The Massacre at Tula Toli Our World

This programme contains distressing

and graphic accounts and images

of violence from the beginning.

These people have just crossed the

border. They are in no man's land

and being driven from their homes.

Now, they are waiting for permission

to enter Bangladesh. The Rohingya

are people that neither country

want. What happened in your village?

Transocean macro they just burnt

their houses.

These are some of the

survivors. They are hungry, sick and

scared. Across the river, the rest

of the Brett campaign of terror

going on. --A deliberate. A campaign

from which no one is safe. But what

we don't know is how many people

have been killed. We do have some

idea of how many have been burnt and

chased out of their homes. These are

just a tiny fraction of the hundreds

and hundreds of thousands of people

who have fled. In our investigation,

we are going to focus on the events

of one day, of one massacre in one

village. Its name is Tula Toli.

Since August, or than 600,000 people

have sought refuge in the camps in

blanket F. -- Bangladesh. People who

brought little with them but the

nightmarish memories of their

experiences at the hands of the

Burmese military. We have come here

to find survivors of the Tula Toli

massacre. We have spoken to six of

them, we have cross-referenced their

testimony with video evidence...

Absolutely horrific pictures. With

maps of the local area, as well as

with interviews collected by human

rights organisations. What emerges

is a picture of systematic violence.

Violence that has been described as

a textbook example of ethnic

cleansing.

Using a satellite photograph of the

area, a Rohingya Alba showed me how

the massacre unfolded. -- elbow. The

village of Tula Toli consist of a

number of settlements surrounded on

three sides by the meandering flow

of a river. In previous days,

soldiers had set fire to other

villages on the opposite bank. At

Wednesday morning, the 30th of

August, the crossed into Tula Toli.

There was panic.

Everyone mentions the river. With

the soldiers advancing from the

north-west and the police post to

the south, many of the villagers ran

east. It ended up on the riverbank.

They were trapped.

And Hugh yourself on the other side

of the river? This woman showed us

where she and others from across the

river at a point downstream where it

was narrow enough to cross. They

used in under trees and plastic

canisters as life raft. Did you see

this with your own eyes?

From a heel on the opposite tank,

they watched the horror unfold.

The horrific scenes she witness

still be a nightmare. But reform

witnessed still give her nightmares.

She watched the bodies of their

neighbours children washed up on the

riverbank. The scene was filmed by

another villager.

The children's names were Rasheeda,

five years old, cushion, three, and

Tahiti, 11 months.

This woman, her husband and four

children or managed to escape with

their lives. Muhammad was not so

fortunate. He and his youngest

daughter survived but three of her

sisters were killed and so was their

mother.

The violence began five days before

the massacre at Tula Toli on the

25th of August, when members of a

Rohingya militant group attacked a

number of police post inside

Myanmar, killing 12. In response,

the Burmese military began what they

called clearance operations. That

was three months ago. Boats filled

with refugees have been coming over

ever since.

The overwhelming majority of people

in Myanmar are Buddhist. The

Rohingya Muslims make up only a

small minority over all but in

Rakhine state, the region that

borders Bangladesh, there may be in

the majority if it were not to the

fact that so many have fled. Even

before the latest violence, the

Rohingya of Myanmar were denied the

most basic rights, the right to

vote, the freedom to travel and

access to decent education and

healthcare.

Now, some of them accused the

Burmese government of using the

attacks by the Rohingya militant as

a pretence. A pretext for a vicious

and indiscriminate crackdown against

Rohingya civilians. The Bangladeshi

authorities monitor what goes on

from the other side of the border.

And I have been told that from the

beginning of August, about three

weeks before the violence started,

they noticed an increase in military

activity on the Myanmar side. Now,

if that is true, it would suggest an

element of preparation for the

violence that followed. And this is

a suggestion that we have heard

corroborated some of the witnesses

we have spoken to well. We were told

about an incident that happened

nearly two weeks before the massacre

in Tula Toli. Also before the

attacks by the militant group known

as the Salvation Army which the

Burmese military claimed prompted

their clearance operations.

Were they trying to recruit people

into village? Was there some truth

to that?

Witnesses said the policemen were

called in by the village

administrator, and local Buddhist

government officials. A few days

later, the same official called a

meeting. Elders from both

communities were asked to sign a

kind of peace Treaty.

Was that unusual, to be asked to do

some like that?

The Rohingya of Tula Toli saw the

document as an explicit guarantee of

their safety. It is because of this

that they stayed in their homes even

when they saw other villages being

burned. Now they believe the

administrative doublecrossed them.

Almost everyone we spoke to

mentioned this village

administrator, the local government

representative. He would accuse the

villages of supporting the

militants, some said. Others that he

tried to force them to register as

foreigners. Another Rohingya Alba

told me that before the massacre he

and the man had been in regular

contact. Do you have his phone

number? Can you call him?

Human rights investigators and

journalist have been trying to talk

to this man for months. None have

managed to contact him until now.

Mr Hussein lost a son and three

grandchildren in the attack. Now,

over a crackly phone line, he

accuses the village administrator of

complicity in the massacre.

At the end of the conversation, Mr

Hussein seems unconvinced. Do you

believe him?

The majority of Myanmar's Rohingya

Muslims have, by now, already fled.

Dispossessed and stateless, the mud

soaked camps of Bangladesh are what

they must for now call home. The

Burmese government says its military

operations just across the border

from here in Rakhine State are a

response to attacks by militants on

the 25th of August. But what about

those reports of troop movements

weeks before the Rohingya militants'

attacks? Well, we're on our way now

to meet an officer in the

Bangladeshi border guard who might

know more about this and who might

be willing to talk to us. Hello,

Major. How's it going?

Fine.

Good.

The Major said he wasn't authorised

to speak to the BBC on camera but we

did have a conversation of camera

and he said I could quote him with

the following, that they saw from

around the fifth of August a huge

concentration, those are his words,

of Myanmar military in the border

area. He said apart from burning

people's homes they extorted

valuables and took their money. I

asked him the purpose of all this,

he said they're trying to make

Rakhine State Rohingya free. There

are members of the Rohingya

salvation army in these camps. We

spoke to two of them. They said they

lacked weapons. Experts who studied

the group tend to agree. They almost

certainly carried out some of the

attacks that sparked the latest

violence but they were unlikely to

have been capable of the

co-ordinated action that riveted to

them by the Burmese military. Here's

another thing the officer we spoke

to at the border Force said to me,

he said there's some merit in the

claim that at least some of those

attacks were staged. He said to our

knowledge there are hardly any

active members of this group. But

even if the militants did do all the

things the Burmese government said

it did, nothing surely could

justified the horrific nature of the

response that followed. By late

morning on the 30th of August on the

riverbank at Tula Toli, dozens of

people had already been murdered but

it wasn't over yet. Some villagers

had escaped by swimming across the

river, but many remain behind,

especially younger women who had

been separated from the rest by the

soldiers. Those who survived endured

an ordeal of almost unimaginable

horror.

Severely

burnt and wounded, she managed to

crawl to safely and eventually

escaped under cover of darkness. She

came to Bangladesh with her

seven-year-old daughter. She was

beaten by the soldiers but survived.

The others did not. One of her

children, she said, was burned to

at least one other survivor of the

Tula Toli massacre has reported that

her young child was grown into a

fire. Others had infants torn from

their arms.

This woman is only 30 years old. The

men who raped her and killed her

children were soldiers. But she,

like others, told us that non-

Rohingya civilians took part in the

attack that day as well, demanding

money and valuables.

I wondered about the Buddhist

village administrator. No one we

spoke to say he personally took part

in the attack and it seems unlikely

that a local civilian official could

have stopped the powerful Burmese

military. But there remains the

question of whether he deliberately

misled the Rohingya villagers into

believing they would be safe in

their homes. Hello, sir. It's the

BBC here. Just to say we're

recording this call. Can I ask you

why did you not warn the villagers

that the army was going to come in?

The people here say that you wanted

the Rohingya out of the village,

that you wanted them gone.

The Burmese government doesn't

regard the Rohingya Muslims as

citizens of Myanmar. Stuck in the

camps in Bangladesh without official

status, it will be hard for them to

return home even if they felt it was

safe to do so. The United Nations

has called this ethnic cleansing.

Others prefer the term genocide.

By whatever name you call it, the

massacre at Tula Toli was a

monstrous crime. A crime that

Burmese authorities are not

investigating. Every evening on the

border, more people try to cross

from Myanmar to safety in

Bangladesh. New arrivals say their

villages are still being burned,

that there are still being traced

and terrorised from their homes. We

asked the Burmese government for a

response to the evidence of a

massacre at Tula Toli, they never

got back to us. For now the violence

continues with impunity. If it goes

on like this there won't be many

Rohingya left in Myanmar, and

perhaps that's exactly what the

Burmese government wants.