UK drags heels on sending mass rape investigators to Myanmar

UNITED KINGDOM - A Foreign Office team specialising in gathering evidence of sexual violence in conflict zones has yet to be deployed to Myanmar’s refugee camps despite evidence that systematic mass rape has been used as a weapon by the Burmese military against the Rohingya muslim minority.

The specialist group was set up by William Hague as foreign secretary in 2012 as part of his joint effort with the actor Angelina Jolie to highlight the pervasive use of sexual violence in conflict. He regards the initiative as one of his chief legacies.

The Foreign Office (FCO) has said it is still assessing the need for a team, even though aid agencies have reported the mass use of rape, including of children as young as 10. The burning and violence in Rakhine state started at the end of August and the FCO minister Lord Ahmad has described reports of sexual violence against the Rohingya as “staggering.”

Hague and his former special adviser Lady Helic have written to the FCO to demand to know what it is doing to investigate and document rape allegations against Burmese forces. As many as 600,000 refugees have fled to Bangladesh, with aid agencies, such as Doctors without Borders and the International Office of Migration, reporting hundreds of cases of rape and sexual violence amongst refugees.

The FCO is supposed to have a roster of health experts on standby ready to travel to war zones to investigate allegations of sexual violence, and to gather evidence that could be used in international criminal courts. The experts were deployed in Syria, South Sudan, Libya and Bosnia.

The team of experts consists of health specialists, lawyers, police officers, psychologists and forensic scientists. It was set up in 2012 to help local authorities where crimes of sexual violence were reported and local bodies did not have the capacity to help.

(The Guardian)