Shame on the armed forces

IF THE international community ever needed to step up and step in – it is now. If, that is, it wants to see a just world where women and girls are no longer raped as an instrument of war; as a means of ethnic cleansing.

Nearly 600 000 Rohingya flee a campaign of violence, health workers in Bangladesh say they have seen evidence of multiple cases of rape at the hands of Myanmar soldiers.

UN medics’ accounts also lend weight to repeated allegations, ranging from molestation to gang rape, levelled at women by Myanmar’s armed forces.

In her keynote address, US actress Angelina Jolie highlighted the plight of Rohingya women seeking shelter in the refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh: “According to the UN, almost every female Rohingya refugee in the camps in Bangladesh is either a survivor of sexual violence or a witness to multiple incidents of sexual assault, rape or gang rape,” she said, adding half of the patients treated for rape have reportedly been under the age of 18.

The widespread threat and use of sexual violence is clearly a shove for forced displacement and a calculated tool of terror aimed at the extermination and the removal of the Rohingya as a group.

Myanmar state forces need to be held to account for the sexual persecution of minority Rohingya women and girls. This is pure racial, ethnic discrimination by the Burmese people. They should be ashamed. Mooi River, KZN

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