U.N.: Myanmar leaders should face genocide charges
GENEVA — Investigators working for the U.N.’s top human rights body said Monday that Myanmar military leaders should be prosecuted for genocide against Rohingya Muslims, taking the unusual step of identifying by name six of those it says were behind systematic crimes targeting the ethnic minority.
The call, accompanying a first report by the team of investigators, amounts to some of the strongest language yet from U.N. officials who have denounced alleged human rights violations in Myanmar since a bloody crackdown began last August. The three-member fact-finding mission and their team, working under a mandate from the U.N.backed Human Rights Council, meticulously assembled hundreds of accounts from expatriate Rohingya, as well as satellite footage and other information to assemble the report.
“The military’s contempt for human life, dignity and freedom — for international law in general — should be a cause of concern for the entire population of Myanmar, and to the international community as a whole,” said fact-finding mission chair Marzuki Darusman, a former Indonesian attorneygeneral, at a news conference.
The team compiled accounts of crimes including gang rape, the torching of hundreds of villages, enslavement, and killings of children. The team was not granted access to Myanmar and has decried a lack of cooperation or response from the government, which received an early copy of the report.
The team cited a “conservative” estimate from aid group Reporters Without Borders that some 10,000 people were killed in the violence, but outside investigators have had no access to the affected regions, making a precise accounting impossible.
Above all, the investigators said the situation in Myanmar should be referred to the International Criminal Court, and if not, to a special tribunal. Last week, Myanmar’s government rejected any cooperation with the ICC, to which it is not a party.
U.N. leaders, foreign government officials, and human rights watchers have for months cited evidence of genocide in Myanmar. But few experts have studied the issue as in-depth, and in such an official way, as the factfinding mission with a mandate from the 46-nation council.