A warning to our TV viewers: This next story contains some disturbing imagery. The Associated Press reports that scores of minority Rohingya Muslims from a village in Burma were massacred and buried in mass graves last August, after government forces opened fire on defenseless civilians and sought to cover up their crime.
The AP cited interviews with two dozen survivors or family members of victims, along with cellphone video footage of the attack’s aftermath, smuggled past police by a villager who filmed the corpses after they were unearthed by heavy rains. The video corroborates witness accounts that Burmese soldiers used acid to partially dissolve the bodies of their victims to make their identification more difficult.
At the United Nations, the special human rights envoy on Burma said Thursday that the video showed “the hallmarks of a genocide.” Since August, nearly 700,000 Rohingya Muslim refugees have fled Burma’s Rakhine State to neighboring Bangladesh after vigilantes and Burmese soldiers unleashed rape and murder while burning hundreds of villages.