When we arrived in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine, Rick Heizman had a delegation of people waiting for him to discuss his victim testimonies for the Independent Commission Of Enquiry (ICOE). This independent commission was set up to collect a database of victims from the 2017 insurgency by the ARSA Rohingya terrorists. The body of work for this commission is a response to the International Criminal Court (ICC) case brought against the government of Myanmar, spearheaded by the United Nations. So far, the progress of this ICC case has been stalled with some legal impediments, a major hurdle being the fact that Myanmar did not sign the Rome Statute in 1998, so the ICC does not have any real legal jurisdiction over Myanmar.
The delegates at the meeting had stacks of new victim testimonies to submit to Rick Heizman. Over the next few weeks, they will be meeting all of the victims. Heizman explained that he is just finishing 70 new victim interviews from his extensive trip in Maungdaw, northern Rakhine, which saw most of the jihadist violence from the ARSA Rohingya terror organization. He has submitted the videos with complete contact information: village, township, personal names and occupations, so there are no obstacles for the ICOE to locate these individuals in order to ascertain the authenticity of his video interviews.
Also in this work for the committee, Heizman went through detailed village maps of Maungdaw and Buthidaung Townships, to show transit routes of human trafficking and weapons smuggling, as revealed by captured ARSA terrorists from the 2017 insurgency. One route from the beach over the Mayu Mountains to Chut Pyin was going to supply weapons to other villages and the whole region; any indigenous persons who came across their path were systematically murdered in a no-living-witness policy. Sometimes the bodies were cut into small pieces and scattered so that the body could not be found, which leaves the surviving family members distraught, as their loved ones can be recognized only by small pieces of clothing.
Rick Heizman says “The ICC case is ridiculous; it totally ignores this side of reality and ignores hard evidence — no photos and no videos with an estimated quarter million smart phones in their hands [the Bengalis], and Burma did not sign the accord for the ICC. Where is the trial for ARSA commanders living in Bangladesh, Pakistan and wherever else they may be, like what they are trying to do with the Burmese commanders?” He added: “These attacks of ARSA were planned ahead of time.” Recently, Heizman has published a very disturbing video from Islamic terrorists that is calling fighters for the “battlefield of jihad” in Rakhine, detailing an ongoing jihadist invasion of the US and the West. This is in sharp contrast to the UN false narrative that somehow manages to completely ignore the aspect of international Islamic terror in Rakhine. Indeed, the massive 2017 ARSA Rohingya insurgency is not even considered as the root cause of the refugee crisis for the ICC case.
After the meetings for the ICOE, Heizman began the long work of translations for some of his new videos. From a raw audio translation file, Heizman meticulously lines up subtitles with emphasis of victims in the interview, such as gesticulations or a change in voice. He even narrowed down background conversations for translation in the process here, with special emphasis on village and location names, names of people, and the placing of events at certain dates in order to help reconstruct events. At one point, the translator mentioned that an old Mro man spoke broken Rakhine language, using old words and language, which would be untranslatable to many people except from a small village area from a specific time.
The first translated items were some documents in Arakanese from Kyauk Phyu, being some definitive confirmation on the violent Islamic insurgency there in 2012. Also, this report establishes a clear history of Bengalis burning down the houses of Rakhine people. Some notes from the rough translation of the report: “Rakhines fleeing the burning houses were shot with jingalies and attacked with swords; two people were killed and 97 injured in just one ward of the village by October 23. Impossible to stop the burning houses. This lasted three days — Oct 22/23/24. Wind direction change saved whole of Kyauk Phyu town from fire and only burnt the Bengali houses. Many Bengalis were on their fishing boats where they kept the petroleum for burning. Most Bengali people fled by sea in fishing boats from Kyauk Phyu. All Rakhine people would have been killed in the siege if they did not find a way to protect themselves. The data shows Rakhines did not attack Bengalis; rather, they just protected themselves, unlike the Bengalis who killed Rakhines. The Rakhine people helped about 350 Bengalis in one case, and let them bring all their belongings by six large boats or to the refugee camps.” Conclusion of the report: “Rakhine people never wanted the attacks, but in the conflict they only protected themselves and can no longer live with Bengalis safely.”
Some of the next translations were regarding the historical genocide of 1942 from actual survivors. There are not many of these survivors still alive, so their testimony is valuable evidence against revisionist history by jihadists. In the ARSA manifesto of February, 2019, they tried to reverse these facts, claiming themselves to be the victims of their own murderous crimes.
Rick Heizman worked on an old man’s story; he fled by train to India to escape the 1942 Bengali massacre. This man knew much of the history surrounding these events. Another testimony from a 97-year-old man whose grandfather rebuilt a pagoda, or zedi, on an ancient site where people told him they saw a sparkling light, but the zedi was destroyed by Bengalis three times during the Second World War. Three times they rebuilt this zedi. The man harrowingly survived Bengalis trying to kill him twice in his lifetime. He says, now many Bengalis are living close by, but when he was a child there were few Bengalis around.
One interview of an old Mro ethnic man told of how he cut the ropes to free his pigs when Bengalis attacked his village in 2012; otherwise the pigs would have been killed by them. He hid in the village while some hid in the forest when the Bengalis attacked, so everybody had to scatter and families became separated from the old people. This is a real-life story of survival.
Another horrific story from an old man told about a brutal Bengali attack from Thay Chaung village, featuring excessive cruelty on a family. The Bengalis severed the organs of the family members; the severed body parts were taken to Bengali villages as trophies for a reward from the imams. Further in the video, we are told that Rakhine families were told to even help and be compassionate to Bengalis before 1942, by giving them land and jobs. The subsequent account in the video from 1942 was a disturbing story of kindness turned against a Rakhine family.
Story after story, testimony after victim testimony, were translated in detail from several languages and analyzed in hours of footage from before 1942 to today, with one common theme of violence, death and cruelty from a group of people who are not indigenous to these ancient lands. The real victims here have been systematically denied justice by the UN, and now by the ICC. Both refuse acknowledge the Islamic jihad in Rakhine State, despite the hard evidence.