Tula Toli Massacre {Masterlist}

January 4, 2017

people allegedly killed in the Tula Toli massacre

Now we'll have a critical look at the deadliest alleged massacre of the Myanmar government's crackdown in late August. This is said to be on August 30 at Min Gyi, locally known by the Rohingya as Tula Toli, at a kink in one of those south-flowing coastal rivers, as noted sort-of boxed in by it on three sides (see map below).

What's alleged there is the biggest massacre reported, committed by Myanmar government forces augmented by local Buddhists. They murdered well over 500 men, women and children, by  a literal reading of what they say, almost surely over 1,000, and perhaps around 2,000 at maximum. The best rounding is probably "about a thousand." So it's a massive killing spree alleged, probably far bigger than the other next five biggest massacres combined. 

That's the alleged number of innocent Rohingya Muslims killed in Tula Toli. The actual number is unproven, and might be zero. But to the people who shape our thinking, alleged = real here. And this is intended to be their flagship alleged massacre, a name to remember, akin to Houla in Syria, or Srebrenica in Bosnia. Tula Toli seems to take that dark flavor quite well. It sort of rolls off your tongue in two pieces that tumbles across the hut floor in the dark like dice. They come up as a pair of small skulls catching the moonlight, that expand until they fill your world with dread. Tula Toli, grave of the Rohingya. 

And it wasn't just a quantity crime but a quality one - the anti-Muslim regime forces and their African Mercenaries their Alawite Shabiha thugs their Buddhist villager mobs killed people horribly, with the kind of evil innocent Muslims all over the world are often faced with (or so they say). Heads were hacked a lot, and much worse is alleged and likely. The main features people agree on down the board, as if they really saw it or at least memorized a list of features to report:

- between 1,000 and 2,000 civilians were assured safety, but herded to the shore and separated.

- Men were killed methodically for a time as women and children watched. They were put in pits and burned (maybe everyone, but the men especially).

- women were made to stand in deep water for a long time, maybe after being shot-up after being told to run (a number of 30 is given, with others killed in the shooting)

- small groups of these women were taken, with any children they had, to huts where they children were brutally killed, and then the women were beaten and raped and killed, and the huts were set on fire.

- Also some children were killed, especially a group found hiding after the main killing, were maybe hacked-up, and tossed in the river.

Okay? This is presumed to have the stamp of approval of the highest authorities and probably the "militant Buddhist" Aung San Suu Kyi. Government helicopters were used, to shot the village and deliver weapons and uniforms to the soldiers, pro-regime village chief, and Buddhist monks and mobs assembled right there across the river, all teaming up in this barbarity and epic-scale mass murder they would try to deny. No effort to cover it up, like going in plain-clothes, or even Rihingya dress, except to burn the bodies a bit. And this being just the biggest of many they were running daily at the time, just because they're racist and/or tools of satan or who cares why, just make it stop, hold someone accountable and save the innocent Muslims, like we did or tried in Libya, Syria, Iraq, etc...  

Some media presentation:

The Guradian reports on U.S. Holocaust museum study citing this as one of three most prominent massacres. "Myanmar soldiers are accused of slaughtering hundreds of Rohingya, including children, who were gathered on a river bank, and then burning the bodies. “Some small children were thrown into the river,” said a witness quoted in the report. “They hacked small children who were half-alive.” Women were herded into huts, raped, beaten to death (or unconscious) and the huts were burned

Time: "Multiple survivors from his village described how perpetrators slit throats, raped women, and burned “piles” of victims, including infant children. Eyewitnesses estimated a death toll of hundreds in that village alone."

Press Release for HRW repor: “The Burmese army’s atrocities at Tula Toli were not just brutal, they were systematic,” said Brad Adams, Asia director. “Soldiers carried out killings and rapes of hundreds of Rohingya with a cruel efficiency that could only come with advance planning.”

Wikipedia page - could use some improvements in what it presents as fact vs. allegation

A Closer Look On Syria (ACLOS) page: incomplete but a brilliant  start (contributors so far: me - mirrors or goes with what you'll see here.)

Tula Toli Massacre analysis - by posts  here:
(An indeterminate amount of detailed study by subject)

• The Alleged Witnesses - so many of them alive and talking...
• The Visual Record and lack of it
  
• Where is Wet Kyein?
• The Village Chairman/Chairmen (forthcoming)
• Others...

Summary

(will be edited and updated some)

Location: on Wikimapia as MinGyi/TulaToli (and see below - but it seems to include other areas - string of homes to the south, and maybe the area to the SW, as labeled here.). Interestingly, it's halfway between Kha Maung Seik and Maung Nu, the two massacres especially that might be the same thing. 16 km south of Kha Maung Seik (app. 90 Hindus killed, buried nearby), 30 km nw of Maung Nu (app. 90+ Rohingya killed, bodies driven off - to the north, allegedly?).

This one is a separate story and allegedly far bigger than both of them combined. Alleged witness accounts suggest a broad range of at least 5-600 to well over 1,000+ civilians were killed, possibly 1,500 or higher, but should no higher than around 2,000 (the upper estimate of total people they rounded up and tried to kill - explained at ACLOS).  It's said only a handful survived, in some places specified as about 20, or 18 in number. Combing the internet, I found perhaps 80 people claiming to be survivors with a story to tell.

The story was a bit slow to emerge, with most detailed reports coming only in December, but at least a couple in English date back to September 7 or so. ...

We hear Myanmar forces with Buddhist mobs, including monks in their robes, slaughtered all these innocent and defenseless Rohingya Muslims, raping and torturing with brutality. It's only on accident they let 18, or maybe 80 or everyone, escape to tell the tale. It sounds fun and all, but it leaves you with a big and hideous crime you'll have to deny and cover up. The government flatly denies it, claiming only the usual, that ARSA militants burned the town themselves and everyone ran off on their own, after also burning some Buddhist and other non-Rohingya villages too, and killing some civilians there, besides security forces (partial explanation at ACLOS). They have no explanation yet for 500-2,000 dead Rohingya at Tula Toli. No one has proof of such a thing yet either, but it's getting believed anyway.

Yet as Human Rights Watch notes: "In an apparent effort to destroy evidence of the killings, soldiers and Rakhine villagers dug pits in which witnesses say they burned the bodies. Many of the women and children died while locked in village houses that were burned to the ground." As far as evidence goes, burning would hide the victims' identity, but would have no chance of erasing the bodies themselves, which would stand as clear proof of the story handed in. The regime could not hide such a crime with such crude methods, and would have no way to avoid at least a few witnesses. So they ran ahead and did it anyway, right? Because their genocidal bloodlust against innocent Muslims knows no bounds, and Russia has their back at the security council, and stuff, right? 

Burning the bodies might obscure details - like the fact that the victims were or weren't actually kidnapped Rakhine villagers, for example. The government might allege this, having found the burn pits and the torched rape huts. I hope those never existed, but in my experience Islamist lies tend to have such hideous "kernels of truth." They don't like to make up crimes out of thin air - they want the cruelty to be real, just reported to the infidels upside-down. So the bigger the better, The worse the better, and as the trick keeps working, the global hate machine get its funding and its "no-fly zones" and "targeted sanctions" and new cool countries like Kosovoa created, and it grows in power. Tula Toli would be a smashing success, so far.

https://frontiermyanmar.net/en/the-destruction-of-tula-toli

By OLIVER SLOW | FRONTIER Myanmar November 30

"one villager in Bangladesh told Frontier that it had been home to about 300 families, of which 60 had been Rakhine and the rest Muslim."

The town was said to be cleansed specifically of  Rohingya, but if their story is untrue, it might even be the upside-down opposite of true.  We know someone burned the Rohingya homes and they all went to the border (or most were killed, as they say, and a "handful" walked to the border). It's alleged Tula Toli's Buddhists were in on the killings, then stayed behind in their un-burnt homes to have the run of the town. That makes them fit for death to Islamists. To be convenient, they might have punished the infidels already ... at the same time as the Tula Toli massacre they were actually the victims of.

Problems with the Prelude 

We also hear the alleged August 30 massacre was preceded by the burning of at least one nearby village, with some degree of massacre as well. But there's a problem with the prelude too.

Sources disagree if it was called Wet Kyein or Dual Toli, but it was across the river the northeast, and was massively burned next time a satellite view was taken (see map above: Wikipedia has it as Wet Kyein). Sources agreed in telling Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch it was a Rohingya village, but disagree on the name. The name AI was given for that place (Wet Kyein) is placed south of Tula Toli by HRW, who heard it was a Rakhine Buddhist town that was suspiciously not burned. The government says Bengali militants burned at least 30 homes in Wet Kyein on the 28th, and it was a Rakhine Buddhist village, apparently just where AI put it across the river, but as Rohingya. This is a potentially important bit of confusion addressed as where is Wet Kyein?

So from this, it seems likely to me ARSA militants raided a nearby Rakhine/Buddhist or maybe mixed village - Wet Kyein, across the river - mid-day on August 28 and perhaps after as well, burned homes, murdered civilians and perhaps took captives, even by boat back to Tula Toli. We can make out this possibility, I suspect, because the story managers used two different methods to try and conceal that event: first using the real name (to AI in or by mid-October), then changing the name of the town, and specifically moving its real name to somewhere else (to HRW in or by mid-December). Then it seems they used the twice-edited event as a prequel to their larger alleged massacre, which... is the kind of thing that could use a fake or laundered prelude to help clarify the "underlying patterns." This amount of map-management (if it's the case) would suggest whatever happened in Wet Kyein might be a big deal the Islamists here are a little worried about, and want to have confused, and fused into one of their own stories.