First, Rohingya villages were burned to the ground. Now, Myanmar’s government is using bulldozers to literally erase them from the earth — in a vast operation rights groups say is destroying crucial evidence of mass atrocities against the nation’s ethnic Muslim minority.
Satellite images of Myanmar’s troubled Rakhine state, released to The Associated Press by Colorado-based DigitalGlobe on Friday, show that dozens of empty villages and hamlets have been completely levelled by authorities in recent weeks — far more than previously reported.
The villages were all set ablaze in the wake of violence last August, when a brutal clearance operation by security forces drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya into exile in Bangladesh.
While Myanmar’s government claims it’s simply trying to rebuild a devastated region, the operation has raised deep concern among human rights advocates, who say the government is destroying what amounts to scores of crime scenes before any credible investigation takes place.
The operation has also horrified the Rohingya, who believe the government is intentionally eviscerating the dwindling remnants of their culture to make it nearly impossible for them to return.
One displaced Rohingya woman, whose village was among those razed, said she recently visited her former home in Myin Hlut and was shocked by what she saw. Most houses had been torched last year, but now, “everything is gone, not even the trees are left,” the woman, named Zubairia, told AP by telephone. “They just bulldozed everything … I could hardly recognise it.”
The 18-year-old said other homes in the same area that had been abandoned but not damaged were also flattened. “All the memories that I had there are gone,” she said. “They’ve been erased.”
Richard Weir, a Myanmar expert with Human Rights Watch, said on the images he had seen, “there’s no more landmarks, there’s no trees, there’s no vegetation.”
“Everything is wiped away, and this is very concerning, because these are crime scenes,” he said.
“There’s been no credible investigation of these crimes. And so, what we’re talking about really is obstruction of justice.”
Both Weir and Lewa said no mass graves were known to have been destroyed. But, Weir added: “We don’t know where all the graves are … because there is no access.”
Zubairia, who asked that only one of her names be used to protect her identify because she feared reprisals, said she did not believe any of the newly constructed homes were intended for Rohingya.
“Even if they give us small houses to live in, it will never be the same for us,” she said. “How can we be happy about our houses being ripped off from our land?”
