‘They burned my child alive’: Survivors remember horrors of Myanmar nine years on

“I was crying loudly for my child. As I was crying, they threatened to shoot me. They were pulling me to the village.”

It was August 30, 2017, and soldiers from the Myanmar military had set the village of Tula Toli alight.

Nine years later, Begum, a Rohingya refugee, tells her story from a worker’s cottage in Brisbane’s southern suburbs, where she has been living since arriving in Australia on a humanitarian visa in January.

On that day in Tula Toli, down by the river, Begum said the soldiers picked the men and teenage boys and killed them – shooting them and stabbing them, some of them with long, pointed wooden farming tools called hossa flails.

“Then they would pull them away and make a pile of the dead bodies along the river. As far as I could see, I saw all the dead bodies,” Begum said.

The soldiers pushed the women towards the burning village, and ripped Begum’s child from her arms. “They burned my child alive,” she said.

As she cried for her dying child, the soldiers pushed Begum and other women into a hut. Without going into further detail, she said the soldiers “did whatever they wanted to do”.

The brutality was part of “clearing operations” conducted by Myanmar’s forces in the Rakhine State, on the nation’s western edge bordering Bangladesh.

The aim was to push the Rohingya – an ethnic Muslim minority in a largely Buddhist nation – out.

Conservative estimates say more than 7000 Rohingya were killed in the region in August 2017 alone, with more than 700,000 forced to flee.

As a result of the 2017 operations, and other violence dating back to 1982, more than a million Rohingya have crossed the wide and shallow Naf River into Bangladesh, where they now live in the largest refugee camps in the world.

It was in this river that Saddam Hossain found himself late one night at the height of the attacks.

Nine years later, Hossain sits on the couch in Begum’s house recounting his story.

Along with his wife Rashida Begum and their one-year-old daughter, he had been pushed into the water from an over-crowded boat while fleeing the violence.