Report: Rohingya Muslims Suffered Grave Human Rights Abuses (+Photos)

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which issued the evidence in a new report, said the actions should be investigated as crimes against humanity.

Entitled, “Please Tell the World What They Have Done to Us” - The Chut Pyin Massacre: Forensic Evidence of Violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar,” the report reveals the findings of forensic medical evaluations of 22 Rohingya survivors of a bloody August 2017 assault on the village of Chut Pyin in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state.

The carnage in Chut Pyin was part of a wave of attacks on Rohingya villages that reportedly killed thousands of people and pushed at least 720,000 Rohingya refugees over the border into neighboring Bangladesh from August 2017 to June 2018, Physicians for Human Rights reported.

The report features in-depth testimonies and analyses of injuries sustained by surviving residents of Chut Pyin.

“We saw multiple gunshot wounds that are consistent with people having been shot while fleeing, and heard numerous accounts of rape and other sexual violence. We rigorously and meticulously analyzed the injuries, first-hand testimonies, and eyewitness accounts, and all our forensic examinations were highly consistent with the events that the survivors described,” explained Homer Venters, MD, PHR’s director of programs, who led the team of doctors who conducted the forensic medical evaluations in Thangkali refugee camp in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar area.

“The power of science, of medicine, is that injuries do not lie. Each laceration, blunt-force trauma, burn, and gunshot wound tells a story, and we use this forensic medical evidence to shed light on what likely happened on that day,” Venters added.

The Rohingya, who have lived in Myanmar for generations, are denied citizenship and are branded illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, which likewise denies them citizenship.

Their former communities in Myanmar have been razed and Buddhists have been shuttled and settled there in newly-built structures to repopulate the area.

Photos by Getty Images show Rohingya refugee at Jamtoli refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh.