The Best American Magazine Writing 2020

by Sid Holt

  The men stayed together until dawn broke. The gunfire had subsided, and the anxious crowd shifted from Ayub’s house to tea stalls next to the Big Village’s main mosque. By the time Futhu returned, Dunse Para was undulating with fear. Ayub and his deputy chiefs, who headed the smaller villages, had been called to the checkpost by the Myanmar Border Guard Police, known as the BGP. A security-service detachment had surrounded the village. Women were told to stay indoors while men clustered here and there, trying to figure out what was going on.

  At the post, Ayub was taken inside to see the BGP sector commander, who showed him a captured militant, presumably among those responsible for the violence.

  “Do you know him?” he asked.

  Ayub said he did not.

  They showed him a dead militant’s body.

  “Do you know him?”

  Ayub swore he did not. The imprisoned man seconded Ayub’s claim under interrogation. The militant said that the men had come to attack the checkpost, with no help from the local community.

  In the afternoon, the sector commander told Ayub to bury the dead body in secret. The man had a beard; he was obviously a Muslim. “It’ll be better if you bury the dead body in a Muslim graveyard. Take three people. Make sure nobody sees it.”

  When Ayub returned to the village, he informed two town criers—saingom—that the authorities had handed down additional rules. The men walked the dirt paths of the villages, calling out the orders: Curfew from dusk to sunrise! No more call to prayer! Men cannot gather in groups greater than four! Quranic school is suspended! Fishing and going to the mountains for timber are forbidden! All house fences must be torn down!

  In an instant, the men’s livelihoods were taken. No one understood what had happened. Two days later, a video was posted online by a group claiming responsibility for the October 9 attack. They called themselves Harakah al-Yaqin, the Faith Movement, and would later take the name the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, ARSA. Suddenly, everyone in Dunse Para was talking about them, even the small children. They wondered who these people were and which village they had come from. The group, led by a committee of Rohingya émigrés in Saudi Arabia, used their language. In the video, they explained that they were spurred to act after the 2012 oppressions. They had launched simultaneous strikes on two BGP checkposts and the BGP headquarters in Maungdaw township. It was not a major offensive, but it had come as a surprise. In total, nine policemen and eight militants were killed. ARSA fled with 62 firearms and more than 10,000 rounds of ammunition. The government estimated that the total attackers numbered 400 and accused the local community of helping.

  As the ARSA video circulated online, the security services returned to Dunse Para. Officers fanned out through the village on patrol. A cluster approached Futhu’s house. They told everyone to come outside and bring their household list, an official record of every member of their family. Anyone missing during a security check could be crossed off the list and banned from ever returning.

  The family came down into their yard. Other than Futhu’s older brother, who had fled more than a decade before and eventually settled in Malaysia, braving the risky sea journey in which thousands of Rohingya have died over the years, everyone was present. Seemingly satisfied, the officers said they could go back inside. They were at the edge of the family’s property when the commander turned back and called for Futhu.

  “Where were you on October 9?” the commander asked.

  Futhu explained he was at the middle-school dormitory. If they had any questions, they could speak to the Rakhine chairman. The commander eyed him, reached up, and grabbed him by his hair. “Why are you trying to fight against the Tatmadaw?” he spat. “Why are you doing this violence?”

  “I’m not involved in any kind of violence,” Futhu said. “Why would I? You’re like our brothers.”

  Futhu recognized one of the BGP officers. He was stationed at the checkpost Futhu crossed every day as he went to the school. They often exchanged greetings and sometimes played soccer together. “I know that man,” Futhu pleaded. “He knows me. Why do you suspect us? We all help each other, we do each other favors. I’ve never been involved in this kind of work. I am a teacher.”

  The commander continued pulling Futhu’s hair at the root. “Why are people coming from Bangladesh fighting with the police and military?” he said. Futhu managed to keep himself quiet. The commander released his grip and strode away. Before the officers left, they kicked down the family’s outhouse fence.

  In the days after the ARSA attack, men of the village were plucked out for interrogation. The village chief’s brother, who was an Islamic teacher, was beaten, and then Ayub himself was taken. The two deputies who accompanied him on the day he was detained fled to the hills, terrified that they would be next.

  * * *

  A few weeks later, the Rakhine chairman sent word that an international delegation would be coming to several towns, including Dunse Para, to learn about their situation. The villagers did not know what to expect. After the 2015 elections, when Aung San Suu Kyi became de facto head of the country, no one pushed the new leadership to account for previous sins. They used many excuses to abdicate “the lady” from responsibility for the apartheid that had flourished for years, including that the Tatmadaw, not the government, was actually still in control. But the ARSA attacks focused international attention on the state, as the Tatmadaw launched “area clearance operations.”

  Futhu was getting ready for prayer at the mosque when he saw a cluster of elders and young students sitting on the ground, discussing what the community should do when the foreigners came. The group was debating making signs in English about their oppression—they could write “RAPE, GENOCIDE, KILLING, TORTURE” in big letters. Someone suggested asking a teacher to write the words in English correctly.

  Futhu wasn’t sure what he thought of the idea. There had been no trouble in their village during the 2012 riots. Was it wise to be writing such things when they lived in peace and harmony with their Rakhine neighbors? Futhu never said he was a brave man. He was helping to oversee the reconstruction of the primary school, which had been wrecked by a cyclone in 2013. They had jury-rigged the roof. He kept his head down; he avoided eye contact; he hurried to finish his prayers.

  The foreigners came during harvest. The rice at the top of the stalks in the paddies was hard and yellow, ready to be cut, threshed, and dried in the sun. When the helicopter landed, everyone working in the fields gathered on the dirt roads. Some held placards, while others strained for a glimpse, as if at a soccer match. One sign read, “How long we suffer mass killing, rape Rohingya mothers and sisters from Rakhine and BGP and government.” Futhu thought his students had looked up the correct English spellings on Facebook.

  There was a foreign woman and a few foreign men wearing clothing from their own countries. The villagers believed they really had come to help. Delegations usually brought their own translators, but more often than not these translators could not speak Rohingya, and most villagers could not speak Burmese. The Rakhine chairman was charged with translating, but he was having trouble with the words.

  The authorities asked if Futhu could help. He stepped forward, along with another teacher. An older woman was crying and crying. The delegates asked what was wrong. She wanted to explain that her brother had been arrested and she had no idea where he was, alive or dead. Other villagers tried to explain their situation: We are not recognized with our real ethnicity. We don’t have permission for anything. We don’t have freedom to move from here to there. We need to receive permission to marry. We don’t have rights. They say that we are foreigners. They say we’re Bengali, and we’re not. All our ancestors, fathers, and grandfathers have been living here for a long time. Why do they not accept us as citizens? Please, you, delegation of different countries, please, try to fix this problem and give us recognition.

  When the meeting ended, the members of the delegation began walking back to their cars, but the Rakhine chairman li
ngered. He turned to the villagers with anger: “You complained about us and shamed our government,” he told them. “There will be a big problem waiting for you.”

  * * *

  Several mornings later, the village found a dozen BGP trucks parked on the main road. Futhu and his father raced to hide his diaries, shoving them in a sack and stowing it in a rice paddy next to some bushes. Hurrying home, they saw the officers making their way to the Big Village. By eleven a.m., they heard the calls of the saingom: All males over twelve years old, report to the Big Village!

  When they arrived, they saw their neighbors, hundreds of them, maybe a thousand, seated in a formation of rows in identical, unnatural positions. The men had their legs straight in front of them, their hands clasped behind their necks, heads bowed. The BGP lined the path. As the new arrivals approached, the officers hit them with sticks or kicked them with their boots. They forced each man to take off his watch and put them in a big, shiny pile. Futhu handed over his watch—a wedding gift from his wife’s family that had come all the way from Yangon, the former capital. But before he could take his place, he was called out of the line. Officers tied his hands behind his back and started beating him. There was no explanation, just a torrent of blows that fell on his head and his body. Futhu fell over. The beating continued. He was bleeding, dizzy. He saw that his father was bleeding from the mouth. He lost consciousness and woke intermittently. He was being dragged now. The sharp points of knives were piercing his skin. A cigarette smoldered his arm. As the villagers watched Futhu’s torment, no one was surprised. They all knew what happened to the educated when the authorities came.

  When Futhu woke up, his arms were still tied behind him. Everything—his back, his stomach, his arms, and his head—hurt. He had been dragged a short distance from the group. If anyone protested or looked up, they were beaten harder. The BGP officers lit cigarettes, smoked, and chatted. One man recorded the detention on his mobile phone, turning it around to film his face, as if he were taking a vacation selfie. An officer barked at Futhu to get up. He could barely stand, but he followed the officer to a clearing, where three higher-ranking officials sat under the shade of betel nut trees.

  “You did the translation for the delegation?” one of them asked.

  Futhu confirmed that he had. “This is not your country,” Futhu remembers him saying. “You’re Rohingya. Your ancestors came from Bangladesh. You claim that you’re indigenous of this country, and you demanded rights? How dare you.”

  Futhu saw that one of the officers in the group was the highest-ranking officer from the nearby BGP post. Another was a man he had played soccer with. He looked to him as he spoke. “I’m the schoolteacher here.”

  “Who wrote the placards?” the officers asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Futhu responded. “I don’t know.”

  The officer Futhu had recognized from the checkpost came over and smashed him in the head with a rifle. They wanted to know about ARSA. Futhu said he knew nothing about them. The Rakhine chairman was there, and the officers turned to him: “What kind of person is he?”

  “I know his parents and his ancestors,” the chairman said. “He is a good man. He goes to school straight and comes back. Maybe he was involved in the placard writing, but he is not involved with any bad people.”

  It was as good of a character reference as Futhu could have hoped for. “Ask the other military and police soldiers how good a relationship our relationship was,” he begged, unable to stop himself from talking. “They see me going to school and coming back directly from the school! Morning and evening, every day! I don’t know any of those people. I have never been involved in this work!”

  Futhu was ordered to return to the others, his life spared.

  By the evening, it had started to rain, turning the ground the men sat on to mud. The officers told the soaking mass to get up. They were herded into a two-story thatched house with the interior walls removed. Hundreds of men were pushed in and piled on top of one another.

  In the morning, women and children appeared, having been told that they could bring food for the captives. Futhu’s mother arrived with fish curry and rice, but her son could not swallow through the pain. As the men ate, the BGP came for the women. In the Big Village, they stormed into their homes. They rooted through their things. They ripped the gold ornaments off their necks and the mobile phones from inside their blouses. They chased women, and if they caught them, they touched all of their bodies.

  At Futhu’s house, his wife, along with one of Futhu’s sisters and his eleven-year-old brother, sat under a tree watching the officers toss their belongings outside. They began to tear apart Futhu’s chest and collect his papers. The papers were useless to everyone except Futhu; even his careful father hadn’t thought to hide them. Futhu’s wife was eight months pregnant with their second child. She had never known her mother-in-law to be particularly forceful, but she charged up to the officer. “What are you doing?” Futhu’s mother demanded. “Why are you going through my son’s papers?” Having just come from seeing her son’s wounds, how much more could she take? Futhu’s wife watched in shock as she tried to grab some of the papers from the officer’s hand. The man did not let go. The officers took all the papers except one, which she picked up off the ground and slid next to her heart. Futhu’s diaries, which he and his father hid that morning, remained safe.

  The BGP commander explained that because Ayub was detained and his two deputies had fled, they needed new leadership. He asked Futhu if he wanted the job. “I am only a teacher,” Futhu said. “I don’t want to be responsible for this.”

  The commander told the group to pick their new leaders. Everyone looked to Foyaz Ullah, because he had held the job before Ayub. Foyaz Ullah was crestfallen. He had no choice but to accept.

  “This time we are letting you go, but next time we will burn your houses and turn them into ashes,” the commander said. “Now, we are warning you orally. Next time, this will talk!” He turned his rifle on the crowd.

  The officers brought Futhu a blank paper. On it Futhu was instructed to write: “The BGP came to our village. They did a check. They did no harassment or looting. They took good care of us.” The men signed their names.

  In the days after the mass detention, men who had run up into the mountains returned to Dunse Para. Those who sheltered in the paddies crept back by night. In the end, the village counted ten men who had been arrested, including the other translator for the foreign delegation. Relatives would spend months trying to figure out where these men were held and whether they had been hurt. For those who remained, their already small world was shrinking—the restrictions were still in place. Men could not fish or cut timber from the hills, but they had families to feed, marriage fees to pay, bribes to register children outside the two-child law. What happens to men when they are powerless? What happens to women who live in fear? Some got desperate and sneaked into the mountains to forage for wood scraps. Others, forbidden to fish with boats or nets, ran into the sea with plastic bags tied to their bodies.

  Since the October 9 attacks, ARSA was growing in strength. They set up cells within dozens of villages, led by local leaders, usually imams. They recruited young, frustrated men, promising money and rights. They revealed a more menacing side. ARSA began targeting Rohingya they suspected of being informants—they killed more than a dozen village heads and other local administrators. For Foyaz Ullah, the pressure would be coming from all sides—if he received ARSA pressure and reported it, he could be executed for collaboration. The military, meanwhile, demanded ARSA updates, even if he had none to give. The community swore they’d never seen or heard from actual ARSA members, but who could be sure what was happening high in the mountains, where they weren’t technically even allowed to tread.

  Ever since the village detention, schools had been closed. With no students to teach, Futhu thumbed his books, read his newspapers, and listened to the radio, but he began losing patience. The children were falling be
hind their Rakhine peers. He heard members of the community say that even if the schools reopened, they would not send their children back. The middle school was about an hour’s walk to Chein Khar Li from Dunse Para, past the checkpost, and parents did not want their children anywhere near the officers.

  Futhu saw that the video taken by the officer at the village detention had been posted to Facebook. A commission came to Dunse Para to “investigate”—the villagers later heard that some officers, including the one Futhu knew, were put in jail. It would be one of the only cases in which the military or the police charged its own with crimes committed against the Rohingya. But nothing in the village changed. The men detained that night were still missing. The villagers heard that one had died in custody. By the summer, Ayub was still in detention. His family had retained a lawyer who told them that with enough money, she could get him released on August 30, but they would have to wait. Futhu had spent the spring focused on rebuilding the primary school. They had collected all the materials, and by August 2017, they were almost done with the new roof.

  * * *

  In the dark early hours of August 25, everyone in Dunse Para and Chein Khar Li woke together and at once to a barrage of bullets, so many that it sounded like pounding rain. Futhu’s wife, who had given birth not long ago to their second son, told her brother-in-law to call Futhu, who was sleeping at Chein Khar Li, but the line would not connect. The sounds were coming from that direction, and they began to fear for his life. A crowd went to see Foyaz Ullah, who was unsure of what they should do. Though the nearby village was being attacked, perhaps the military would not come to Dunse Para. We are innocent people, they repeated to themselves.