UN calls for army chief to face law

General Min Aung Hlaing must be investigated and prosecuted

Geneva

United Nations (UN) investigators yesterday called for Myanmar’s army chief to resign and for him and five other top commanders to be prosecuted in an international court for genocide against the country’s Rohingya minority.

The call prompted Facebook, which has been criticised for allowing hate speech against the Rohingya to flourish, to ban the army chief and remove other pages tied to the country’s military.

About 700 000 Rohingya Muslims fled northern Rakhine State to Bangladesh after Myanmar launched a brutal crackdown in August last year on insurgents amid accounts of arson, murder and rape at the hands of soldiers and vigilante mobs in the mainly Buddhist country.

Myanmar has vehemently denied allegations of ethnic cleansing, insisting it was responding to attacks by Rohingya rebels.

But yesterday, a UN-backed fact-finding mission into violations in Myanmar said the country’s “top military generals, including Commander-in-Chief Senior-General Min Aung Hlaing, must be investigated and prosecuted for genocide.”

They should also be probed and prosecuted for “crimes against humanity and war crimes” against the Rohingya in Rakhine, as well as against other minorities in the northern Kachin and Shan States. The army tactics have been “consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats”.

The head of the mission, Marzuki Darusman, insisted that “the only way forward is to call for [Min Aung Hlaing’s] resignation and stepping down immediately”.

The mission, which was created by the UN Human Rights Council in March 2017, concluded in its report that “there is sufficient information to warrant the investigation and prosecution of senior officials in the Tatmadaw [Myanmar army] chain of command.”

Criticism was also directed at Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been widely attacked for a perceived failure to stand up for the stateless minority. The report found that she had “not used her de facto position as head of government, nor her moral authority, to stem or prevent the unfolding events”.–