Rohingya say their village is lost to Myanmar’s spiralling conflict

Bula Katum (R), 35, a Rohingya refugee woman sits in a makeshift shelter at Kutupalang Makeshift Camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, September 4, 2017. (REUTERS)
Updated 07 September 2017
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Rohingya say their village is lost to Myanmar’s spiralling conflict

KUTAPALONG, Bangladesh: The villagers said the soldiers came first, firing indiscriminately. Then came civilians, accompanying the soldiers, to loot and burn.
Now in Bangladesh, 20 Muslims and Hindus gave interviews in which they recounted how they were forced out of their village of Kha Maung Seik in Myanmar’s Rakhine State on Aug. 25.
“The military brought some Rakhine Buddhists with them and torched the village,” said Kadil Hussein, 55.
“All the Muslims in our village, about 10,000, fled. Some were killed by gunshots, the rest came here. There’s not a single person left.”
Hussein is staying with hundreds of other new arrivals at the Kutapalong refugee settlement, already home to thousands of Rohingya who fled earlier.
Nearly 150,000 Rohingya have arrived in Bangladesh since Aug. 25, when insurgents of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army launched attacks on security forces in Rakhine State.
Reuters interviewed villagers from Kha Maung Seik and neighboring hamlets, who described killings and the burning of homes in the military response to the insurgent attacks.
Reuters has been unable to verify their accounts. Access to the area has been restricted since October, when the same insurgent group attacked police posts, killing nine.
Myanmar says its forces are in a fight against “terrorists.” State media has accused Rohingya militants of burning villages and killing civilians of all religions.
Myanmar does recognize the 1.1 million Rohingya as citizens, labelling them illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
The refugees from Kha Maung Seik, and from numerous other villages across the north of Rakhine State, say Myanmar forces and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists are intent on forcing them out.
One refugee, Body Alom, 28, said he hid in forest with thousands of others when the soldiers arrived. He waited for hours before emerging to look for his family.
He says he saw corpses in paddy fields, and eventually found his mother and brother dead with gunshot wounds. Two other villagers said they saw bodies in the fields.
“It wasn’t safe, so I just left them,” he said. “I had no chance to give them a burial.”
TENSE MIX
A military official denied that Buddhist civilians were working with authorities and instead accused Muslims of attacking other communities.
“The military arrived at the village later but did not find any bodies,” said the military source, who declined to be identified as he is not authorized to speak to media.
Another military source in the state capital, Sittwe, said Kha Maung Seik was in the conflict zone and clear information about what happened had yet to emerge.
The main village of Kha Maung Seik was home to a mixed community, with Rohingya Muslims in the majority along with about 6,000 Rakhine Buddhists, Hindus and others.
The village is known to the Rohingya as Foira Bazar for its market of about 1,000 shops where everyone did business.
But relations have been strained for some time.
A government plan to grant Hindus citizenship, violence in the state in 2012 and October, and an identity card scheme that the Rohingya rejected as it implied they were foreign, all contributed to tension, the refugees said.
Since October, more soldiers were posted near the village, with border police. Patrols went house-to-house arresting anyone suspected of having militant links, they said.
Abu Kalam, 31, showed Reuters welts on his back, arms and legs, and what he said were cigarette burns on his arms. He said he was detained by the military last month, before the attacks, as he was working in his vegetable patch with a knife.
“After October, the military told us not to have knives. When they saw me using one they arrested me,” he said, adding he was kept in a barracks for six days.
“They regularly tortured me, asking ‘are you connected with Al-Yaqin?’,” he said, using another name for the rebels.
INDISCRIMINATE FIRING
Villagers in Kha Maung Seik say they heard shooting at 2 a.m. on Aug. 25. A military source in Maungdaw town and two Muslim residents said militants attacked a police post near the village that night.
According to the military source, the rebels attacked with grenades then turned their attention to a Hindu neighborhood.
Four Rohingya villagers separately gave Reuters accounts of how, at about 5 a.m., soldiers entered the village, firing indiscriminately. Thousands fled.
“I was at the front of a big group running for cover, but I looked back and could see people at the back getting shot,” said Abul Hussein, 28.
Later, grenades and mortar bombs were fired into the forest, according to Hussein and three other villagers.
“I saw a mortar hit a group of people. Some died on the spot,” he said.
From the forest, residents watched military and civilians loot and burn houses. Civilians helped gather bodies, according to Body Alom and two other villagers.
“They collected the bodies, searching for belongings,” said Body Alom. “They took money, clothes, cows, everything. Then they burned the houses.”
Members of Myanmar’s small Hindu community seem to have been caught in the middle. The military source said some Hindus from Kha Maung Seik were unaccounted after the militant attack.
A group of Hindu women refugees in Kutapalong said they saw eight Hindu men killed by Buddhist Rakhines after they refused to attack Muslims.
“They asked my husband to join them to kill Rohingya but he refused, so they killed him,” said Anika Bala, 15. Six months pregnant, she said Muslims helped her get to Bangladesh.
After seeing their homes burned, Kha Maung Seik’s Muslim leaders decided it was too dangerous to stay.
“We thought we might be able to return and live with other types of people,” said Mohammed Zubair, 30, assistant to the village chairman.
“But we realized that’s not possible.”
About 100 men decided to stay and fight, Body Alom said.
“One said to me ‘If I have to die, I will die here’.”


Germany brushes off Musk calling Scholz a ‘fool’

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Germany brushes off Musk calling Scholz a ‘fool’

Government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann took a playful dig at the US tycoon, saying that “on X, you have Narrenfreiheit,” which translates to the freedom to act like a fool
A tight-lipped Scholz simply called it “not very friendly“

BERLIN: German officials on Friday brushed off tech billionaire Elon Musk labelling Olaf Scholz a “fool” on his social media platform X after the dramatic collapse of the chancellor’s coalition government.
In a comment Thursday above a post about the implosion of Scholz’s long-troubled coalition, the world’s richest man tweeted in German: “Olaf ist ein Narr” — “Olaf is a fool.”
Asked about Musk’s comment, government spokeswoman Christiane Hoffmann took a playful dig at the US tycoon, saying that “on X, you have Narrenfreiheit,” which translates to the freedom to act like a fool.
The word refers to revellers during Germany’s traditional carnival season, which starts next week, having the freedom to act without inhibitions.
Historically, the term echoes the notion of the “jester’s privilege” — the right of a court jester to mock those in power without being punished by the king.
Asked later about the comment, a tight-lipped Scholz simply called it “not very friendly,” adding that Internet companies are “not organs of state so I did not even pay it any attention.”
Musk strongly supported US election winner Donald Trump, and is now positioned to take up a role in his administration as a deputy tasked with restructuring government operations.
It is not the first time the Tesla boss has had run-ins with German officials online.
Last year he said Berlin-funded migrant rescue operations in the Mediterranean could be seen as an “invasion” of Italy, sparking a terse response from the German foreign ministry.
He has also expressed sympathy for some of the positions of Germany’s far-right AfD party, which has notched up a string of recent electoral successes and is riding high in the opinion polls.

First flight with Israelis evacuated from Amsterdam lands in Tel Aviv

Updated 08 November 2024
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First flight with Israelis evacuated from Amsterdam lands in Tel Aviv

  • The plane that arrived in Tel Aviv had passengers evacuated from Amsterdam

TEL AVIV: The first flight carrying Israelis evacuated from Amsterdam after violent clashes following a football match there landed on Friday at Ben Gurion International Airport, the Israel Airports Authority said.
“The plane that arrived in Tel Aviv now has passengers evacuated from Amsterdam,” Liza Dvir, spokeswoman for the airport authority told AFP.


India’s Modi rejects calls to restore Kashmir’s partial autonomy

Updated 08 November 2024
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India’s Modi rejects calls to restore Kashmir’s partial autonomy

  • Modi revoked partial autonomy in 2019 and split the state into the two federally administered territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh 
  • Jammu and Kashmir held its first local election in a decade this year, newly-elected lawmakers passed resolution this week seeking restoration

NEW DELHI: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi strongly backed his government’s contentious 2019 decision to revoke the partial autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, days after the territory’s newly elected lawmakers sought its restoration.
“Only the constitution of Babasaheb Ambedkar will operate in Kashmir... No power in the world can restore Article 370 (partial autonomy) in Kashmir,” Modi said, referring to one of the founding fathers of the Indian constitution.
Modi was speaking at a state election rally in the western state of Maharashtra, where Ambedkar was from.
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government revoked partial autonomy in 2019 and split the state into the two federally administered territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh — a move that was opposed by many political groups in the Himalayan region.
Jammu and Kashmir held its first local election in a decade in September and October and the newly-elected lawmakers passed a resolution this week seeking the restoration.
Jammu and Kashmir’s ruling National Conference party had promised in its election manifesto that it would restore the partial autonomy, although the power to do so lies with Modi’s federal government.
Jammu and Kashmir’s new lawmakers can legislate on local issues like other Indian states, except matters regarding public order and policing. They will also need the approval of the federally-appointed administrator on all policy decisions that have financial implications.
Under the system of partial autonomy, Kashmir had its own constitution and the freedom to make laws on all issues except foreign affairs, defense and communications.
The troubled region, where separatist militants have fought security forces since 1989, is India’s only Muslim-majority territory.
It has been at the center of a territorial dispute with Pakistan since the neighbors gained independence from British colonial rule in 1947.
Kashmir is claimed in full but ruled in part by both India and Pakistan, which have fought two of their three wars over the region.


Kyiv says Russia has returned bodies of 563 soldiers

Updated 08 November 2024
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Kyiv says Russia has returned bodies of 563 soldiers

  • The exchange of prisoners and bodies of killed military personnel remains one of the few areas of cooperation
  • The announcement represents one of the largest repatriations of killed Ukrainian servicemen

KYIV: Ukraine said on Friday it had received the bodies of 563 soldiers from Russian authorities, mainly troops that had died in combat in the eastern Donetsk region.
The exchange of prisoners and bodies of killed military personnel remains one of the few areas of cooperation between Moscow and Kyiv since Russia invaded in 2022.
“The bodies of 563 fallen Ukrainian defenders were returned to Ukraine,” the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War said in a statement on social media.
The announcement represents one of the largest repatriations of killed Ukrainian servicemen since the beginning of the war.
The statement said that 320 of the remains were returned from the Donetsk region and that 89 of the soldiers had been killed near Bakhmut, a town captured by Russia in May last year after a costly battle.
Another 154 of the bodies were returned from morgues inside Russia, the statement added.
Neither Russia nor Ukraine publicly disclose how many military personnel have been killed fighting.


Russia sentences soldiers who massacred Ukraine family to life in prison

Updated 08 November 2024
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Russia sentences soldiers who massacred Ukraine family to life in prison

  • The court in Rostov-on-Don sentenced the two men to life in prison for mass murder “motivated by political, ideological, racial, national or religious hatred“
  • The incident triggered uproar in Ukraine

MOSCOW: A Russian court sentenced two soldiers to life in prison for the massacre of a family of nine people in their home in occupied Ukraine, state media reported on Friday.
Russian prosecutors said in October 2023, the two Russian soldiers, Anton Sopov and Stanislav Rau, entered the home of the Kapkanets family in the city of Volnovakha with guns equipped with silencers.
They then shot all nine family members who lived there, including two children aged five and nine.
The southern district military court in Rostov-on-Don sentenced the two men to life in prison for mass murder “motivated by political, ideological, racial, national or religious hatred,” the state-run TASS news agency reported, citing an unnamed law enforcement source.
The incident triggered uproar in Ukraine.
Kyiv alleged at the time that the Russian soldiers had murdered the family in their sleep after they refused to move out of their home to allow Russian soldiers to live there.
“The occupiers killed the Kapkanets family, who were celebrating a birthday and refused to give up their home,” Ukraine’s human rights ombudsman Dmytro Lubinets said a day after the murder.
Russian forces seized the city of Volnovakha in Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region at the start of their full-scale military offensive.
It was virtually destroyed by Russian artillery strikes.
Russian soldiers have been accused of multiple instances of killing civilians in Ukrainian towns and cities they have occupied since February 2022.
Moscow has always denied targeting civilians and tried to claim reports of atrocities at places like Bucha were fake, despite widespread evidence from multiple independent sources.
The arrest and sentencing in this case is a rare example of Russia admitting to a crime committed by its troops in Ukraine.
State media did not say what prosecutors determined the reason for the attack was.
TASS suggested it could have been a “domestic dispute,” while both the independent Radio Free Europe and Kommersant business outlets said it could have been linked to a dispute over obtaining vodka.
The trial was held in secret.
The independent Radio Free Europe outlet reported the Rau, 28, and Sopov, 21 were mercenaries for the Wagner paramilitary before joining Russia’s official army.
They had both received state awards a few months before the mass murder, it said.