Myanmar junta forces massacre scores of civilians outside Sittwe

The names of sources quoted in this story have been changed to protect their security. “They told us they meant us no harm and just wanted to talk,” a civilian woman in Rakhine State said, recalling how a day of bloodshed and unimaginable horror began with junta soldiers promising she would be safe. Thet Mar, 26, is one of the civilians living in Byine Phyu village in Rakhine State’s Sittwe Township who have accused the Myanmar army of brutally torturing and slaughtering scores of the village’s men last week in an apparent act of revenge against the Arakha Army (AA). She described what she experienced after the soldiers came to her home in Byine Phyu village—located on the northern outskirts of Sittwe, near important junta air and naval bases as well as a regional operations command centre—in the late morning of May 29. Five trucks carrying at least 200 soldiers surrounded the village at 11am that day, she recalled. Leaving the vehicles, the fully armed soldiers came down to the village on foot, one by one. As they walked through the streets, they ordered villagers to come out of their houses immediately for questioning. They then ordered the men, women, and children who had come out of their homes to gather near the central market between the village’s four wards. As people followed the orders and gathered in the village’s centre, the troops separated the men and adolescent men from the women, girls, and younger children, sorting them into two groups on either side of the main road, which they had blocked off with their trucks. While the soldiers guarding the women ordered them to sit on the ground looking downward, the soldiers across the road put blindfolds on the men and forced them to take their shirts off and assume squatting positions. “The next thing we knew, they were firing their guns and beating the men up,” Thet Mar recalled, adding that children frightened by the gunshots began fainting in fear. “All we could hear was the men crying out in pain and distress, calling on their mothers and fathers,” she said. “If we lifted our heads and tried to look, they threatened to shoot us too. They fired in the air several times, and held up bombs to show us they could throw them into the crowd.” The AA—known as the Arakan Army until rebranding as the Arakha Army in April—has alleged that junta troops murdered a total of 76 men in Byine Phyu that day, as well as subjecting women in the village to rape. While denying these specific accusations, the Myanmar military council’s spokesperson Maj.-Gen. Zaw Min Tun acknowledged that junta security forces had conducted a “clearing operation” in the area, during which three men were killed and 20 were taken into custody on suspicion of being AA members. The village and the war in Rakhine State A large village, Byine Phyu was home to more than 2,500 people before many of its residents left, induced to seek homes elsewhere by deteriorating safety conditions and frequent patrols and inspections by Myanmar army soldiers as the ongoing fighting in Rakhine State spread closer to the town. Rakhine State has become a vital front in Myanmar’s internal conflict since late last year, when the Arakan Army (AA)—the state’s largest and most powerful ethnic armed group—launched an offensive against the coup regime’s forces with the stated intent to achieve full territorial control of the state. A general view of Rakhine State’s capital of Sittwe in September 2016. (Photo by Romeo Gacad/AFP) In recent months, the junta troops set up checkpoints on all routes into and out of the village, interrogating and searching civilians and vehicles that passed through. People remaining in the village have been forced to live hand to mouth, earning their livelihoods by fishing, working as market couriers, or driving tuk tuks and trishaws, according to Thet Mar. “There is no way we could support the AA because we can barely survive here, living from scratch,” she told Myanmar now. “Why aren’t they fighting the AA instead of terrorising helpless, poverty-stricken civilians?” she added. Since resuming its fight against the military last November, the AA has seized control of nine of Rakhine State’s seventeen townships as well as neighbouring Paletwa Township in Chin State. The AA has moved swiftly and sometimes ruthlessly in its anti-junta campaign. The AA as well as the military have allegedly targeted members of the severely persecuted Rohingya ethnic community in the state, and tens of thousands of civilians were forced to flee when the AA took over Buthidaung, a Rohingya-majority town near the Bangladesh-Myanmar border. In February, pro-junta propaganda channels alleged that the AA’s sinking of two junta warships on the Kaladan River in Kyauktaw Township allegedly resulted in the deaths of soldiers’ noncombatant and civilian family members. Survivors tell their stories: ‘revenge’ against the AA Once the soldiers had rounded up Byine Phyu’s remaining civilian residents at the village market on May 29,,, they began by asking both the men and women the same questions, according to Thet Mar: whether they knew people supporting the AA and where to find them. When the women said they did not know, Thet Mar said, the soldiers shouted back that it was a lie, and when the men said the same thing, the soldiers shot them. The soldiers said that they were paying the villagers back for what the AA had done to the military families on the Kaladan River in Kyauktaw, Thet Mar added. Villagers told Myanmar Now that the soldiers also taunted them, saying that the AA’s commander in chief Twan Mrat Naing could do nothing for them now. One of Thet Mar’s uncles was killed, she said, while her sister-in-law lost her father, husband, and two brothers in the massacre. Another of Thet Mar’s acquaintances had six of her male family members killed, she added. Several villagers confirmed to Myanmar Now that in addition to shooting scores of men, the military also loaded hundreds of blindfolded men onto their trucks and took them away. An empty street in Sittwe seen after Cyclone Mocha in May 2023 (EPA) Although the soldiers had promised not to harm them, the soldiers wasted no time in subjecting the captive men to brutal beatings and other forms of torture, according to Tin Nu, another villager who was present. Tin Nu, who is in her 40s, bravely defied the soldiers’ orders by looking in the direction of the group of men, and was able to catch a glimpse of what was being done to them. Soldiers were beating the men with what looked like rubber truncheons, she said, and seemed to be targeting young men with tattoos, especially those showing an eagle—a symbol used by the AA—or the phrase “Tharlizwa,” a Rakhine-language blessing or greeting. “They used knives to cut under the skin where the men had tattoos,” Tin Nu told Myanmar Now. “Then they beat them till the cut flesh came off.” “If they cried out from the pain, they shot them dead. A man who tried to run was also shot and killed,” she added. Tin Nu said the soldiers held the villagers for two and a half days without food or water under the scorching sun. Tin Nu began to sob as she recounted what she witnessed. “After they killed them, I saw them covering the bodies with tarpaulins. Some people had their entire families killed. It was awful,” she said. “Ten of them, under the tarpaulins, were taken away in front of my eyes.” Children deprived of food and water, allegations of rape After the killing, the soldiers kept the women of Byine Phyu captive, according to Thet Mar, along with children of all different ages, adding that the soldiers did not provide them with food or water. She saw one mother with an infant who went without water or food until the next day, she added, and saw children fainting from heat, thirst, and hunger. “One of my nieces, a five-year-old, didn’t even have the strength to stand. She tried to get up once and collapsed,” Thet Mar told Myanmar Now. Tin Nu confirmed that the soldiers refused to provide food or water to children and adults alike, and only responded with threats when she asked. “At around 3pm that day, I told the soldiers I needed to fetch water for my children because their throats were parched,” she said. “A soldier just held me at gunpoint and told me not to move another step, or he would shoot me.” “They made us go hungry the whole day, not giving us water or anything at all,” she said. Although the villagers were held until Friday morning, police officers began to arrive on Thursday and take over from the soldiers in shifts, according to Thet Mar. The police officers treated them more kindly, she said, sharing small amounts of food and water when they could. The police allowed the women to cook with the ingredients they had been able to forage from the residential wards, she said, adding that the police had a bit more humanity than the soldiers. “They told us they cared, not like the people who had been guarding us before,” she added. On Friday around 10am, the police told the villagers they had to leave Byine Phyu, but that they could take them wherever they wanted to go, Thet Mar said, telling them that even if they went back home there was nothing left for them there. As she made one last stop at her house before travelling to a monastery in Sittwe, Thet Mar saw that the village’s houses had been ransacked, with windows broken and valuables such as gold, money, cooking utensils, and even clothes missing. She did not know whether the soldiers or police were to blame. “First we found that our TV was gone. Even my mother’s good clothes and longyis had been taken out of their bags, which were cut open with knives,” she said. “We didn’t expect this at all. But of course, they had also been lying when they said they meant us no harm.” “It was a crime against humanity,” Thet Mar added. “It was an ethnic cleansing of the Rakhine people as a retaliation against the AA.” In addition to the hundreds of men the junta troops had killed or taken away to unknown destinations, at least five girls or young women from the group are said to be missing after being raped or killed by the junta, Thet Mar said, but added that she did not know them personally. Tin Nu said she witnessed one young woman being taken away. “It was around 10 at night. One of the girls sitting beside me was picked out by the junta troops. They put the hood on her head, and took her away,” she said. The soldiers spared only a few of the village’s men. They allowed Thet Mar’s brother-in-law, a driver who had survived the massacre, to stay with his family because the police said they needed him to drive villagers out of Byine Phyu to Sittwe, she said. “The only reason he was released was because of his driving skill,” she added. She is taking shelter at a monastery in Sittwe along with her mother and her sister’s family. They total six people altogether, including her brother-in-law, who has been traumatised by the experience. Among the hundreds of men who were tortured and killed, he is one of only a few fortunate survivors who escaped torture, but he has not slept well, according to Thet Mar. “He told us that he could still see the horrible scene of men being tortured to death and dragged away, that he could still smell the fresh blood,” she added. A man's three sons go missing Among many parents who lost their sons during the horrible massacre was Hla Than, 57, who endured brutal torture himself at the soldiers’ hands. Hla Than has five children including his son-in-law—three sons and two daughters—two of whom are disabled. His three sons are now missing. “I am particularly worried for my deaf son because he does not know how to respond. I am especially worried he might be suffering, more so than my two other sons,” he added. “I don’t know if they have been killed or not. I have not heard anything about them.” His is one of many families now confronting the devastation of slain and missing family members. “Many mothers are still crying at the monastery; it saddens me to see their pain,” Hla Than said. “Without them, I am like a man who’s lost his legs and arms,” he said, noting that his sons provided crucial support for the family. Like the women who spoke to Myanmar Now, Hla Than said he had not been expecting the brutal killing and torture as junta soldiers approached the village. They routinely came for inspections, he said, and he had no reason to anticipate anything out of the ordinary. “Despite their scrutiny, we were staying in our village as usual. We didn’t anticipate this inspection one day would turn into such a spree of torture and killing,” he told Myanmar Now. “And since they were giving orders, we thought going along with them would be for the best,” he added. Along with his wife and five children, he went out to join the other villagers, he said, adding that he was shocked to be blindfolded on the way and forced to remove his shirt while his wife and two daughters were taken away to join the women. After being blindfolded, all he remembers is being tortured and hearing their scream and cries from the others, he said. He was beaten, and was kicked three times just for asking a man behind him to give him a bit of room in the suffocating heat, he said. “A soldier immediately kicked me and slapped my face, calling me a ‘gabby son of a bitch’. The kicks sent me rolling head over heels,” said Hla Than. “My back still hurts. My eyes hurt too from being blindfolded for two days.” Hla Than recalled that a captain—who himself claimed to be from Taungup and of Rakhine ethnicity—said Rakhine people had celebrated when the military’s family members had been killed in Kyauktaw, and that the soldiers would pay them back the same way. “He said, ‘We will kill all of you for what you did to our families, the women and kids in Kyauktaw,’” Hla Than said. The soldiers who were torturing the Byine Phyu’s residents were at some point drinking beer and alcohol, appeared being drunk, as they took turn to torture the people, he said. “All I could hear was screaming and shooting all over the place after we were blindfolded,” Hla Than recalled. “They just slaughtered people like they were animals, chickens.” A friend of Hla Than’s in his 30s was among the dead. Several eyewitnesses estimated that the soldiers had rounded up close to 1,000 people at the market, of whom about 400 were men or teenage boys. After the massacre, the junta are said to have taken most of the bodies and cremated them outside a nearby cemetery. The latest count placed the number of men and boys who survived at 113, according to Hla Than. “There were patches of blood all over the ground,” he recalled. “But I didn’t dare look back for fear of what else they might do to us”

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