Silent cry for justice on children’s faces can no longer be ignored
The first thing that struck me was the haunted, glazed look in a toddler’s eyes. Tiny, malnourished, the boy stared blankly into space as he sat listlessly on his teenage aunt’s knee at an overburdened clinic in a sprawling Rohingya refugee camp.
Then it was the 16-year-old girl, who tried to conceal her face and avoided eye contact out of heartbreaking, but unwarranted, shame at being forced out of her home and raped by soldiers.
She was mute from trauma, but did not need words to express the pain of lost innocence and shattered hopes. It screamed out from her face.
The scale of the genocidal intent of the rape and killing pursued by Burma’s military has been obvious to reporters and aid workers for a year.
Many children, after weeks of rehabilitation in the hands of dedicated aid workers, had a playful demeanour. But their crayon drawings of extreme violence and candour about the murder of their parents were horrifying.
“I think she has been killed by the military,” Jane Alam, 12, told me matter-of-factly, speaking about his mother who had been lost among the refugees fleeing their burning homes.
“I don’t want to go back to Burma. They will shoot us,” said Yasminara, 11, who had seen footage of her father’s murder on a mobile phone.
The scale of the crisis sparked by the mass exodus of at least 700,000 Rohingya refugees last autumn has been overwhelming.
Bangladesh’s vast, dusty Kutupalong and Balukhali refugee camps stretched as far as the eye could see. And the innumerable, crudely built shacks contained story upon story of cruelty.
Independent accounts of brutality and mass murder, of babies being tossed into fires in front of their screaming mothers, of women being gang-raped in front of their children, all bore striking similarities.
Their stories have been woven together over the past year in investigations by human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The UN’S report, based on interviews with 875 witnesses, not only corroborates earlier investigations but issues a cry for justice that can no longer be ignored.
The UN investigators’ demand for Burma’s military leaders to be tried for genocide and war crimes is a shaming wake-up call for an international community that vowed the horrors of Srebrenica and Rwanda should never be repeated.
Establishing facts through an official UN mission was an important first step towards accountability and redress for the world’s most persecuted minority.
The UN’S damning conclusions should mark the end of empty talk and the time for action.