Evidence from a village gives more information on atrocities against Rohingya

The faces of the men half-buried in the mass graves had been burned away by acid or blasted by bullets. Noor Kadir could only recognise his friends by the colours of their shorts.

Kadir and 14 others, all Rohingya Muslims, had been choosing players for the soccer-like game of chinlone when the gunfire began. By the time the soldiers stopped shooting at the Myanmar village of Gu Dar Pyin, only Kadir and two teammates were still alive. Days later, Kadir found six of his friends lying among the bodies in two graves.

They are among more than 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 massacres like Gu Dar Pyin never happened, and has acknowledged only one mass grave containing 10 “terrorists” in the village of Inn Din. The recent findings, however, suggest not only the military’s slaughter of civilians but the presence of many more graves.

Genocide in Rakhine?

The graves are the newest piece of evidence for what looks increasingly like a genocide in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State against the Rohingya. Satellite images obtained by the Associated Press from DigitalGlobe show a village decimated. Community leaders 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. Almost every villager interviewed by the Associated Press 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.

Survivors said soldiers planned the August 27 attack, and tried to hide what they had done. Thousands of people from the area hid deep in the jungle, stranded without food except for the leaves and trees they tried to eat. From about 10 miles away another group of villagers watched from a mountain as Gu Dar Pyin burned, the flames and smoke snaking up into the sky.