The Tula Toli Massacre

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2017

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The chilling story of a massacre of Rohingya muslims in a small village in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. On 30 August government soldiers swept through the village setting fire to homes, raping and killing dozens, possibly hundreds of its muslim inhabitants. An ongoing military crackdown in the state has seen more than 500,000 Rohingya muslims flee to neighbouring Bangladesh since late August.

The government of Aung San Suu Kyi has faced international condemnation over the crisis. She says the military is responding to attacks by Rohingya militants. But the Rohingya have long been persecuted in Myanmar: denied citizenship, decent healthcare and education.

For Assignment, Gabriel Gatehouse investigates the massacre in Tula Toli. Speaking to survivors in camps in Bangladesh, he pieces together a picture of horrific violence, perpetrated in what has been described as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” And he hears evidence that suggests the violence may have been planned in advance.

Produced by John Murphy

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and thank you for downloading this podcast.
0:03.0	Since the end of August, more than half a million Rohingya Muslims have fled their homes in Myanmar seeking refuge in Bangladesh.
0:12.0	And in this program, we're going to focus on one massacre that took place on one day in one village.
0:20.0	Partly because this incident is so horrific, it's on such a scale that it demands
0:26.3	investigation in its own right. We're talking about mass murder, mass rape,
0:31.5	the killings of infants and of children, but also because this isn't an isolated
0:36.8	incident.
0:37.8	Things like this, albeit on a smaller scale, have been going on throughout Northern
0:42.1	Rakhine State since since August and in some places
0:45.0	they're even continuing to this day.
0:47.4	We're talking about the burning of villages, we're talking about what the United Nations
0:51.6	has called ethnic cleansing.
0:54.3	The Burmese government says that it's trying to root out terrorists and the army there says
0:58.8	that it's innocent of any charges of violence against civilians. But as you'll hear in this program we've got
1:05.8	some pretty convincing evidence that that isn't the case and before you start
1:10.8	listening I should warn you that our investigation contains some pretty horrific
1:17.8	descriptions of violence, including some very graphic descriptions of sexual violence.
1:24.0	Well, we've finally got permission to go through and it's an extraordinary site, a sea of people on a long thin mud ridge.
1:39.6	Right on the river here in no man's land. The river itself is the frontier between Bangladesh and Myanmar and these people
1:47.2	many of them look in a terrible state. This is assignment on the BBC World Service.
1:55.0	I'm Gabriel Gatehouse and before we go any further,
1:58.0	I should warn you that this program contains stories you'll find distressing. I certainly did, with descriptions of extreme violence
	...

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