Myanmar top generals should face genocide charges, U.N. panel says
Campaign against Rohingya cited
GENEVA — Myanmar’s army commander and other top generals should face trial in an international court for genocide against Rohingya Muslims and for crimes against humanity targeting other ethnic minorities, United Nations experts said on Monday after a yearlong investigation.
It was the strongest international condemnation yet of the military’s actions following a crackdown on the Rohingyalast August.
Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the commander in chief of Myanmar’s army, is one of six generals named as priority subjects for investigation and prosecution by a United Nations Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar 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 ferocious 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 borderto Bangladesh.
Myanmar has rejected allegations of widespread atrocities, asserting that its security forces were simply respondingto attacks by Rohingya militants on Myanmar 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 on Monday, the panel described the Rakhine operations as a “foreseeable and planned catastrophe” building on decades of oppression of Rohingya Muslims. Myanmar 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 and2016.
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.
Myanmar’s civilian leader, Daw 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 Myanmar 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.