‘Mounting evidence’ of Myanmar genocide — Watchdogs

WASHINGTON: Myanmar security forces slit the throats of Muslim Rohingya, burned victims alive, and gang-raped women and girls, according to two separate reports detailing mounting evidence of genocide against the minority group.

Human Rights Watch focused on the use of sexual violence in its report on the military’s campaign against the Rohingya, and concluded that the depredations amounted to crimes against humanity.

“Rape has been a prominent and devastating feature of the Burmese military’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya,” said Skye Wheeler, a researcher at Human Rights Watch and author of the report.

“The Burmese military’s barbaric acts of violence have left countless women and girls brutally harmed and traumatised.”

A separate report by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Southeast Asia-based Fortify Rights documents “widespread and systematic attacks” on Rohingya civilians between Oct 9 and December of last year, and from Aug 25 of this year.

The 30-page report, entitled ‘ They tried to kill us all’, is based on more than 200 interviews with survivors and eyewitnesses, as well as international aid workers.

Some world leaders have already described as ‘ethnic cleansing’ the scorched-earth military campaign against the Rohingya.

Evidence gathered by Fortify Rights and the Holocaust Museum demonstrates that “Myanmar state security forces and civilian perpetrators committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing” during two waves of attacks in the majority Buddhist nation, the report says.

“There is mounting evidence to suggest these acts represent a genocide of the Rohingya population,” it says.

Almost 700,000 Rohingya, more than half of the population in northern Rakhine state, have been forcibly displaced since October last year when Myanmar’s army began ‘clearance operations’ after a previously unknown group attacked and killed security officers.

Those operations were, in practice, “a mechanism to commit mass atrocities,” the report said.

“State security forces opened fire on Rohingya civilians from the land and sky. Soldiers and knifewielding civilians hacked to death and slit the throats of Rohingya men, women, and children,” it said.

“Rohingya civilians were burned alive. Soldiers raped and gangraped Rohingya women and girls and arbitrarily arrested men and boys en masse.”

The report said investigators from Fortify Rights and the Holocaust Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide traveled to Rakhine and the Bangladesh-Myanmar border area, where Rohingya have fled.

It quoted eyewitness testimony of mass killings in three villages in late August.

“When the killing was complete, soldiers moved bodies into piles and set them alight,” after soldiers reportedly murdered hundreds in one attack, the report said, adding to chilling and consistent accounts of widespread murder, rape and arson at the hands of security forces and Buddhist mobs.

Human Rights Watch, for its part, interviewed 29 rape survivors.

In every case but one, they were gang raped by two or more perpetrators. In eight cases, women and girls reported being raped by five or more soldiers.

Women described witnessing the murders of their young children, spouses, and parents before being raped. — AFP