Burmese soldiers barred the entrance to the mosque, men arrived with machetes and gasoline cans and then, according to Rohingya Muslim eyewitnesses, the killing began.
“Those that ran were hacked to death. Others that got away were shot by the army,” said Master Kamal, a 53-year-old teacher, and one of the survivors of the massacre in Aung Sit Pyin in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. “They were burning houses. We fled to save our lives.”
Kamal told reporters that he saw three neighbors — including a father and son — butchered as he fled, making a 10-day trek across monsoon-drenched hills, rivers and fields to Bangladesh.
Photo: AFP
Interviews with about 10 people from the village who found refuge at Balukhali camp in Bangladesh revealed horrific details of the events in Aung Sit Pyin on Aug. 25.
That was the day Rohingya Muslim militants attacked police posts across Rakhine, sparking a violent crackdown that has so far driven about 300,000 of Myanmar’s 1.1 million Rohingya population across the border.
The stateless Muslim minority blames the Burmese army and Buddhist mobs for the widespread killings.
The testimony is difficult to verify because access to Rakhine is heavily restricted.
The Burmese government has blamed Rohingya militants for the atrocities, including firebombing their own villages and killing civilians suspected of collaborating with the army.
Mohammad Amin, a 66-year-old farmer whose father was a village chief, said his family had lived in Aung Sit Pyin for three generations.
“This is the first time we have fled. I have never witnessed violence like this,” said the wiry farmer, wrapped in a tattered blue sarong in a mud-splattered Balukhali shanty.
When the shooting began he ran into the jungle to hide, saying he crossed a river to avoid soldiers pursuing civilians.
Families scattered. Amin spent days searching for his seven sons and daughters in the brush, dodging military patrols.
“From the other side of the river, I could see everything burning,” he said.
The Burmese army said at least 400 people, mainly militants, have been killed in the violence.
However, there are fears that figure is underestimated, with other Rakhine villages also the target of alleged massacres.
Many of the refugees from Aung Sit Pyin reported seeing people slaughtered, or passing corpses cut down or burned as they sprinted in all directions from advancing forces.
Twenty-six families who made it out are cramped underneath a large tarpaulin sheet in a muddy field behind Balukhali. There are no toilets nor clean water.
Some said the journey took seven days.
Others said they spent up to 12 days hiding from the military and tackling steep passes and rain-soaked jungle to reach Bangladesh.
Anwara Begum said she plunged into a river with her four-year-old son, as soldiers fired at fleeing villagers.
She clung to debris, but lost contact with her other five children in the chaos, saying she hid terrified in the hills while helicopters buzzed overhead.
“I thought I would never see them again,” the 35-year-old told reporters.
Her other five children, aged 12 to 19, linked up with their father at the border and the family was reunited in Bangladesh, she said.
Others have been less fortunate.
Nearly 100 people have drowned trying to cross the Naf River on the border, their bodies washing up on the shore.
Others have arrived bearing injuries consistent with bullet wounds, or missing limbs from alleged landmines placed to deter evacuees from returning.
The sprawling camps inside Bangladesh have swelled with newcomers like Jamal Hussain, 12, who said his five older brothers were cut down by machine gun fire in Aung Sit Pyin as they ran.
He has not seen his parents or seven sisters since.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the