A hard rain fell through the night and put the smoldering fires out. Rajuma scooped up Sadiq and ran with her mother and younger brother down to the riverbank, where scores of other Rohingya had gathered. Islam, a military veteran and card-carrying citizen of Myanmar, was forced to move to the Rohingya side of Tula Toli. They made it to a hill and were able to hide from their attackers. The 2017 incident or ‘the Second Exodus’ exacerbated existing violence by the Burmese Army. It was the most rapid human exodus since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The Rohingya: Survivors of Atrocity After enduring decades of persecution, abuses, and ethnic violence, when will the Rohingya finally see justice and respect for their rights? Exclusive: Many arrive in the … . (There are reportedly at least 120,000 Rohingya confined to internment camps in Rakhine State.) Eventually, they secured passage on a boat. “We can cure the wounds on our skin, but we can’t cure the injuries in our minds.”, Noor Kabir, Tula Toli’s village representative, lives in a camp down the road. This was well before the ramped up efforts of the Myanmar government to force Rohingyas to move, but reflective of the longer term abuse the Rohingya have suffered. She was after all a world famous activist and survivor of Dr. Josef Mengele’s twin experiments at Auschwitz Camp in Poland. Despite damning evidence of atrocities, military officials maintain they were carrying out “clearance operations” against “extremist terrorists” fighting for an Islamic state in Rakhine. Islam’s easygoing nature won him both Muslim and Buddhist friends. Rajuma and other eyewitnesses say soldiers emerged from the tree line, firing scattershot at fleeing villagers. An ethnic Bamar with Asiatic features, wiry limbs and a faded tattoo of a fighting peacock on his wrist, he had retired to the village with his Rakhine wife after 19 years in the Myanmar army. The Survivors of the Rohingya Genocide. Kutupalong refugee camp, Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. The militia then combed over the bodies and finished them off with blades. He shows me a notebook filled with names, ages and village quarters of Rohingya residents he has confirmed killed or missing. At the time Saputara didn’t know where they were going and she was so scared she believed she was going to die. In March, its top human-rights investigator in Myanmar, Yanghee Lee, said she was “increasingly of the opinion that the events bear the hallmarks of genocide,” the harshest words we’re likely to hear from a diplomat. The 1982 law rendered the Rohingya stateless, unable to escape their tormentors through international immigration. In late 2010, the ruling Myanmar military began enacting a series of democratic reforms after decades as a pariah state with only China for an ally. Rafiq, Rajuma and their next-born may have to move again. Trailing Rafiq with a low gaze, she walks past Nazmul Islam’s house to a food-distribution point. Rohingya are residents of the Rakhine province of Myanmar but during a military crackdown in and after 2017, thousands of them fled their homes. Tula Toli, a sleepy farming community nestled in a fertile river bend, had been spared much of the bloodshed, until late last summer. On the afternoon of August 27th, three days before the military attacked Tula Toli, Islam had been summoned to a police outpost on the Rakhine side of the village at the behest of Aung Ko Sing, the Rakhine chairman. But then the attack on Tula Toli began. Meanwhile, Rajuma spent the night wandering in the dark until she ran into some women from the village. “The violence and torture that happened in Myanmar are usually in my thoughts and mind,” a Rohingya … The wedding was low-key, given the prohibition against large Rohingya gatherings. “If you come back to Buddhism, we will take care of you.” Islam explained he had chosen Allah after many years of deep reflection and would rather die than renounce his faith. China, which sits on the council and remains Myanmar’s unflinching ally and biggest trade partner, has made multibillion-dollar investments all over the country, including in Rakhine, with a new industrial park, oil-and-gas terminal and a deep-water port. Her head, ribs and groin throbbed in pain, and the women lying beside her were dead. A ruthless military crackdown had left scores dead in October 2016, and forced 87,000 Rohingya to seek refuge in neighboring Bangladesh. She was hauling furniture out of her family home in Tula Toli village, a small community of mostly Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State, on the western coast of Myanmar. So they looked for small clues to guide them out – grains of rice, chilies, scarves that people dropped in flight. By 11 a.m., the shooting in Tula Toli had ceased. They tell me they’d spent months evading authorities and scrounging for food. Openly hostile Rakhine villagers had begun stealing Rohingya crops and livestock at will, while security forces came to loot Muslim homes and tear down farm fences. In the West, we learn about Nazi Germany’s determination to eradicate European Jews during the Holocaust and we learn about the casual slaughter of multitudes of Indigenous people spread across continental North America. Lal Mia – one year, Ahmed Hussain – 85 . Biba is a single mother of five children and lives in the Tillabery region in Niger. On the fringes of Kutupalong, a sprawling supercamp already home to some 400,000 Rohingya refugees displaced by previous waves of violence, the latest arrivals were busy clear-cutting hillsides to make new camps. Rajuma had spent her entire life in the village. Two months after the country’s first modern elections, in June 2012, anti–Muslim pogroms broke out in Rakhine following the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman; 140,000 Rohingya were forced into open-air concentration camps. I returned to Bangladesh in mid-March, the day after a group of several hundred crossed over. Sheets of incoming bullets smacked the thatch homes “like raindrops,” Rajuma recalls. These genocides occurred fairly recent in our history, yet we still consider genocides  as atrocities of the past. He was unable to make out their faces, but assumed Rajuma was among them. “For us, there is no place to stand.”. Though many Rohingya families have documentation going back generations, they are denied citizenship and basic rights. Out of an initial batch of 8,032 refugees’ documents handed over by Bangladesh, only 374 were accepted. She is 15 years old. Islam, who was detained within earshot, says they bragged about burning children alive in front of their mothers, “laughing out loud and telling each other how they took the jewelry and money off the women they raped,” Islam says. “That’s the unique burden stateless people carry,” says Wade. “The U.N. and policymakers around the globe are fully aware that the persecution of the Rohingya will eventually be classified legally as a genocide,” says Azeem Ibrahim, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Policy in Washington and author of The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. Working in the rice-paddy fields, she caught the eye of Rafiq, a shy neighbor with a boyish grin. From the edge of the camps, I could see smoke curdling on the horizon as Burmese soldiers razed more villages to the ground. At the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh, Rolling Stone conducted interviews with dozens of Rohingya, including 15 survivors from Tula Toli, all of whom testify to a deliberate campaign of eradication. Hours later, as the sun set, Rajuma, bloody and in shock, woke to a burning sensation: The house was on fire. When UNHCR began resettling the Rohingya in Bangladesh between 2006 to 2011, his case was not submitted under the Survivors of Violence and/or Torture category, as well as the Refugees with Medical Needs. Terrified, the boy made a run for it. For weeks, no country would accept them. “There are 410 people here,” he says, drawing a finger down the list. A veteran of the Balkans and Iraq, he had just finished interviewing a Tula Toli survivor who says her six children were murdered in front of her before she was gang-raped and left for dead in a burning home. We rarely learn about more recent efforts, like in Myanmar,  that result in intentional extermination efforts of marginalized peoples in faraway places from cultures that aren’t uniquely intertwined with our own. (202) 460-4710, Myanmar's Rohingya: Anatomy of a Genocide, Crisis in Myanmar: The Rohingya Refugees & The American Response, Stories by Campus Consortium Reporting Fellows, OPPORTUNITIES FOR JOURNALISTS AND CAMPUS CONSORTIUM MEMBERS, Bringing Stories Home: Local Reporting Grants. Yet nearly every Western diplomatic mission, including the U.N. leadership in Myanmar, opposed an investigation. Multiple witnesses tell Rolling Stone the dozens of corpses scattered on the flats were collected and heaved inside on the army soldiers’ orders. “I would rather drink poison than go back to Burma,” says Rajuma, who in addition to her son and brother, lost her parents and two sisters in the attack. “The Rohingya have been so persecuted, and for so long, they are desperate to find a place where they can be safe and made to feel welcome. Gashes carved her skull, and her torso was covered with bruises and cuts that had to be stitched up. Bangladesh, one of the poorest, most densely populated countries in the world, rallied to handle a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. Stranded at sea: Rohingya survivors' stories More than 200 Rohingya refugees are believed to have died or gone missing at sea in 2020 in search of a better life. Though those working in the refugee camps during the period immediately after August 2017 and into early 2018 were more likely to capture the acute effects of the violence, health care workers providing care to Rohingya survivors after 2018 were also able to share stories of survivors’ experiences of violence in Myanmar and speak to the long-term physical and mental impacts of this violence. Five gunshots missed. In the absence of jobs and with no possibility to go to school in Niger, she followed her husband to Libya in order to find work. On the day of the massacre, Myanmar security forces surrounded 23-year-old Umma Salama’s home and ordered her family to come out. Eva and Mickey were both forced by the German government to flee their homes and ultimately move to concentration camps as the German army made gains throughout Europe. “After seeing that, I realized no one would be spared,” he says. Suite #615 The Citizenship Act excluded Rohingyas from citizenship by virtue of their ethnicity and created a system designed to abuse ethnic minorities. We often overlook the people experiencing displacement and violent attacks in more remote corners of the planet as we go about our daily lives. According to a UN fact finding mission the attacks were indeed planned and coordinated to eradicate the community. She knew Rohingya had been burned out of three nearby villages in the preceding days, and Rajuma, a slight 20-year-old with somber eyes and a gold nose piercing, had been tracking the smoke plumes from her window, sleepless and on edge. Survivors recounted in detail their experiences reliving terrifying events through flashbacks and nightmares, feeling hopeless about the future, and unrelenting anxiety. Another 10 soldiers entered the room. With an alarming lack of knowledge about arguably the best understood genocide in modern history, it would stand to reason that lesser known massacres fall off the radar of public consciousness entirely. When army troops had advanced on Tula Toli in a hail of gunfire, Rafiq had dived into the river and thrashed across as rounds snapped over his head. More than 200 Rohingya refugees are believed to have died or gone missing at sea in 2020 in search of a better life. Fatima survived a massacre of Rohingya at Tu Lar To Li in Burma. With the Gambia’s genocide suit against the Myanmar government, Ziaur hopes that justice will be brought by the international community. He commanded Divisions 33 and 99 in Northern Rakhine during the massacre in Tula Toli. After years of studying the Koran, he converted and changed his name. December 22, 2017 07:37 AM Share on Facebook. . Many of the survivors are sick and suffering from extreme dehydration The men walked out alone, and the next group came for Rajuma. When the job was done, their wrath turned on Islam. Two more infant girls were snatched from the other women and tossed in with him. Rajuma was soon pregnant with their first son, Sadiq, and the young family moved in with her parents. “You know that kalars can’t live in our country,” one soldier said. The Rohingyas are a Muslim minority living in the West Rakhine state of Myanmar. “You’re rarely going to have the situation of Nazi Germany where they leave behind documents and plans,” he says. Biba’s dream of a better life in Libya was overshadowed by experiences of racism in everyday life. Satellite imagery confirms more than 350 hamlets have been destroyed so far across the state. The Rohingya could not walk to the nearest market without paying bribes to Rakhine officials, and if found congregating in groups or outside after curfew, Rohingya were beaten up. A massive, scorched-earth military operation backed by helicopters and civilian death squads razed dozens of Rohingya -hamlets. “If they don’t feel shame to do these crimes, then why should we be shy to tell the whole world?”. More important, he was literate, and his side hustle translating government documents made him useful to both communities. Their shoulders bore the crimson logo “99,” a battle-hardened division redeployed to the area on the pretext of fighting insurgents. Over the next three hours, the survivors say, males were lined up and shot, two or three times apiece. In the wake of the violence and refugee crisis in 2016, the U.N. floated the “very likely” possibility of crimes against humanity. A nearby home was attacked and her family was forced to leave the village. She made no mention of the Rohingya exodus. Nearly a year on, Rohingya are still fleeing Rakhine. Along with four other women, she was pushed toward one of the huts by a pair of soldiers. When she got off the boat, her family stepped onto land in Bangladesh. What culminated was a series of attacks on the community including mass attacks, property destruction, rape, and governmental confiscation of property. “I was afraid they’d kill me if I slept,” he says.