined up and shot, two or three times apiece. The militia then combed over the bodies and finished them off with blades.
Intent to destroy, however, is hard to prove, says James Silk, the law professor who supervised the Yale study. “You’re rarely going to have the situation of Nazi Germany where they leave behind documents and plans,” he says. But based on the regime’s long-standing policies to restrict and weaken the group, a pattern of anti-Rohingya rhetoric from government officials and Buddhist leaders, and collaboration between state security forces and anti-Muslim vigilantes, the report concluded it was “difficult to avoid inferring an intent to destroy Rohingya.”
