UN: Myanmar army brutality on Rohingya unfathomable

Myanmar’s army has used unfathomable levels of violence against minority Rohingya, UN investigators said yesterday, calling for the military to be removed from politics and top generals to be prosecuted for genocide.

In the most meticulous breakdown of the violence in Myanmar to date, a UN team of investigators presented a 444-page report laying out in horrifying detail a vast array of violations committed by the country’s powerful military, especially against the Rohingya Muslims.

“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.

Myanmar’s ambassador to the UN, Kyaw Moe Tun, slammed yesterday’s report as “one-sided” and “flawed”.

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 soldiers and vigilante mobs in the mainly Buddhist country.

Myanmar’s 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 2017.

‘Genocide’

The UN team said the military’s tactics had been “consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats”, and said that estimates that some 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 charges 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.