GENOCIDE IN MYANMAR

COUNTDOWN TO ANNIHILATION: GENOCIDE IN MYANMAR
In Thandoli’s June 2012 ‘battle of the creek’, police were reported as explicitly authorising Rakhine
attacks on Rohingya. A Rakhine village administrator told researchers:
People were invited to fight. I also joined the fight at Thandoli [Rohingya village]. They had a
loud speaker, members of a group, but I don’t want to give the name of the individuals/group
who came. I didn’t want to kill anyone because they were my workers [Muslims]. Nobody was
injured from my village. 30-40 villagers from here went to fight. Three Rakhine were killed.
I saw one body of a Muslim man who was killed. Fighting went on for 30 minutes. Villagers
from here went to burn down the Muslim village with fire torches, with hay. We tried to burn
the village in the first day but we couldn’t. Muslim villagers were shooting into the air so we
were frightened and ran away. Thirty minutes later, we tried again and that time we ended up
fighting each other. We had sticks and knives to fight.
The police came, as well as a three star general, because I informed them that Rakhine had been
killed. I told the police that we wanted to go back and fight. They [police] authorised us to attack
the Muslim village after checking with us if we thought we had enough men to win, once we
confirmed we did, they withdrew. The police allowed us to attack the Muslims. The police, they
were from Sittwe. Many Muslim people fled when the attack happened. 238
The evidence strongly suggests not only that a calculated decision was made by the State authorities to
allow the massacres to take place, but also that security forces participated in some instances. This lends
credence to the claim that the killings of Rohingya and the destruction of their neighbourhoods was both
planned and managed by State authorities. One Rakhine villager told ISCI:
The villagers from this village were involved in the fighting. I think that about 200 people went
from my village out of a population of 1,500 … the express bus came to the entrance of the village
and we all went to Ming Chin ... apparently the military police arrived and the villagers split up
into small groups because the police shot into the air. We left the village at 9am and we were
back on the express bus around 3-4pm. 239
Rohingya eyewitnesses reported the involvement of large numbers of Rakhine women wielding knives
and spears. According to one Aung Mingalar elder:
Many Rakhine women were also involved, they were wearing short pants, they never wear
these, not longi. I saw this with my own eyes. They had long knives and hand spears. There
were maybe 20 – 30% women in Sittwe township.
Many eyewitnesses described how the security forces failed to protect Rohingya and Kaman Muslims
who called for assistance. Rather than defend those under attack, police were reported, in many
instances, to have aided the attackers. One woman recounted her experience of police complicity in
violence in October 2012:
238 Rakhine man, aged 45, informal village administrator, interviewed in village on outskirts of Sittwe, 6 December 2014,
239 Rakhine man, aged 52, interviewed on 5 December 2014.
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