Order for Myanmar genocide: ‘Kill all you see’
The two soldiers confess their crimes in a monotone, a few blinks of the eye their only betrayal of emotion: executions, mass burials, village obliterations and rape.
The August 2017 order from his commanding officer was clear, Pvt. Myo Win Tun said in video testimony.
“Shoot all you see and all you hear.”
He said he obeyed, taking part in the massacre of 30 Rohingya Muslims and burying them in a mass grave near a cell tower and a military base.
Around the same time, in a neighboring township, Pvt. Zaw Naing Tun said he and his comrades in another battalion followed a nearly identical directive from his superior: “Kill all you see, whether children or adults.”
“We wiped out about 20 villages,” Zaw Naing Tun said, adding that he, too, dumped bodies in a mass grave.
The two soldiers’ video testimony, recorded by a rebel militia, is the first time that members of Myanmar’s military have confessed taking part in what U.N. officials say was a genocidal campaign against the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority.
On Monday, the two men, who fled Myanmar last month, were transported to The Hague, where the International Criminal Court has opened a case examining whether Myanmar military leaders committed large-scale crimes against the Rohingya.
The atrocities described by the two men echo evidence of serious human rights abuses gathered from among the more than 1 million Rohingya refugees now sheltering in neighboring Bangladesh.
What distinguishes their testimony is that it comes from perpetrators, not victims.
“This is a monumental moment for Rohingya and the people of Myanmar in their ongoing struggle for justice,” said Matthew Smith, chief executive officer at Fortify Rights, a human rights watchdog. “These men could be the first perpetrators from Myanmar tried at the ICC, and the first insider witnesses in the custody of the court.”
The New York Times couldn’t independently confirm the two soldiers committed the crimes to which they confessed. But details in their narratives conform to descriptions provided by dozens of witnesses and observers, including Rohingya refugees, Rakhine residents, Myanmar soldiers and local politicians.
And multiple villagers independently confirmed the whereabouts of mass graves that the soldiers provided in their testimony — evidence that will be seized on in investigations at the International Criminal Court and other legal proceedings.
The Myanmar government repeatedly has denied that such sites exist.
The crimes the soldiers say were carried out by their infantry battalions and other security forces — some 150 civilians killed and dozens of villages destroyed — just are a part of Myanmar’s long campaign against the Rohingya. And they portray a concerted, calculated operation to exterminate a single ethnic minority group.
The massacres of Rohingya that culminated in 2017 catalyzed one of the fastest flights of refugees anywhere in the world. Within weeks, three-quarters of a million stateless people were uprooted from their homes in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state as security forces attacked their villages with rifles, machetes and flamethrowers.
Old men were decapitated, and young girls were raped, their headscarves torn off to use as blindfolds, witnesses and survivors said.
Doctors Without Borders estimated at least 6,700 Rohingya, including 730 children, suffered violent deaths from late August to late September 2017. About 200 Rohingya settlements were razed from 2017 to 2019, the United Nations said.
In a report published last year, a fact-finding mission for the U.N. Human Rights Council said “there is a serious risk that genocidal actions may occur or recur and that Myanmar is failing in its obligation to prevent genocide, to investigate genocide and to enact effective legislation criminalizing and punishing genocide.”
The Myanmar government has denied any orchestrated campaign against the Rohingya.
In December, Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who’s the nation’s civilian leader, defended Myanmar against charges of genocide in another case, this one at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
She has seen her legacy tarnished by her support for the military and her refusal to vocally condemn the persecution of the Rohingya.
Only a few soldiers have been punished, with brief prison terms, for what the military says were isolated missteps in a couple of villages.