Investigators working for the UN’s Human Rights Council yesterday said that Myanmar’s military leaders should be prosecuted for genocide against Rohingya Muslims, taking the unusual step of identifying six by name to pinpoint the main alleged perpetrators of deadly, systematic crimes against the ethnic minority.
The call, accompanying a first report by the team of investigators, amounts to some of the strongest language yet from UN officials who have denounced alleged human rights violations in Myanmar since a bloody crackdown began in August last year.
The three-member “fact-finding mission” and their team, working under a mandate from the council, meticulously assembled hundreds of accounts from expatriate Rohingya, as well as satellite footage and other information to assemble the report.
Photo: EPA-EFE
“The military’s contempt for human life, dignity and freedom — for international law in general — should be a cause of concern for the entire population of Myanmar, and to the international community as a whole,” mission chair Marzuki Darusman, a former Indonesian attorney-general, told a news conference.
The council created the mission in March last year — nearly six months before a string of deadly rebel attacks on security and police posts set off a crackdown that drove Rohingya to flee into Bangladesh. The UN estimated that more than 700,000 have fled.
The team compiled accounts of crimes including gang rape, the torching of hundreds of villages, enslavement, and killings of children — some before their eyes of their own parents.
The team was not granted access to Myanmar and has decried a lack of cooperation or even response from the government, which received an early copy of the report.
The team cited a “conservative” estimate from Reporters Without Borders that about 10,000 people were killed in the violence, but outside investigators have had no access to the affected regions — making a precise accounting elusive, if not impossible.
Above all, the investigators said the situation in Myanmar should be referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, and if not, to a special tribunal.
The team’s assessment suggests the crimes against the Rohingya could meet the strict legal definition, which was last applied to state-supported abuses with respect to crimes in Bosnia and Rwanda nearly 25 years ago.
Adding into their assessment: The extreme brutality of the crimes; “hate rhetoric” and specific speech by perpetrators and military commanders; policies of exclusion against Rohingya people; an “oppressive context” and the “level of organization indicating a plan for destruction.”
The investigators cited six military leaders as “priority subjects” for possible prosecution, including the commander-in-chief, Min Aung Hlaing. A longer list of names is to be kept in the office of the UN human rights chief for possible use in future proceedings.
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