LONDON: Rohingya Muslim militants brandishing guns and swords massacred 105 Hindu men, women and children over two days in Myanmar last year, Amnesty International has revealed.

The Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a Rohingya rebel group, terrorised, murdered and abducted Hindus in northern Rakhine state just before a disproportionate campaign of violence was carried out by Myanmar’s security forces against the Rohingya, forcing some 700,000 of them to flee to Bangladesh .

On August 25, 2017, the same day that ARSA staged coordinated attacks on 30 police outposts and border guards, killing a dozen government forces and sparking the government crackdown, ARSA captured scores of Hindus and slaughtered them outside their own villages.

Twenty Hindu men, 10 women, and 23 children, 14 of whom were under the age of eight, were killed by ASRA in the village of Ah Nauk Kha Maung Seik, according to Amnesty. The same day all the 46 Hindus in the neighbouring village of Ye Bauk Kyar disappeared.

Based on dozens of interviews with survivors, as well as forensic pathologists’ analyses of photographic evidence, Amnesty has revealed how at 8 am on August 25, 2017, the ARSA attacked the Hindu community in the village of Ah Nauk Kha Maung Seik in northern Maungdaw township. Armed men dressed in black and Rohingya villagers, who are predominantly Muslim, rounded up their Hindu neighbours, robbed, bound, and blindfolded them, before marching them to the outskirts of the village where ARSA fighters killed 53 of them, execution-style, starting with the men.

Eight Hindu women and eight Hindu children were abducted and spared after the Rohingya rebel fighters forced the women to agree to “convert” to Islam.

“The men held knives and long iron rods. They tied our hands behind our backs and blindfolded us. One of them said: ‘You and Rakhine ( Buddhist ) are the same, you have a different religion, you can’t live here. I gave them my gold and money,” 22-year-old survivor Bina Bala told Amnesty.

Raj Kumari, 18, said: “They slaughtered the men. We were told not to look … They had knives, spades and iron rods. … We hid ourselves in the shrubs and could see … My uncle, my father, my brother were all slaughtered.”

Formila, 20, told Amnesty the fighters returned “with blood on their swords and hands” and told the women the men had been killed. Later, as Formila and the other abducted women were being marched away, she turned back and saw ARSA fighters kill the other women and children. “I saw men holding the heads and hair of the women, then they cut their throats,” she said.

The survivors were forced to flee with the Rohingya fighters to Bangladesh, before being repatriated to Myanmar in October 2017.

On August 26, 2017, ARSA terrorists killed six Hindus, including three Hindu children, on the outskirts of Maungdaw, near Myo Thu Gyi village. Kor Mor La, 25, who survived, saw her husband Na Ra Yan, 30, and five-year-old daughter Shu Nan Daw executed. “The people who shot us were dressed in black. … I could only see their eyes. … They had long guns and swords,” Kor Mor Lar said. “My husband was shot next to me. I was shot in the chest.”

The bodies of 45 Hindus from Ah Nauk Kha Maung Seik were unearthed in four mass graves on September 28, 2017. The remains of the rest of the victims have not been found.

“It’s hard to ignore the sheer brutality of ARSA’s actions, which have left an indelible impression on the survivors. Accountability for these atrocities is every bit as crucial as it is for the crimes against humanity carried out by Myanmar’s security forces in northern Rakhine state,” said Tirana Hassan, crisis response director at Amnesty International.

Amnesty International is calling for independent investigators and a UN fact-finding mission to be given full access to Rakhine state.

At a UN Security Council meeting in New York last week, Myanmar’s permanent representative, Hau Do Suan, said “the truth has been suppressed by the incessant sensational argument of Muslim victimhood narratives. The brutal killings and atrocity committed by the ARSA terrorists on innocent ethnic Hindu, Rakhine Buddhist and other tribes has been ignored by the western media.”

