Hundreds of thousands of the mostly Muslim Rohingya community have fled Buddhist-majority Myanmar since 2017 after a military crackdown. The action by the military is now the subject of a genocide case at the United Nations' highest court in The Hague.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is today due to officially announce the decision to designate that crackdown a genocide in remarks at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, where an exhibit on "Burma's Path to Genocide" — using a former name for the country — is on display.

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But the military's campaign against the Rohingyas, a Muslim minority in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, actually began years earlier — and since 2012, a small network of citizen activists have been risking their lives to secretly film its impact.

Their harrowing footage, and the first-ever on-camera interview with a member of the network, are featured in the new FRONTLINE documentary, Myanmar's Killing Fields.

"Even though it was risky to film, I did it to help my people," says "Sabo," who agreed to speak on the condition that FRONTLINE protect his identity.

Airing Tuesday on PBS, Myanmar's Killing Fields is U.S. television's most comprehensive investigation of the Myanmar military's violent crackdown on the Rohingyas — an effort that the United Nations has described as having the "hallmarks of genocide."

Secret footage

The Myanmar military denies abuses and says it has been fighting a militant Islamist Rohingya group, ARSA, that has attacked and killed security forces at police and army bases.

But with secret footage filmed by the network, and firsthand accounts from victims and their families, the documentary depicts an orchestrated campaign to target civilians, state-sanctioned violence and mass murder.

Including in Chut Pyin, one of dozens of Rohingya villages that were attacked and burned to the ground last August.

Sabo was filming in a nearby village as survivors from Chut Pyin streamed in — men, women, and children, many of whom had been shot in the back as they fled.

"They were all in a terrible state," Sabo says in the above excerpt from Myanmar's Killing Fields.

"They were traumatized after seeing brothers and sisters killed … Only God knows how much they suffered."

Shot, raped mutilated

FRONTLINE tracked down survivors seen in Sabo's footage, who independently recounted how the military attacked civilians and raped women and children.

"I was shot and fell in the rice field. I could not get up, I was in so much pain.

"Then four soldiers raped me," 16-year-old Jamila Khatun, now living in a refugee camp across the border in Bangladesh, tells FRONTLINE.

Another survivor, Nur Begum, describes being rounded up and taken into the bushes, where she says a soldier shot dead a woman who tried to fight back.

"A soldier cut off her breast," Begum says, sobbing.

"He held it up like this and showed us and it was shaking. He said if we screamed, they would do the same to us."

Then, she says, several soldiers raped her.

Village leader and medic Rashan Ali says he did what he could to treat the victims: "I treated 92 people there … They were lacerated, they cut their breasts, then they shot them. I treated them with whatever I had."

Many of the rape victims, Ali says, were children.

"Some of them could not bear it and they died," he says.

• Frontline documentary, first published on PBS. Used with permission.
• Image: YouTube

I've been visiting Rohingya refugee camps close to the Bangladesh/Myanmar border, and the scale of the forced migration is truly horrifying.

Land unoccupied in late August is now a cramped shanty city of bamboo, tarpaulin and mud that seems to go on forever.

Interviews in the camps paint a desperately sad picture. The details of these interviews are invariably confronting and often distressing, and explain why so many Rohingya fled Myanmar so quickly.

A farmer becomes understandably emotional when he tells me:

"I lost my two sons, and two daughters. At midnight the military come in my house and burnt the house, but first they raped my two daughters and they shot my two daughters in front of me.

"I have no words to express how it was for me to suffer to look at my daughters being raped and killed in front of me. My two sons were also killed by the government. I was not able to get the dead bodies of my daughters, it is a great sorrow for me."

Background to the refugee crisis
The military's ongoing "clearance operation" began in late August with the supposed aim of ridding Myanmar of a recently emerged militant group.

But this campaign's real intent is now widely regarded as being to force the ethnic Rohingya, a Muslim minority, from their homes, away from their land, and out of Myanmar.

Myanmar's military, the Tatmadaw, has used tactics that are brutal, indiscriminate, and yet sadly familiar to the Rohingya and other groups in Myanmar such as the ethnic Kachin and Karen.

Witnesses described to me how, when the Tatmadaw arrived at their village, the soldiers fired weapons and killed people inside wooden homes, arrested young men, raped women, told residents to leave, and then burned homes to prevent the residents' return. Continue reading

Sources

• The Conversation article by Ronan Lee, PhD Candidate, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University
• Image: Hindustan Times

It is estimated that in less than three weeks, up to 400,000 Rohingya refugees have fled Myanmar.

They are fleeing mass human rights violations and atrocities, including: the burning of villages and crops, using petrol and rocket launchers; executions by shooting, stabbing, beating or burning; beatings; and sexual violence.

But the Rohingya refugee crisis is not new. For decades, the Rohingya have been persecuted in Myanmar, with almost one million fleeing Myanmar since the 1970s.

Previous waves of displacement and return have been marked by violence and growing suspicion towards Rohingya by the Rakhine Buddhists and the national (military and civilian) governments.

The crimes being committed in the past weeks against the Rohingya are also not unusual.

They have only escalated in intensity and number, with the perpetrators no doubt spurred by the impunity with which they have been able to commit such atrocities for so long.

UN officials such as the Secretary General and the High Commissioner for Human Rights have called the current situation "ethnic cleansing."

The UN has avoided the term "genocide" - however, it is genocide that is taking place. Myanmar's military government has systematically sought and acted to remove the Rohingya minority from Myanmar and overall, from existence.

Rohingya are a minority group living in Rakhine state of Myanmar, located on the western coast and along the border with Bangladesh and close to India.

Rohingya are referred to as "Bengali" - a derogatory term - and, despite evidence of their residence in Myanmar for centuries, are denied citizenship and the participatory rights that come with that privilege such as participating in the public service.

Rohingya's freedom of movement is restricted (they are even herded into detention camps and ghettos), their employment rights and options severely limited, and they are denied access to food, healthcare and education.

In addition, long-term mass violence has been carried out, including instances of organised massacres accompanied by sexual violence. Continue reading

Sources

• ABC Religion & Ethics, article by Gerhard Hoffstaedter and Melanie O'Brien.
• Image: Kenn Orphan