Rohingya Refugees Tell Stories of Rape, Murder Committed by Myanmar Army
“We could hear them screaming from the paddy field”
I’ve been documenting the horrors that the Rohingya people have endured at the hands of the Myanmar army. This Muslim minority has faced oppression for decades, but the battle to liquidate them has spiked this year. Those who have managed to escape have fled to Bangladesh and have started to speak about what happened when the army raided their villages.
The details from Myanmar’s “clearance operation” of the Rohingya will make anyone cringe and cry. Officers raping girls over and over, slitting their throats afterwards. They also set fire to villages and shot indiscriminately at those who ran out of the buildings.
Rape
The London Times published an article on Friday that provided testimonies from women who were raped by Myanmar soldiers. Doctors have treated these women at a clinic in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh and have reported “evidence of mass sexual assault and are struggling to cope with the numbers.” The Times continued:
Armed with pistols and machetes, the soldiers stormed into Amina’s home, killing her husband with a shot to the head as they came in. When her two-month-old son began crying one soldier seized the child and dashed him against a wall. “My heart shattered into a thousand pieces,” Amina wept.
Two soldiers then held her down as a third man raped her. When she screamed they choked her until finally she endured the attack in silence. “When they pressed my face to a side,” she said, “I saw my son’s lifeless body lying there on the ground.”
Twenty-seven-year-old Rahma recounted how the soldiers separated the men and the women in her village. The soldiers then took the men into a hut at gunpoint and proceeded to set the hut on fire. Then they turned their attention to the women:
The women were forced to strip naked and herded together like cattle. Soldiers handpicked the youngest girls and dragged them away.
One of them was Saba, a 12-year-old girl who lived next door to Rahma. “We could hear them screaming from the paddy field,” Rahma said. They found the girls’ naked bodies floating in a muddy ravine the next day.
The clinic has had to provide many of these women with “emergency contraception and post-exposure prophylaxis for HIV.” More from The London Times:
Mumtaz, 20, said that she was raped by five soldiers and walked to Bangladesh with dried blood still caked on her legs. The makeshift clinic in Cox’s Bazar stitched her up but could only offer paracetamol for the pain.
Nearby was Lena, 26, who describes how the women in her village of Pyaung Pyit were rounded up. “They gathered all the women and started beating us with bamboo sticks,” she said.
“After beating us the military took me and nine other women into a nearby hut. They cursed us in Burmese and told us we did not belong here. Then they started raping us. They slit four of the girl’s throats.”
Another young woman said she and her sister Yasmin, 18, were dragged by their hair and made to strip in a courtyard by soldiers, who tied them up and took it in turns to rape them. When Yasmin spat in one soldier’s face, her sister says she was smashed repeatedly in the face with a rifle butt until she was dead.
Murder
Other refugees have told stories of mass murder in their villages. The Myanmar soldiers arrived, ready to kill. They first shot their guns in the air and then turned on the residents. From The Washington Post:
Mohammed Roshid, a rice farmer, heard the gunfire and fled with his wife and children, but his 80-year-old father, who walks with a stick, wasn’t as nimble. Roshid said he saw a soldier grab Yusuf Ali and slit his throat with such ferocity the old man was nearly decapitated.
“I wanted to go back and save him, but some relatives stopped me because there was so many military,” Roshid, 55, said. “It’s the saddest thing in my life that I could not do anything for my father.”
One rights group said at least 150 people died in three villages:
“I can’t count how many,” said Soe Win, a 10th-grade teacher. “We were all watching what the military did. They slaughtered them one by one. And the blood flowed in the streets.”
When soldiers arrived in the villages, some told the people that they could not stay at home. Mohammad Showife, 23, said soldiers announced “their arrival with a strafe of machine-gun fire.” The Washington Post continued:
He and his family members scattered, and he stopped to help his neighbor Mohammed Rafique, 17, whose right hip had been run clean through by a bullet, back to front. They ran through a mob looting homes and soldiers setting fire to other dwellings with shoulder-fired rocket launchers. Many took refuge in the jungle, where the dense foliage, thick after the monsoon, provided cover.
Once there, some of the women sat silently weeping. Others just looked at each other: What would they do now? They tried to attend to Rafique’s wound with boiled water and torn strips of clothing.
The first night came, an uneasy darkness settled in, the sky flickering with fire and shadows. They did not know then there would be five nights more.
Then the military demanded Mohammed Zubair, 40, hand over his boats. He did so to save his life, but “watched in horror as the military began stacking dead bodies on the boat, one after the other, like lumber, including two 13-year-old boys he knew well.”
From The Independent:
Another man from the same village, named as Sultan Ahmed, 27, told the charity: “Some people were beheaded, and many were cut. We were in the house hiding when [armed residents from a neighbouring village] were beheading people.
“When we saw that, we just ran out the back of the house.”
Survivors from other villages in the region also described seeing people being beheaded or having their throats cut.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
How about a little discussion of the history of this conflict, or is this now an MSM blog that won’t mention that the ‘poor widdle innocent Rohingya’ committed mass murder against the Buddhists in the recent past and have been engaged in a long running ISIS grade insurgency with a stated goal of exterminating the local Buddhist population.
horrifying, true, but i’d like to point out that Mooseslimes the world over do the same thing to other peoples, and each other all the time & it’s never news.
also, Soros is neck deep in this , so, for both reasons, i’m having a hard time getting w*rked up over this.
case in point: https://legalinsurrection.com/2017/09/pakistan-christian-man-sentenced-to-death-for-blasphemy/
Is there substantial corroborating evidence for these atrocities? There is a big problem in Israel with Leftists and Palestinian Arabs inventing stories of misconduct by the IDF, stories which are then lapped up by Leftist news organizations eager to publish about supposed Israeli wrongdoing. So we should consider that the same thing might be happening here.
Rape is a common weapon today. I may have been historically, but for at least some period it was criminalized under Western norms.
Muslims seem to use it commonly, since it raises so much cultural terror.
Other side of the world. It doesn’t affect me, and I’m not too partial to Muslims anyway.
Your response is unfortunate. We should never condone by silence atrocities of this nature. Men killed in combat is one thing. Women and children violated in war crimes is something else.
Unfortunate as well is the Muslim presence in Burma. The British brought them there to be more subservient workers. The British weren’t bothered by exporting Muslims from one territory to the other. The Muslims are not at all shy about putting women and children in harm’s way, to press an advantage. Women and children are suffering, while the leadership of Bangladesh and Myanmar are maneuvering. The Western tradition is that wars are fought between armies of men wearing uniforms. The Germans forced Dutch civilians to walk in front of German tanks, and Dutch forts surrendered. The Muslims will sacrifice women and children. There have been atrocities by the Rohingya, but it is their women and children who suffer when revenge is meted out.
sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
the way i see it is that they are unhappy that the Buddhists are doing to them what they would, and often do, to the Buddhists, whenever they get a chance.
you set the rules, you damn sure have to live by them.
my sympathy for them can be measured in nano-5hits
Feel free to volunteer for military service over there as well as paying for it. I won’t tolerate either of those, and frankly I’m getting tired of paying for other people’s “compassion.”
Yet it was London that got bombed this week by Muslims not Burma.
Are we signing up to be world cop again? I missed the thank you card for the other times, but did notice our embassies being bombed and a bunch of jet planes flown into our buildings.
All those military age Muslims in Syria aren’t running to help their brethren out, they’re running to Germany and raping there.
I’ve read that the attacks on the Rohingya people by the Myanmar army are retaliatory in nature. Rohingyas have conducted terrorist attacks including ones on the army.
Nor is this new:
“Bangladesh Accuses Rohingya Muslims of Attacking Buddhists”
https://blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2012/10/01/bangladesh-accuses-rohingya-muslims-of-attacking-buddhists/
“Buddhist nationalists gathered to condemn recent attacks by Rohingya insurgents”
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2017/0831/In-Myanmar-Buddhists-take-hard-stance-against-Muslim-Rohingya-minority
One Pyrie Sone, A Burmese writes:
“Most of those Rohingyas Muslims(Bengalis) are trained by the Taliban and they are demanding segregation in order to establish their own nation. Refer to this “Rohingya insurgency in Western Myanmar – Wikipedia”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_insurgency_in_Western_Myanmar
And Statement from the Myanmar Government (Press release regarding the attacks on… – Myanmar President Office)
https://www.facebook.com/myanmarpresidentoffice.gov.mm/posts/1113520795362322
So,it’s not that We,Burmese,are attacking Muslims. We are attacking those who are a threat to our national security.
Don’t trust whatever the media shows you. Media manipulates.”
An old expression applies; there are two sides to every story. That the media is only reporting on side tells the whole story. “Agenda journalism” is alive and active.
and so is George Soros and his evil agenda.
Naive Mary doesn’t seem to realize that the Muslims are illegal aliens who trained at an Army base, and attacked undefended villages in the country that was allowing them to break the law. The Muslim crimes were unprovoked and far more severe than those reported in this article according to the Hindustan Times.
Mary seems to have a real issue with Myanmar defending itself from the naked aggression from Bangladesh.
Who, but Mary, could support such cowardly attacks by the Muslims.
Rather than deploring the horrors of war, which we cannot change in the past, it is better to try to improve the future, so these things don’t happen again.
In this case the solution is obvious. Burma is a Buddhist country, one of the last few remaining. The Muslim Rohingya, who are racially Bengalis like those the Muslims in Bangladesh, have never had citizenship in Burma. It’s been very plain the Burmese want them to leave. The atrocities have run both ways.
The article says that those that escape go across the river to Muslim Bangadesh. Nobody in Burma wants to stop them from leaving! They want them to go! They should do it, or receive asylum in another suitable country for example Muslim Pakistan. I understand that Rohingya refugees are being placed in Indiana, in the USA, and that’s a much less suitable placement because the cultural compatibility is not close.
Arty, you have hit upon the muslim solution! Send them ALL back to their native lands and let them establish any kind of religion or laws that they desire. Make them get a visa to visit this country and wear an ankle bracelet monitored by ICE while they are here. What single group in our whole world is responsible for 99% of all terrorism? Why do we act like “Most” muslims are good when there is no evidence that they ever fight bad muslims? Why have we made them a protected minority class when they are the largest single denomination on this planet? Why is this so hard to figure out by the “Elite”?
The Leftist Elite know exactly of what Islam consists. One predator recognizes another. The Left and Islam are in a temporary “marriage of convenience” as both recognize that the Western right is a far greater obstacle to their agenda than either believes the other to be.
Islam has bloody borders. These atrocities are ugly – evil – regardless of who are the perpetrators and who are the victims and who are both. But the modern Hindus can live in peace with the modern Buddhists, and the modern Christians can live in peace with the modern Jews, better than the modern Muslims can live in peace with any of them.
My heart breaks for these people. My heart breaks for the Yazidi under Daesh / ISIS, too. The common thread is Islam. Most Muslims are no doubt decent people – certaily all my Muslim acquaintances seem to be, though I don’t know them well – but looking around at the Muslim world and where it’s heading makes me believe that’s very much in spite of their religion, rather than in part because of it.
sounds like chicago.
There are indeed two sides to this story – and lots of fake news by the usual suspects:
Tuesday, 12 September 2017
Reporting on the Rohingya: “The Tip of a Huge Iceberg of Misinformation” by Hugh Fitzgerald:
Jonathan Head discusses at the BBC website four of the most widely-circulated photographs, ostensibly showing Rohingya victims of current Buddhist violence, that are examples of “fake news.” The first photograph, showing a number of bloated corpses, “does appear on several websites dated last year. This suggests the image is not from the recent violence in Rakhine state.’’ “Suggests” is British understatement for “clearly shows.”
The BBC has ascertained that the second photograph, of a woman mourning a dead man tied to a tree, was taken in Aceh, Indonesia, in June 2003, by a photographer working for Reuters.
The third photograph, of two infants crying over the body of their mother, is from Rwanda in July 1994. It was taken by Albert Facelly for Sipa, and was one of series of photos that won a World Press Award.
It has also been difficult to track down the fourth image, of people immersed in a canal, but it can be found on a website appealing for funds to help victims of recent flooding in Nepal.
In other words, not one of the four photographs widely distributed as examples of Rohingya suffering has anything to do with the Rohingyas. This is what the BBC’s south-east Asia correspondent has confirmed. Surely that ought to be made widely known, and just as surely, it won’t.
This “fake news” is, according to Aung San Suu Kyi, “simply the tip of a huge iceberg of misinformation calculated to create a lot of problems between different communities and with the aim of promoting the interest of the terrorists.”
Let’s refresh our memories of what has been going on in Myanmar this last month. All the news reports coming from Myanmar (Burma) tell the same story: tens of thousands of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority, have been fleeing into Bangladesh, to avoid the sudden upsurge in violence from both Burmese military and civilians. The Rohingya are presented as the innocent and long-suffering victims of “racist” Burmese Buddhists (Islam being, for propaganda purposes, a “race”). Only a handful of the reports mention, and only briefly, as if in passing, that the current violence began when, in mid-August, Rohingya fighters attacked 30 different police stations and an army base, as part of their campaign to stake their claim to Rakhine State, in western Myanmar, and showing themselves able “to strike terror in the hearts” of the Infidels to get it. The attacks left more than 70 dead, Muslims and Buddhists…
http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm?blog_id=66591#.WbuXAEshRNY.twitter
Stay in your own country and they will not bother you.