One evening, as Ma Nway and her family were having dinner, soldiers from Myanmar’s armed forces, known as the Tatmadaw, came to her house and asked for her husband. According to her account, they blindfolded him, took out their guns and beat him in front of her.
“At the time, I could only cry,” said Ma Nway, an ethnic Arakanese from Myanmar’s westernmost Rakhine State, who prefers not to reveal her identity for fear of reprisals. “I feared they would shoot me, so I held my tongue … I felt like they were the most brutal people in the world.”
RFA
Family members of villagers kidnapped by government soldiers in Myanmar’s Rakhine state were turned away by police this week after trying to file a missing persons report, their second attempt to call for accountability following the villagers’ disappearance in March.
The 18 captives, residents of Rakhine’s strife-torn Kyauktaw township, were arrested in mid-March, when Myanmar troops entered the region amid fighting with the ethnic Arakan Army (AA) and burned down dozens of homes in the 500-home ethnic Rakhine tract.
Eight of the group went missing from Tin Ma village on March 13, with the other 10 disappearing from Tin Ma Gyi village three days later.