Attachments
Executive Summary
On August 25, 2017, security forces from the Myanmar military, Border Guard Police, and Rakhine civilians attacked the village of Koe Tan Kauk, located in Maungdaw, Rakhine State. Battalion 537 had previously deployed to the area and stationed at a Rakhine temple in Shinklin, as well as at the school and at a military camp to the north of Shinklin.
The 200-500 assailants besieged the village at dawn and sprayed gunfire at Rohingya villagers as they fled for their lives. Security forces stormed houses and physically beat the Rohingya, then killed and injured many Rohingya villagers. 80% of victim-survivors interviewed had lost direct family members, defined as spouses, children, and parents. Many were forced to abandon the dead bodies where they fell in order to preserve their own lives.
Rohingya men in particular faced a torturous choice between fleeing for their lives and perhaps endangering their female family members to physical and sexual violence versus remaining to protect their families and being shot to death. After escaping to the forest, Rohingya men ultimately saw their families shot dead before their eyes or returned home to their families’ dead bodies.
Security forces set fire to hundreds of homes in the village and looted property. The arson began in the early morning between 7:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. and lasted for hours until the afternoon. The only building that remained standing afterward was the school. Based on an initial survey, the total number of Koe Tan Kauk villagers killed on these two days amounts to 148.
In the terror after such mass-scale violence and killing, Koe Tan Kauk villagers escaped to Bangladesh, where they now live in temporary tents inside precarious refugee camps.
Yet the systematic destruction of the Rohingya people began far earlier than August 2017. Starting from decades earlier, the government confiscated land from Rohingya villagers and allocated it to Rakhine people. In 2012, Rohingya villagers were forcibly expulsed from their ancestral village of Frangchaung and later settled in an IDP camp in Koe Tan Kauk. In 2016, military, police, and immigration forces surrounded Koe Tan Kauk on the pretext of locating militants. They dragged the Rohingya from their homes, brutally beat