Mass killings ‘coordinated’

MYANMAR ATROCITIES

AUS government investigation has found that Myanmar’s military waged a “well-planned and coordinated” campaign of mass killings, gang rapes and other atrocities against the Southeast Asian nation’s Rohingya Muslim minority.

The US state department report could be used to justify further US sanctions or other punitive measures against Myanmar authorities, US officials said.

But it stopped short of describing the crackdown as genocide or crimes against humanity, an issue that other US officials said was the subject of fierce internal debate that delayed the report’s rollout for nearly a month.

The report resulted from more than a thousand interviews of Rohingya men and women in refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh, where almost 700 000 Rohingya have fled after a military campaign last year in Myanmar’s Rakhine State.

“The survey reveals that the recent violence in northern Rakhine State was extreme, largescale, widespread and seemingly geared toward both terrorising the population and driving out the Rohingya residents,” according to the 20-page report. “The scope and scale of the military’s operations indicate they were well-planned and coordinated.”

Survivors described in harrowing detail what they had witnessed, including soldiers killing infants and small children, the shooting of unarmed men and victims buried alive or thrown into pits of mass graves. They told of widespread sexual assault by Myanmar’s military of Rohingya women, often carried out in public.

Myanmar government spokesperson Zaw Htay declined to comment when reached yesterday and said he was unable to answer questions by telephone.

Calls to military spokesperson Major-General Tun Tun Nyi were unanswered.

One witness described four Rohingya girls who were abducted, tied up with ropes and raped for three days.

They were left “half-dead,” he said, according to the report.

Human rights groups and Rohingya activists have put the death toll in the thousands from the crackdown, which followed attacks by Rohingya insurgents on security forces in Rakhine State in August 2017.