Letter of Concern to Oxford University Press regarding Dr Jacques Leider and ORE Asian History Series 

5 February 2018 

We, the undersigned group of scholars and rights campaigners, are disturbed by the fact that OUP’s Oxford Research Encyclopedias (ORE) Asian History series has commissioned Dr Jacques Leider, head of the Bangkok-based Ecole Française de l’ Extrême-Orient (EFEO) and a well-known advisor to the Myanmar military’s Armed Forces Historical Museum in Naypyidaw, to write a reference article on the subject of the Rohingya people in the forthcoming series: the ORE Asian History (under “Political”, see “Rohingya: Emergence and Vicissitudes of a Communal Muslim Identity in Myanmar (Jacques Leider), forthcoming Jan–Mar 2018”, found 03 February 2018 at: http://asianhistory.oxfordre.com/page/forthcoming/). 

As you know, the Tatmadaw (the official name of the Myanmar armed forces) has been credibly accused of committing crimes under international law including crimes against humanity and even the crime of all crimes, genocide, against the predominantly Muslim Rohingya. 

As you also know, the Oxford University Press (OUP) has a very well-earned reputation for fairness and authority in the fields in which they publish reference material. Anything published by OUP online about the Rohingya and Myanmar will be given a great deal of credibility by both scholars and the general public and carry a great deal of weight in any ongoing disputes over the exact legal name of the crimes against this world’s largest stateless population whose group identity and historical presence is being erased officially and popularly in Myanmar. 

We therefore draw your attention to our following concerns regarding your selection of Dr Jacques Leider to write a reference article for the ORE Asian History series: 

(1) We find that positions taken by Dr Leider in interviews with the press, in public talks and in published articles raise serious questions about his objectivity regarding the Rohingya and their history. His well-documented pattern of denials that the Myanmar military-directed mass violence and scorched-earth military operations against the Rohingya community – the subject of his ORE article – is challenged by the growing body of legal analyses and human rights research reports which point to the fact that Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya as a group amounts to international crimes including crimes against humanity and genocide. 

(2) We believe that televised appearances by Dr Leider with military and government officials condoning state policies against the Rohingya give the appearance to the viewing public that he validates views that underlie the Myanmar military's ousting in 2017 of 680,000 people and the massacre of Rohingya for which the military has recently admitted responsibility. A recent English-Burmese bilingual book entitled “Talk on Rakhine Issue: Discussion on Finding Solutions” published by the Ministry of Defence’s Myawaddy News Group in Myanmar highlights the fact, in photos and text, that Dr Leider was the only foreign expert to participate in the strategic discussion organized by this official propaganda organ of the Myanmar MOD in the first month of what the United Nations officially described as “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya. On 7 and 8 September 2017, Dr Leider was on stage seated with two ex-Lt-Colonels named Than Aye and Ko Ko Hlaing (respectively, ex-officer-in-charge of the strategic affairs unit and the ex-adviser to the former General and former President Thein Sein 2010-15) in the Myanmar capital Naypyidaw at the said invitation-only event billed as “Talk on Rakhine Issue: Discussion on Finding Solutions”. 

In the introduction of the aforementioned book published by the Myanmar Military, the position of Myanmar regarding the actions taken against the Rohingya – which have been abundantly documented and assessed as egregious human rights violations by six successive UN Special Rapporteurs on the human rights situation in Myanmar since 1992 as well as by the world’s leading human rights monitors such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – is presented as a legitimate course of action (that is, by the Myanmar military to defend the country against Islam’s attempt to expand its demographic power base and dominate the world; see supra at p. 4 “Talk on Rakhine Issues”, Ministry of Defence Myawaddy News Group). 

In these strategic discussions, ex-Colonel Ko Ko Hlaing openly singled out Oxford University as a very influential institution which hosted an international conference on the Rohingya where knowledge about the Rohingya (history, identity and repression) was discussed and disseminated. By this, he implied that Oxford University – and other similarly influential entities – is somewhere that the Myanmar military needs to try to make strategic inroads to promote its official denial both of Rohingya identity and history, and of the state-directed terror and expulsion. 

The audience was mainly composed of officials from the Ministry of Defence. Myanmar’s official and popular Islamophobia – whereby Muslims have been scapegoated in the same way as the Jews were in the old Europe – is well-documented in scholarly and human rights literature. These discussions took place at the time Leider’s host organization (the Myanmar military) was responsible for the violent deaths of “at least 6,700 Rohingya, in the most conservative estimations […] including at least 730 children below the age of five years,” in the first month alone of the military operations conducted in Northern Rakhine state of Myanmar (i.e. from 25 August to 24 September 2017), according to the findings from a limited survey carried out by the international humanitarian NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) among the survivors of this wave of ethnic cleansing who are now in refugee camps in Chittagong, Bangladesh (see “Myanmar/Bangladesh: MSF surveys estimate that at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed during the attacks in Myanmar” http://www.msf.org/en/article/myanmarbangladesh-msf-surveys-estimate-least-6700-rohingya-were-killed-during-attacks ). 

(3) Dr Leider’s insistence (see “History Behind Rakhine State Conflict” https://www.irrawaddy.com/from-the-archive/history-behind-rakhine-state-conflict.html, “The Frictions in the Rakhine State Are Less About Islamophobia Than Rohingya-Phobia” https://thewire.in/182611/frictions-rakhine-state-less-islamophobia-rohingya-phobia/ , and “The Truth About Myanmar’s Rohingya Issue” https://thediplomat.com/2016/03/the-truth-about-myanmars-rohingya-issue/ ) that Rohingya identity – not Rakhine or the majority Burmese – be critically scrutinized as a political identity born out of political and communal conflict indicates a bias against Rohingya claims of their long documented history of settled existence in Rakhine state. This pronounced bias (in addition to his evident relations with the Myanmar military) should have raised doubts about his appropriateness to write a reference article about the Rohingya. We perceive in Dr Leider’s writings and public statements an unconcealed bias against Muslim Rohingyas, which results in his dismissal or wilful ignorance of irrefutable (and easily accessible) evidence that effectively undermines his thesis which is that the Rohingya, unlike other “genuinely ethnic identities”, were manufactured by Muslim fighters or Mujahideens in the post-independence period of the 1950’s. For instance, Dr Leider labels it a “delusion” that the Government of the Union of Burma recognized the Rohingya as a constitutive ethnic group of the Union following the surrender of the separatist Mujahideen in July 1961. The irrefutable fact is this: as late as 1964, the Government of Burma officially included the Rohingya as an ethnic group of Burma in its official Burmese language “Encyclopaedia Myanmar” (V. 9). In addition, the Rohingya were granted a slot on the country’s sole broadcasting station known as the Burma Broadcasting Service (BBS) as an indigenous language programme, broadcast three times per week, alongside other indigenous languages such as Shan, Lahu, etc., until the 3rd year (1964) of the military rule of General Ne Win. 

The readily accessible official documentation supports the Rohingya’s collective claim that they were officially recognized as an ethnic group of the Union of Burma, from which follows the conclusion that it is the State of Myanmar that has embarked on the project of erasing Rohingya ethnic identity, their history and presence which predates the formation of the post-colonial state of the Union of Burma in 1948. Dr Leider’s choice to ignore these primary and official sources regarding Rohingya ethnic identity and nationality further reinforces Myanmar’s institutionalized propaganda and Fake News that the Rohingya do not exist as an ethnic nationality, while lending a veneer of objective scholarly authority. We observe, further, that there is an alarming parallel between Myanmar’s de-nationalization and identity destruction and the German de-nationalization of the Jewish population under Nazi rule. 

(4) Genocide denial is a crime in countries such as Germany. Although there is no UK or international law against which the denial of state-directed crimes against humanity, including genocide, of the Rohingya can be judged, the consensus is emerging among the world’s leading institutions and scholars in the field of genocide studies – from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yale University Human Rights Law Clinic, the University of Washington Law School, the Queen Mary University of London International State Crimes Initiative to the Russell-Sartre-inspired Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Myanmar – that Myanmar is responsible for genocide. Even the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has expressly stated that he is “not ruling out” that genocide is being committed against the Rohingya. Yet, despite the well-publicized findings by world-renowned research institutes and scholars of genocide, Dr Leider dismisses them. He also fails to acknowledge that Myanmar’s majoritarian racism among the country’s Buddhists is violent. He characterises Buddhist racism towards the Rohingya as merely “strong sentiment”. 

We do not deny that Dr Leider, like anyone else, has a right to comment on the Rohingya or any other topic, but when someone takes such a strong position against the historicity of one group's claims regarding ethnicity/identity (and only one group's in a context of conflict between two or more groups), it seems unfair that they should be commissioned for a project to write an article on the ethnic group in question that seeks to present itself as a fair and unbiased reference source. The ORE is certainly not an appropriate vehicle in which to publish such views. Indeed, OUP should have nothing to do with them. 

We note also that OUP appears only to have commissioned an article on the Rohingya and not on the Rakhine Buddhist community whose ethnic claims, we understand, are no stronger than those of the Rohingya. It is hard to interpret this as other than OUP’s taking a stand in favour of the Myanmar military and against the Rohingya for reasons unclear and that OUP supports, at least indirectly, the current ethnic cleansing which Dr Leider's writings and media appearances are used to deny. 

Finally, it needs to be stressed that there is something more consequential than our objection per se to OUP’s commissioning a reference article by Dr Leider on the target of the Myanmar military's repression. That is the question whether Western educational institutions of worldwide influence should allow themselves, wittingly or not, to be used as a platform by illiberal regimes through academics and scholars whom the regimes view as supporters of their views (and hence as, in effect, their proxies for propaganda). The well-reported cases of Cambridge University Press and China, or the LSE and the Ghaddafi regime, spring to mind. 

It is worth quoting the recent words of Ruth Barnett, a Jewish Kindertransport survivor in Britain: 

“‘Never Again’ is unlikely to be achieved in our lifetime but it is we who need to make an effective input towards making it happen. Each and every one of us can do something. It is essential to learn to contain our own violent impulses so that we can talk and negotiate instead of exacerbating and increasing the violence of others. 

“Perhaps the most poisonous factor is the toleration and cover-up of denial. Denial opens the door for others to commit crimes against humanity, as we clearly see others getting away with it. We need to enthuse and stimulate curiosity and an insistence to expose the truth. 

“We live with so much denial that many people can no longer distinguish between misinformation, disinformation and truth." 

(Ruth Barnett, 27 January 2018, "I Survived The Holocaust. Merely Remembering It Is No Longer Good Enough", RightsInfo.org, 

https://rightsinfo.org/why-remembering-the-holocaust-isnt-enough/ ) 

We sincerely urge OUP to reconsider your editorial decision to commission Dr Leider to write a reference article on the subject of the Rohingya. We ask that if this article goes ahead, it includes a clear disclaimer that Dr Leider is not a distant observer and that the article should be considered as an opinion piece, not as an unbiased reference source, regarding a controversial subject which has already been documented by MSF to have caused the deaths of over 6,700 Rohingya in the first month of Myanmar’s 2017 military attack and the flight of 680,000 refugees over several months. 

1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University, USA 

2. Nursyahbani Katjasungkana, National Coordinator of Indonesia Legal Aid Association for Women, Indonesia 

3. Rainer Schulze, Professor Emeritus of Modern European History, University of Essex, and Founding Editor of the journal “The Holocaust in History and Memory,” UK 

4. Noam Chomsky, American linguist, philosopher and activist (Institute Professor, MIT), USA 

5. Mofidul Hoque, author and activist, Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice, Liberation War Museum, Bangladesh 

6. Tapan Bose, filmmaker, human rights defender, India 

7. Richard Falk, Professor of International Law, Emeritus, Princeton University, USA 

8. Barbara Harrell-Bond, OBE Emerita Professor and Founding Director of The Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford 1982–1996, UK 

9. Barbara Harriss-White, Emeritus Professor of Development Studies, Oxford University, Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, UK 

10. Ritu Dewan, Vice President, Indian Society of Labour Economics; Director Centre for Development Research and Action; Executive Director, Centre for Study of Society and Secularism; President, Indian Association for Women's Studies (2014-17) 

11. Prof. Gregory Stanton, Founding Chairman, Genocide Watch & George Mason University. Arlington, Virginia, USA 

12. Johan Galtung, Founder, Peace Studies 

13. Youk Chhang, Chairman, Genocide Documentation Center of Camboda/The Sleuk Rith Institute, Cambodia 

14. Abdul Malik Mujahid, Chair Emeritus Parliament of the World's Religions 

15. Karen Jungblut, Director of Global Initiatives, USC Shoah Foundation, USA 

16. María do Mar Castro Varela, Professor of Pedagogy and Social Work and activist, Alice Salomon University, Berlin, Germany 

17. C Abrar, Professor of International Relations, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh 

18. John H. Weiss, Associate Professor of History, Cornell University, USA 

19. Khin Mai Aung, Burmese American civil rights lawyer and writer, New York, USA 

20. Maung Zarni, Burmese human rights activist and scholar, Genocide Documentation Center of Cambodia/The Sleuk Rith Institute 

21. Harn Yawnghwe, Executive Director, Associates to Develop Democratic Burma Inc./Euro-Burma Office, Canada 

22. Bilal Raschid, Past President of Burmese Muslim Association 

23. Swagato Sarkar, DPhil (Oxford), Associate Professor, O.P. Jindal Global University, India 

24. Sumeet Mhaskar, DPhil (Oxford), O.P. Jindal Global University, India 

25. Prof. Donesh Mohan, Academic, India 

26. Dr. Peggy Mohan, Author, India 

27. Prof. Ranabir Samaddar, Academic, India 

28. Rita Manchanda, Feminist writer, India 

29. Samsul Islam, Author, India 

30. Neelima Sharma, Theatre activist, India 

31. Jawed Naqvi, journalist, India 

32. Seema Mustafa, journalist, India 

33. Ashok Agrwaal, lawyer, India 

34. Dr. Walid Salem, Al Quds University & the Director of The Centre for Democracy and Community Development, East Jerusalem, Palestine 

35. Jun Nishikawa, PhD, professor emeritus, Waseda University, Japan 

36. Dr Ravi P Bhatia, an educationist and peace researcher & Retired professor, Delhi University, India 

37. Gill H. boehringer, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Macquarie University School of Law, Sydney , Australia 

38. Paul Copeland, C M, (Recipient, Order of Canada), Lawyer, Toronto, Canada 

39. U Kyaw Win, Professor Emeritus, Orange Coast College, California, USA 

40. Professor Michael W. Charney, Academic, UK 

41. Dr Amit Upadhyay, Assistant professor, TISS Hyderabad, India 

42. Dr. Nicola Suyin Pocock, United Nations University International Institute of Global Health, Malaysia 

43. Rezaur Rahman Lenin,Academic Activist, Adjuct Faculty, Eastern University Bangladesh & Executive Director, Law Life Culture, Bangladesh 

44. Natalie Brinham, ESRC PhD scholar, Queen Mary University of London School of Law, UK 

45. Niranjan Sahoo, PhD, Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, India 

46. Prof. Dr. Célestin Tagou, Prof. of PS, IR P&D Studies, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and International Relations, Protestant University of Central Africa, Executive Secretariat of the Network of Protestant Universities of Africa

47. Dr. Tilman Evers, Germany 

48. Jørgen Johansen, Deputy Editor of Journal of Resistance Studies, Sweden 

49. Sarah Tobias, philanthropist & activist, Canada 

50. Miki Lanza, Movimento Nonviolento c/o Centro Studi Sereno Regis, Torino, Italy 

51. Oskar Butcher, human rights activist and scholar, Germany 

52. Professor Emeritus George Kent, University of Hawai'i and Deputy Editor, World Nutrition, USA 

53. Sebastian Eck, Galtung-Institut, Switzerland 

54. Robert J. Burrowes Ph.D., co-founder 'The People's Charter to Create a Nonviolent World', Australia 

55. Shadi Sadr, Executive Director of Justice for Iran, UK 

56. Tasnim Nazeer, Award-winning journalist and Universal Peace Federation Ambassador for Peace, UK 

57. Emir Ramic, Academic, Ph.D., Chairman of the Institute for Research of Genocide, Canada 

58. Nadeem Haque, P.Eng. - Director of the Institute of Higher Reasoning (IHR), Canada 

59. Diana de la Rúa Eugenio, President of Asociación Respuesta para la Paz -ARP-, member NGO of OAS, President of International Peace Research Association Foundation -IPRA Foundation, Argentina 

60. Dr. Syeda Hamid, Academic and Author, India 

61. Dr. Siddiq Wahid, Historian and Educationist, India 

62. Dr. Syed Ahmed Haroon, Psychiatrist, Pakistan 

63. Anis Haroon, Poet, Pakistan 

64. Sushil Pyakurel, Adviser to President of Nepal 

65. Porf. Noor Ahmad Baba, Academic, India 

66. Anand Patwardhan, Filmmaker, India 

67. Rodolphe Prom, President, Destination Justice, Cambodia 

68. Doreen Chen, Co-Director, Destination Justice, Cambodia 

69. Syed Zainul Abedin, Painter, Poet, Journalist, Bangladesh 

70. Dr. Navsharan Singh, Researcher and author, India 

71. Leo fernandez, IT Specialist, India 

72. Feroz Medhi, Filmmaker social activist, Canada 

73. John Packer, Associate Professor of Law and Director, Human Rights Research and Education Centre, University of Ottawa, Canada 

74. Fathima, MA Women's Studies Student, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India 

75. Rana Jawad, University of Bath, UK 

76. Prof. Dr. Sami A. Al-Arian Director and Public Affairs Professor, Center for Islam and Global Affairs İslam ve Küresel İlişkiler Merkezi, Turkey 

77. Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation and Director of the International State Crime Initiative, Queen Mary University of London, UK 

78. Karen Busby, Professor of Law & Director, Centre for Human Rights Research, University of Manitoba 

79. Lyal S. Sunga, Visiting Professor in International Relations and Global Politics, The American University of Rome, Italy 

80. Dr. Christina Szurlej, Assistant Professor, St. Thomas University (Canada) 

81. Matthew Smith, Chief Executive Officer, Fortify Rights

But what is exactly Beech's point of singling out a 9-year old kid who said he was a Rohingya from Myanmar where cricket is not played or popular, who fled the country, saying he "liked cricket"i,? I saw many a Bangladeshi children playing crickets on the beech of the Bay of Bengal, about half -hour drive from large refugee camps.

Many Bengladeshi children live within walking distance from the camps - in Bangladeshi villages along Tek Naf river and along the coast.

If her intention is to make sure that other media outlets separate facts from fictions then her intention is exceedingly self-conceited: some of the most accurate stories with depths on Rohingyas are written by freelancers on the margins who do real investigative journalism - not the mainstream corporate New York Times.

So, Beech was not questioning the number of this grown-up Rohingya male - who may simply be boosting how great a man he was - as opposed to poking a hole at a 9-year child who may or may not even be a Rohingya child.

Then Beech recycles this vague and well-worn message that Muslims have been in Western Myanmar for generations while choosing not to point out the fact that Rohingyas were officially recognized as both citizens and an ethnic minority of Myanmar in the Encyclopedia of the Union of Burma as late as 1964.

Why is the international community still struggling to put a name to what's happening in Myanmar?

The Associated Press on Thursday published an exclusive report that adds to a catalog of horrors in Myanmar. The news agency confirmed the presence of at least five previously unreported mass graves filled with the bodies of Rohingya villagers. This counters the Myanmar government’s line that it is only fighting Rohingya insurgents and that such massacres are not taking place.

Yanghee Lee, the U.N.’s special envoy on Myanmar, responded to the report that the months-long military operation against the Rohingya has “the hallmarks” of a genocide” — but wouldn’t say it outright.

The Rohingya are a Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, where they don’t have citizenship rights and have been subject to multiple rounds of crackdowns for decades. The most recent crackdown, started in August after insurgents launched deadly attacks on police posts, has been by far the most brutal. Thus far, it has led to:

• Nearly 700,000 Rohingya (out of 1.1 million) fleeing into camps in neighboring Bangladesh
• At least 9,000 Rohingya being killed in the first four months
• Reports of near famine and starvation conditions among Rohingya — especially children — remaining in Myanmar
• Documentation of mass rape of Rohingya girls and women by Myanmar military
• The destruction of hundreds of Rohingya villages by the Myanmar military

Bangladesh and Myanmar have signed a deal to repatriate Rohingya refugees who fled the conflict, but neither government has offered details on how the Rohingya will be sent back home safely when their villages have been burned down and even at the best of times, they were living under apartheid conditions in Myanmar.

The United Nations and the United States got around to calling the operation “ethnic cleansing” in the fall, but have thus far avoided saying it rises to the level of all-out genocide. Genocide is defined as acts “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole, or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” and is a crime under international law. Ethnic cleansing is the “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” It is not in violation of any specific international law.

In December, Zeid Ra‘ad al-Hussein, the U.N.’s human rights chief, asked: “Can anyone — can anyone — rule out that elements of genocide may be present?”

Zeid will not be seeking another term in the position, citing “the current geopolitical context, might involve bending a knee in supplication; muting a statement of advocacy; lessening the independence and integrity of my voice.” Veteran diplomat Bill Richardson, a member of the advisory group on the Rohingya crisis, also announced his resignation from his position earlier this month saying that the board’s mission was tantamount to “whitewash” and said Myanmar’s leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, lacked “moral leadership.”

“It’s disappointing that this has been called the most egregious example of persecution, ethnic cleansing, even of genocide in the world today, and yet, there does not seem to be much attention being given to it,” said Robert Marro, director outreach in Washington for the Burma Task Force.

“Even people like Bill Richardson resigning from the commission and criticizing Suu Kyi is not making headline news,” he told ThinkProgress, adding the fact that so little attention is being paid in general to the situation is “very disappointing,” especially given that the crisis is ongoing.

“We’ve been saying more months and months that are all of the signs are indicative of some kind of genocide going on.” Marro said that all of the group’s field research indicates that the number of those killed is “substantially greater” than official estimates. He added that he’s not surprised that these graves were discovered and is certain others will be found.

Still, the U.N. — and the international community writ large — is trying to read the tea leaves laid out by mass graves before trying to figure out if Maynmar is carrying out a genocide. Lee told reporters that she is unable to make any definitive statement about genocide until, according to the AP, a “credible international tribunal or court” makes that determination, but, she added, the U.N. is “seeing signs and is building up to that.” 

BALUKHALI REFUGEE CAMP, Bangladesh — The faces of the men half-buried in the mass graves had been burned away by acid or blasted by bullets. Noor Kadir finally recognized his friends only by the colors of their shorts.

Kadir and 14 others, all Rohingya Muslims in the Myanmar village of Gu Dar Pyin, had been choosing players for the soccer-like game of chinlone when the gunfire began. They scattered from what sounded like hard rain on a tin roof. By the time the Myanmar military stopped shooting, only Kadir and two teammates were left alive.

Days later, Kadir found six of his friends among the bodies in two graves.

They are among at least five mass graves, all previously unreported, that have been confirmed by The Associated Press through multiple interviews with more than two dozen survivors in Bangladesh refugee camps and through time-stamped cellphone videos. The Myanmar government regularly claims such massacres of the Rohingya never happened, and has acknowledged only one mass grave containing 10 “terrorists” in the village of Inn Din. However, the AP’s reporting shows a systematic slaughter of Rohingya Muslim civilians by the military, with help from Buddhist neighbors — and suggests many more graves hold many more people.

“It was a mixed-up jumble of corpses piled on top of each other,” said Kadir, a 24-year-old firewood collector. “I felt such sorrow for them.”

The graves are the newest piece of evidence for what looks increasingly like a genocide in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state against the Rohingya, a long-persecuted ethnic Muslim minority in the predominantly Buddhist country. The U.N. special envoy on human rights in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, said Thursday that the military’s operations against the Rohingya bear “the hallmarks of a genocide.”

Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement that the AP report “raises the stakes for the international community to demand accountability from Myanmar.”

“It’s time for EU and the U.S. to get serious about identifying and leveling targeted sanctions against the Burmese military commanders and soldiers responsible for these rights crimes, and for the U.N. to lead the charge for a global arms embargo, and an end of training and engagement for the Tatmadaw,” he said, using the local name for Myanmar’s military.

Repeated calls to Myanmar’s military communications office went unanswered Wednesday and Thursday. Htun Naing, a local security police officer in Buthidaung township, where the village is located, said he “hasn’t heard of such mass graves.”

Myanmar has cut off access to Gu Dar Pyin, so it’s unclear just how many people died, but satellite images obtained by the AP from DigitalGlobe, along with video of homes reduced to ash, reveal a village that has been wiped out. Community leaders in the refugee camps have compiled a list of 75 dead so far, and villagers estimate the toll could be as high as 400, based on testimony from relatives and the bodies they’ve seen in the graves and strewn about the area. A large number of the survivors carry scars from bullet wounds, including a 3-year-old boy and his grandmother.

Almost every villager interviewed by the AP saw three large mass graves at Gu Dar Pyin’s northern entrance, near the main road, where witnesses say soldiers herded and killed most of the Rohingya. A handful of witnesses confirmed two other big graves near a hillside cemetery, not too far away from a school where more than 100 soldiers were stationed after the massacre. Villagers also saw other, smaller graves scattered around the village.

In the videos of the graves obtained by the AP, dating to 13 days after the killing began, blue-green puddles of acid sludge surround corpses without heads and torsos that jut into the air. Skeletal hands seem to claw at the ground.

___

THE MASSACRE

Survivors said that the soldiers carefully planned the Aug. 27 attack, and then deliberately tried to hide what they had done. They came to the slaughter armed not only with rifles, knives, rocket launchers and grenades, but also with shovels to dig pits and acid to burn away faces and hands so that the bodies could not be identified. Two days before the attack, villagers say, soldiers were seen buying 12 large containers of acid at a nearby village’s market.

The killing began around noon, when more than 200 soldiers swept into Gu Dar Pyin from the direction of a Buddhist village to the south, firing their weapons. The Rohingya who could move fast enough ran toward the north or toward a river in the east, said Mohammad Sha, 37, a shop owner and farmer.

Sha hid in a grove of coconut trees near the river with more than 100 others and watched as the soldiers searched Muslim homes. Dozens of Buddhists from neighboring villages, their faces partly covered with scarves, loaded the possessions they found into about 10 pushcarts. Then the soldiers burned down the homes, shooting anyone who couldn’t flee, Sha said.

At the same time, another group of soldiers closed in from the north, encircling Gu Dar Pyin and trapping villagers in a tightening noose.

When Mohammad Younus, 25, heard explosions from hand grenades and rocket launchers, he ran to the road. He was shot twice while trying to call his family. One of the bullets, still in his hip, can be seen when he pinches the skin.

His brother found him crawling on his hands and knees and carried him to some underbrush, where Younus lay for seven hours. At one point, he saw three trucks stop and begin loading dead bodies before heading off toward the cemetery.

Buddhist villagers then moved through Gu Dar Pyin in a sort of mopping-up operation, using knives to cut the throats of the injured, survivors said, and working with soldiers to throw small children and the elderly into the fires.

“People were screaming, crying, pleading for their lives, but the soldiers just shot continuously,” said Mohammad Rayes, 23, a schoolteacher who climbed a tree and watched.

Kadir, the chinlone player, was shot twice in the foot but managed to drag himself under a bridge, where he removed one of the bullets himself. Then he watched, half-delirious, for 16 hours as soldiers, police and Buddhist neighbors killed unarmed Rohingya and burned the village.

“I couldn’t move,” he said. “I thought I was dead. I began to forget why I was there, to forget that all around me people were dying.”

Near dawn, three boys creeping toward the bridge from another village to see what had happened heard Kadir’s groans and brought him back with them.

For days, Rohingya from the area stole into Gu Dar Pyin and rescued people who’d been left for dead by the soldiers. Thousands of people from the area hid deep in the jungle, stranded without food except for the leaves and trees they tried to eat. More than 20 infants and toddlers died because of the lack of food and water, villagers said.

A day after the shooting began, another group of survivors watched from a distant mountain as Gu Dar Pyin burned, the flames and smoke snaking up into a darkening sky.

___

THE MASS GRAVES

Six days after the massacre, Kadir risked his life to dodge the dozens of Myanmar soldiers occupying the local school so he could look for his four cousins. That’s when he found his teammates half-buried in the mass graves. He also saw four plastic containers that turned out to contain acid.

In the next days and weeks, other villagers braved the soldiers to try to find whatever was left of their loved ones. Dozens of bodies littered the paths and compounds of the wrecked homes; they filled latrine pits. The survivors soon learned that taller, darker green patches of rice shoots in the paddies marked the spots where the dead had fallen.

As monsoon rains pounded the sometimes thin layer of dirt on the graves to mud, more bloated bodies began to rise to the surface.

“There were so many bodies in so many different places,” said Mohammad Lalmia, 20, a farmer whose family owned a pond that became the largest of the mass graves. “They couldn’t hide all the death.”

Eleven days after the attack, Lalmia set out to see if the soldiers had destroyed the Quran in the village mosque. He walked quickly along the edge of the jungle to the mosque, where he found torn pages from the Muslim sacred book scattered about.

As he tried to clean up, someone shouted that the soldiers were coming. He fled through an open window, looking back over his shoulder at about 15 patrolling soldiers.

When he turned back to the path, he stopped abruptly: A human hand stuck out of a cleared patch of earth.

Lalmia counted about 10 bodies on the grave’s surface. Although he was worried about the military finding him, he used a six-foot bamboo stick to check the pit’s depth. The stick disappeared into the loose soil, which made him think that the grave was deep enough to hold at least another 10 bodies.

“I was shocked to be that near so many bodies I hadn’t known about,” Lalmia said. He and other villagers also saw another large grave in the area.

He estimates that soldiers dumped about 80 bodies into his family’s pond and about 20 in each of the other four major graves. He said about 150 other bodies were left where they fell.

Three of the big graves were in the north of the village. Two of those pits were about 15 feet wide and 7.5 feet long, villagers said. The pond, which Lalmia had helped dig, measured about nine feet deep and 112 square feet.

Many other smaller graves with three, five, seven, 10 bodies in them were scattered across Gu Dar Pyin. During a short walk, Abdul Noor, an 85-year-old farmer, saw three dead bodies stuffed into what might have been a latrine hole and covered with soil. He saw another two near some banana plants, and three in the corner of a compound.

“I tried to see more, but the stench was overwhelming and the soldiers were still at the school,” he said.

Two other men separately said they saw another latrine filled with bodies and covered with a thin layer of soil. They said it contained between five and 10 bodies on the top, and thought there were at least five more corpses below.

After 12 days, Younus went to try to find four family members who’d been killed. He saw people in the graves without hair or skin who he thought had been burned with acid, and dozens of decomposing bodies in the rice fields.

The next day, on Sept. 9, villager Mohammad Karim, 26, captured three videos of mass graves that were time-stamped between 10:12 a.m. and 10:14 a.m., when he said soldiers chased him away. When he fled to Bangladesh, Karim removed the memory card from his phone, wrapped it in plastic and tied it to his thigh to hide it from Myanmar police.

In the Bangladesh refugee camps, nearly two dozen other Rohingya from Gu Dar Pyin confirmed that the videos showed mass graves in the north of the village. They easily picked out details from a geography they knew intimately, such as the way certain banana plants were positioned near certain rice paddies.

The videos show what appear to be bones wrapped in rotting clothing in a soupy muck. In one, the hands of a headless corpse grasp at the earth; most of the skin seems melted away by acid that has stained the earth blue. Nearby are two bloated legs clad in shorts. A few paces away, the bones of a rib cage emerge from the dirt.

The AP saw several other videos that appeared to show graves in the village, but only Karim’s contained the original time stamps. In some cases, villagers said Myanmar soldiers took their phones and memory cards, sometimes at knife and gun point, at the checkpoints they had to pass through on the way to Bangladesh.

Some survivors never found the bodies of their loved ones.

Rohima Khatu, 45, recounted her story as tears streamed down the face of her 9-year-old daughter, Hurjannat, who sat silently by her mother’s side.

Khatu was determined to find her husband, even though women risked not only death but rape if they were caught by the soldiers. Villagers said her husband was shot after he stayed home to protect their 10 cows, five chickens and eight doves, along with their rice stockpiles.

So 15 days after the massacre, she searched for him in the graves at Gu Dar Pyin’s northern entrance, trying to identify him by the green lungi and white button-down shirt he had been wearing. Only 10 minutes passed before someone shouted that about 20 soldiers were coming.

“There were dead bodies everywhere, bones and body parts, all decomposing, so I couldn’t tell which one was my husband,” Khatu said. “I was weeping while I was there. I was crying loudly, ‘Where did you go? Where did you go?’”

“I have lost everything.”

___

Foster Klug has covered Asia for the AP since 2005. Follow on www.twitter.com/apklug

January 29, 2018

Buthidaung, Arakan State -- Five Rohingya houses and two Cowsheds have been destroyed in a fire in Buthidaung Township this afternoon.

It has been reported that the fire broke out at 'Kyauk Phyu Taung' village in Buthidaung around 3 pm local time. Although the exact cause of the fire is unidentified, the villagers highly suspect that the BGP (Border Guard Police) set the houses on fire.

"The Immigration, Ma-Ka-Pha (short form of 'Team for Prevention of Illegal Immigration from Westgate') and the BGP arrived at the village this morning to conduct 'Headcount (Census) Operation'. While all the villagers gathered at one place, most parts of the village were void of people. 

"The BGP personnel were making rounds and hunting birds in the village. It was around that time, the fire started, said a villager to RB News.

Amidst the presence of the BGP, the villagers were apparently afraid to approach to the scene to extinguish the fire. The Fire Brigade arrived at the village after the fire razed the five houses and two other cowsheds.

Since August 25, 2017, the Joint Forces of Burmese (Myanmar) Military and BGP have entirely or partially burnt down more than 350 Rohingya villages in Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathedaung Townships.

[Reported by RB Correspondent; Edited by M.S. Anwar]

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