The Burmese army has used unfathomable levels of violence against the minority Rohingya, UN investigators said on Tuesday, calling for the military to be removed from politics and top generals to be prosecuted for genocide.
The UN report, which laid out in meticulous detail a vast array of violations committed by Myanmar’s powerful military, came just hours before an International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor announced a preliminary probe into crimes against the Rohingya.
“It is hard to fathom the level of brutality of Tatmadaw operations, its total disregard for civilian life,” head of the UN fact-finding mission Marzuki Darusman told the UN Human Rights Council, referring to the nation’s military.
Burmese Ambassador to the UN Kyaw Moe Tun criticized Tuesday’s report as “one-sided” and “flawed.”
The ICC’s preliminary examination could lead to a formal investigation and then possible indictments.
“I have decided to proceed to the next phase of the process and to carry out a full-fledged preliminary examination of the situation at hand,” ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said in a statement.
A brutal military crackdown last year forced more than 700,000 Rohingya to flee over the border into Bangladesh amid accounts of arson, murder and rape at the hands of troops and vigilante mobs in mainly Buddhist Mynamar.
The Burmese army has denied nearly all wrongdoing, insisting its campaign was justified to root out Rohingya insurgents who staged deadly raids on border posts in August last year.
The UN team said the military’s tactics had been “consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats,” and said that estimates that about 10,000 people were killed in the crackdown was likely a conservative figure.
It said there were reasonable grounds to believe that the atrocities were committed with the intention of destroying the stateless Rohingya, warranting the charge of “genocide.”
A shorter version of the mission’s report, published last month, had already called for Myanmar’s army chief and five other top military commanders to be prosecuted in an international court for genocide.
In his presentation, Darusman provided excruciating details of massacres in Rohingya villages in which “the men were systematically killed. Children were shot, thrown into the river or onto a fire.”
Women and girls were routinely gang raped before being locked inside burning houses.
Of those who survived, many had been severely bitten, in what appeared to be “akin to a form of branding,” he said.
Darusman said the “scale, cruelty and systematic nature [of the sexual violence] reveal beyond doubt that rape is used as a tactic of war.”
“There cannot be any democratic transition in Myanmar unless the Tatmadaw relinquishes its control of the politics, of the economy and of the constitution,” UN investigator Christopher Sidoti told reporters. “We have seen not the birth of democracy in Myanmar, regrettably, but the stillbirth.”
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese