Genocide trial urged for Burmese
U.N. panel blames generals for atrocities against Rohingya
GENEVA — Burma’s army commander and other top generals should face trial in an international court for genocide against Rohingya Muslims, U.N. experts said Monday after a yearlong investigation.
Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the commander in chief of Burma’s army, is one of six generals named as priority subjects for investigation and prosecution by a U.N. fact-finding mission on Burma in a report detailing military campaigns involving atrocities that “undoubtedly amount to the gravest crimes under international law.”
The three-member panel leveled the most serious charge, genocide, over the campaign unleashed by the Buddhist-majority security forces against Rohingya Muslims a year ago. That campaign, in the state of Rakhine, sent more than 700,000 fleeing across the border to Bangladesh. The U.N. experts also recommended that the generals face trial for crimes against humanity targeting other ethnic minorities.
Burma has rejected allegations of widespread atrocities, asserting that its security forces were simply responding to attacks by Rohingya militants on Burmese police posts and an army station on Aug. 25 last year. But the panel said there was enough information to warrant investigation and prosecution of senior officers “so that a competent court can determine their liability for genocide.”
In an 18-page report released Monday, the panel described the Rakhine operations as a “foreseeable and planned catastrophe” building on decades of oppression of Rohingya Muslims.
Burma has long falsely classified the Rohingya as “Bengali” immigrants from Bangladesh, denying them citizenship and making them vulnerable to attack, including previous assaults in 2012 and 2016.
The panel found evidence of genocidal intent in the operation, citing the prevailing rhetoric of hate directed at the Rohingya and statements by military commanders as well as “the level of organization indicating a plan for destruction; and the extreme scale and brutality of the violence.”
The panel said estimates of 10,000 deaths in the Rakhine campaign were conservative and cited harrowing witness accounts of mass killings, gang rapes of women and young girls, and the wholesale destruction of villages by the military, known as the Tatmadaw.
Burma’s civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and other civilian authorities “contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes” by failing to use their positions to stop them, the panel said.
Elsewhere, “scorched earth” operations by the military against Kachin and Shan ethnic minorities in northern Burma revealed similar patterns of attacks and sexual violence against civilians, the panel said.
The three-member panel — led by Marzuki Darusman, a former Indonesian attorney general — is to present its report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva next month along with an annex that runs more than 400 pages and includes witness testimony of atrocities and detailed satellite imagery analysis.
The accounts, collected from victims and eyewitnesses, “will leave a mark on all of us for the rest of our lives,” Darusman told reporters in Geneva.
Burma refused access and cooperation to the investigation, which based its report on 875 interviews and documents compiled in numerous field missions to Bangladesh and neighboring countries. “Only verified and corroborated information was relied upon,” it said.
The panel report detailed attacks carried out by a Rohingya militant group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, including the raids last August, and it reported abuses carried out by other ethnic armed groups in the north.
But it said that “military necessity would never justify killing indiscriminately, gang-raping women, assaulting children and burning entire villages.”
The Tatmadaw’s tactics were “consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats” in Rakhine state and in Burma’s north, it said.
The U.N. human-rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, has previously condemned the army’s actions as ethnic cleansing and possibly genocide, but the panel’s unequivocal assertion is likely to increase pressure for immediate international action.
The panel said the U.N. Security Council should refer Burma to the International Criminal Court or set up an international tribunal like those that investigated genocide and atrocities in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. It also urged the council to impose an arms embargo on Burma and penalize those most responsible for crimes with travel bans and a freeze on assets.
The panel members said Monday that the Tatmadaw commander should resign as a first step toward achieving accountability for the military’s crimes, but there was no immediate sign of any change in his position of power.
Over the weekend, Min Aung Hlaing returned from Russia, where he attended a military forum and shopped for weapons.
Both Russia and China have shielded Burma from formal criticism from the Security Council.
Burma is often called Myanmar, a name that military authorities adopted in 1989. Some nations, such as the United States and Britain, have refused to adopt the name change.
In addition to the six generals named in the report, the U.N. panel is providing a “non-exhaustive” list of people accused of atrocities to the high commissioner for human rights. The list is to be made available to any international body pursuing accountability.