THAINGKHALI REFUGEE CAMP, Bangladesh: Mohammad Hossain knows the man who led the attack on his village, joining with Myanmar soldiers to seize his Rohingya neighbours and “cut them into pieces,” Hossain said. Two years earlier, he said, the same person locked him in a dungeon and burnt his legs with a hot metal rod and shoved needles under his fingernails.
It was the same man who raped Mostafa Khatun repeatedly over several days, then slit the throat of her husband during the soldiers’ attack on their village, she said.
Nearly two dozen Rohingya Muslim refugees shared similar stories, detailing years of oppression and abuse that culminated in the mass slaughter of Rohingya in the village of Chut Pyin, Myanmar, on August 27 last year. One man above all is responsible, they say: They know where he lives, they know his cellphone number.
He is Aung Thein Mya, the administrator still in charge of several villages including Chut Pyin. There is little sign he will ever face punishment.
One year after Myanmar’s military began its broader campaign of violence against the Rohingya — burning villages, killing thousands and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee to Bangladesh after raids by Rohingya insurgents on several police checkpoints — there has been little progress in holding anyone accountable.
Efforts by the international community have largely faltered and have focused primarily on the country’s leadership: the generals who are widely accused of orchestrating the killing and expulsions, and Myanmar’s civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate whose failure to stop the violence has drawn condemnation abroad.
Thein Mya is not a soldier. He is a civilian administrator and part of an ethnic minority, the Rakhine, who have themselves long been persecuted by the military and the country’s Bamar Buddhist majority, but joined in the campaign against the Rohingya.
In a telephone interview, Thein Mya denied the abuse accusations and said he was not even present during the massacre, contradicting more than a dozen witnesses.
The abuse described by the residents of Chut Pyin, which in the Rohingya’s language is named So Farang, is echoed in testimonies from villages across the region. And it bolsters concerns by human rights officials about the ability of Rohingya refugees, who now number more than 1 million, to ever return peacefully to their homeland.
After decades of playing the Rakhine against the Rohingya, turning victims into conspirators, Bamar Buddhist authorities have made ethnic hatred the defining reality of Rakhine state, a strip of land along the Bay of Bengal in western Myanmar that the Rohingya have inhabited for centuries.
“Both communities live in fear of each other,” said Dominik Stillhart, director of operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross.
A report published in July by an advocacy group, Fortify Rights, describes how the military, with the help of local Buddhists, meticulously planned for genocide and other crimes against humanity in the year before the attacks. Sharp tools that could be used as weapons were confiscated; fences around Rohingya homes were torn down; and thousands of troops were deployed to Rakhine state.
Through that year, and for years before, Thein Mya kept the Rohingya under his charge in a state of terror, Rohingya witnesses said. He stole their livestock and produce, charged exorbitant fees for everything from grazing rights to marriage proposals, and inflicted vicious punishment for even minor indiscretions, locals said.
Reached by telephone, Thein Mya, who is still in office, was almost smug. He denied the accusations against him and insisted that he enjoyed a cordial relationship with his Rohingya neighbours, even as he referred to them using racial slurs or as “Bengali,” a term meant to convey, falsely, that they are not native to Myanmar, but rather immigrants in the country illegally from Bangladesh.
The Rohingya, he said, burnt down their own houses and fled for reasons unknown to him. But now that they are gone, life for him and his neighbours has improved, he said.
“I don’t want them to come back here,” he said in the interview. “Our village is peaceful without the Bengali.”
Though numerous accounts portray Thein Mya as the architect of much of the Rohingya’s suffering in his district, he is also a cog in a much larger machine: the methodical oppression of ethnic minorities by the military, known as the Tatmadaw, and Myanmar’s Bamar Buddhist majority.
As a local administrator, Thein Mya is beholden to the Tatmadaw and would have been expected to carry out the government’s oppressive policies against the Rohingya or suffer the wrath of the security forces, said Matthew Smith, the chief executive of Fortify Rights, which tracks violence against the Rohingya.
“They are extensions of the state, and they act as such and in some cases commit violent abuses against the local population,” Smith said.
On August 27, Thein Mya arrived in the Rohingya section of Chut Pyin at around 9am accompanied by a group of soldiers, witnesses said, and stole a widow’s cow. What happened next was described by six witnesses, including Shom Khatun, the cow’s owner.
Thein Mya had the cow slaughtered and the meat cooked as a curry. Just hours before the violence began, Thein Mya sat down with his comrades and ate the curry in view of the people he was about to massacre.
The killing started around 1 or 2 in the afternoon, witnesses said.
Abdul Hashem, a 73-year-old religious leader, said he was with a group of men at the mosque before afternoon prayers. Karima Khatun, 20, said she was cleaning the kitchen when she saw soldiers approaching her home. Roushon Ali, 48, said he heard someone give an order for everyone to come out of their houses.
Thein Mya seemed to be helping soldiers identify targets, witnesses said. Hossain said he saw Thein Mya talking on his phone immediately before the shots rang out.
“We are ready on this side,” he said he heard Thein Mya say. “Come and shoot soon. Kill. Kill them all.”
“After that they started shooting,” Hossain said. He watched the carnage, he said, while hiding in a pond with seven other people. “People were dying. Injured people were screaming in pain. They were being burnt alive. Some people were hiding in the hills, some were in the ponds, some were in the bushes, some were in the toilets.”
At the centre of the carnage was Thein Mya, though witness accounts varied, distorted by time and trauma. Some said he was carrying an assault rifle and joined soldiers in the shooting. Others said he carried only a long knife or sword.
Fatima Khatun said she saw him throw a toddler into a burning house.
“The baby was running away,” she said. “His mother was shot, so he was frightened. The chairman grabbed him and threw him into the fire.”
Human rights groups documented similar accounts. In a June report, Amnesty International, citing witnesses, described Thein Mya as “leading the vigilantes who participated in the village’s burning.”
Chut Pyin residents told Fortify Rights that Buddhist civilians armed with swords beheaded people who had been shot by soldiers.
The killing lasted until the evening, witnesses said. Ali said the last time he saw Thein Mya was at sunset.
“I saw him walking randomly, looking for survivors,” Ali said. “If he saw any alive, he made sure they were dead by cutting their throat.”
