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Witness to horror — Rohingya women speak out about Myanmar Army rape and other atrocities in Maungdaw
By Chief Researcher : Razia Sultana B.A, M.A, LL.B, Kaladan Press Network (KPN)
This report comprises testimony of twenty-one Rohingya women who have fled to Bangladesh to escape Myanmar Army “clearance operations” in Maungdaw since October 9, 2016.
The women, from nine villages targeted during the operations, share similar experiences of how large numbers of Myanmar troops, with Border Guard Police and local paramilitary forces, surrounded and entered their villages, indiscriminately torturing and killing men, women and children, and burning down houses.
Almost all the women lost their husbands in the crackdown. Most are missing, feared dead. Three of their husbands were killed in massacres of up to forty men; one saw her husband and two young sons shot dead with thirty other men. Another woman saw soldiers shoot her husband dead by firing into his anus. Only one of the husbands had managed to flee to Bangladesh, but he had been severely tortured, with his testicles burned.
Eleven of the women lost their children during the attacks. One had her one-year-old baby pulled from her arms and thrown into her burning house. Another woman saw her seven-year-old son deliberately stamped to death. Another found her baby’s dead body on the ground with his throat cut.
Fifteen women, from eight villages, personally experienced or witnessed sexual violence by Myanmar Army and paramilitary troops during the recent security operations, providing evidence that at least 70 women and girls have been raped.
Most of the rape incidents took place when women were gathered at gunpoint in large groups outside their villages during security operations in Kyar Goung Taung, Yae Khat Chaung Gwa Son, and Kyet Yoe Pyin.Groups of soldiers pulled young women away from the others and took them to be raped in nearby houses, fields or forest. Some women were taken to be raped in military camps. One woman witnessed gang-rape of ten girls by about 30 soldiers in an open field near Yae Khat Chaung Gwa Son.
At least six of the rape victims were killed. One woman found the mutilated body of her 20-year-old sister in her house in Laung Don after a Myanmar military raid. Her breasts had been cut off, a gun barrel stuck in her vagina, and the body of her newborn baby, who had been stamped to death, left on her chest. Another woman found the naked bodies of five of her neighbours in the forest near Laung Don. One had been beheaded, and another tied up to trees, her legs splayed.
Soldiers also subjected large numbers of women to sexually humiliating treatment during security raids. Women described how their breasts and groin were grouped by soldiers during body searches. Groups of women forced out into fields near their villages were forced to strip down to their underwear or completely naked, and stand for long periods in the hot sun.
Ten of the women interviewed had been personally robbed of their valuables, with soldiers pulling their gold earrings, necklaces and nose studs from their bodies. Fifteen of the interviewees had seen their houses burned down by the Myanmar troops.
Despite directly experiencing atrocities at the hands of the Myanmar military, villagers have been forced to deny that the Myanmar troops committed these crimes. A woman whose house was burned down was rounded up with other villagers in front of hundreds of armed soldiers at the police station in Kyet Yoe Pyin, and forced to declare in front of a video camera that it was the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) who had burned their houses and killed their parents and children.
The similarity of the testimony provided by women from different villages show a clear pattern of grave violations by the Myanmar military against civilians on a widespread scale, indicating that the abuses are being committed systematically, with full command responsibility.
The leadership of the Myanmar military must be held to account for these atrocities. The Myanmar government must stop denying reports of abuses. They must order an immediate withdrawal of military troops from Maungdaw, and allow an independent international investigation into the abuses as well as unfettered humanitarian access to the area.
In the meantime, we call urgently for international peace-keeping forces to be deployed in the Maungdaw area to protect local civilians from ongoing abuse, and for the government of Bangladesh to provide shelter and protection for civilians fleeing persecution.
Who are the Rohingya ? — “The Rohingya of Burma are one of the world’s most persecuted and vulnerable ethnic minorities. Due to their racial and religious differences with the Burman Buddhist majority, they have been officially declared by Burma’s ruling military regime as non-citizens of Burma, making them legally stateless people. They are treated not only as aliens, but also modern-day slaves in their ancestral homeland of Arakan.”
The Rohingya is an ethnic group with bona fide historical roots in the region – its settlements dating back to the 7th century C.E. Arakan sits at the border between Islamic and Buddhist Asia, and Rohingya reflect this geographic reality, being an ethnic mix of Bengalis, Persians, Moghuls, Turks and Pathan,who “have developed a culture and language which is absolutely unique to the region and civilization of their own.”
Rohingyas are a mixture of many kinds of people. The Rohingya speak a Bengali dialect – close to what is spoken in the Chittagong region of Bangladesh, mixed primarily with words from the Urdu, Hindi, and Arabic languages, but also from the Myanmar and English languages,4 and so have evolved distinct ethnic characteristics over the past several centuries, being as they are people of a different ethnic background from the majority.
The Rohingyas of Arakan still carry Arab names, faith, dress, music and customs. They are nationals as well as an indigenous ethnic group of Burma. “They are not a new born racial group of Arakan rather they are as old an indigenous race of the country as any others.”
The name “Rohingya” derives from Rohang / Roshang, an earlier name for Arakan. Dr. Michael W. Charney writes, “the earliest recorded use of an ethnonym immediately recognizable as Rohingya is an observation by Francis Buchanan in 1799. As he explains, a dialect that was derived from Hindi “…is that spoken by the Mohammedans, who have long been settled in Arakan, and who call themselves Roainga, or native of Arakan6 and it can be asserted…that one claim of the Buddhist school in Rakhaing historiography, that Rohingya was an invention of the colonial period, is contradicted by the evidence.”
Arakan: An Historical Perspective — An independent kingdom for over 5,000 years until it came under Burma rule in 1784, Arakan found itself at the intersection of two worlds, situated as it was between Muslim- Hindu South Asia and Buddhist Southeast Asia, and also amidst the dent kingdom, Arakan at times encompassed Chittagong region in the southern part of what is today known as Bangladesh, and covered an area larger than modern-day Arakan state. Col. Ba Shin, a Chairman of the Burma Historical Commission, wrote: “Arakan was virtually ruled by Muslims from 1430-1531.”
On October 9, 2016, attacks were carried out by alleged Rohingya militants on police outposts in Maungdaw township of Rakhine State. The Myanmar military responded immediately by deploying large numbers of troops – together with Border Guard Police8 and local paramilitary forces – to carry out “clearance operations” against the suspected attackers. The paramilitary forces are mainly comprised of ethnic Rakhine from local “model villages” set up by the previous military regime in northern Rakhine State, into which non-Rohingya peoples have been resettled from other areas.
In August 2017, Myanmar authorities began launching deadly “clearance operations” against the Rohingya people in northern Rakhine State, resulting in thousands of deaths and forcing more than700,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. The Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar has documented widespread, systematic rape and other sexualized torture of Rohingya women and girls and has found credible reports of sexual violence against Rohingya men and boys. Yet little is known about this male-directed violence. The Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) conducted an exploratory qualitative study to examine the nature and characteristics of sexual violence perpetrated against Rohingya men and boys in Myanmar and in Cox’s Bazar District, Bangladesh, and to evaluate male survivors’ access to services in Bangladesh.
