Researchers track human rights abuses to get justice
Hoping officers in Myanmar will be held responsible
BANGKOK — A group of human rights researchers officially launched a website Wednesday that they hope will help get justice for victims of state violence in Myanmar, where one of the world’s less-noticed but still brutal armed struggles is taking place.
Since the army seized power in February 2021 from the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, thousands of people have been killed by the security forces seeking to quash pro-democracy resistance. According to the United Nations, more than 1.8 million have been displaced by military offensives, which critics charge have involved gross violations of human rights.
War crimes have become easier to document in recent years thanks largely to the ubiquity of cellphone cameras and the nearuniversal access to social media, where photo and video evidence can easily be posted and viewed.
But it’s harder to establish who is responsible for such crimes, especially generals and other high-ranking officers behind the scenes who make the plans and give the orders.
“Generals and lower ranking officers should fear being dragged before a court of law and imprisoned for crimes they ordered or authorized,” Tom Andrews, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, told the Associated Press by email. “Research must move beyond merely stating the obvious — that crimes are occurring — and connect those who are responsible to specific atrocities. The victims of these crimes deserve justice and that will require the research necessary to hold those responsible fully accountable.”
The new website, myanmar.securityforcemonitor.org, is an interactive online version of a report, “Under Whose Command? — Human rights abuses under Myanmar’s military rule,” compiled by Security Force Monitor, a project of the Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute, to connect alleged crimes with their perpetrators.
The project’s team constructed a timeline of senior commanders and their postings, which can be correlated with documented instances of alleged atrocities that occurred under their commands. It exposes the army’s chain of command, identifying senior army commanders and showing the connections from alleged rights violations to these commanders, study director Tony Wilson told the Associated Press in an email interview.
“This is one of the pieces of the jigsaw that has up until now been missing in terms of accountability — demonstrating how the system works and that these abuses are not just the result of rogue units or individual soldiers,” he said.
Wilson said the Myanmar data show that 65 percent, or 51 of all 79 senior army commanders between the end of March 2011 and the end of March this year, “had alleged disappearances, killings, rape, or instances of torture committed by units under their command.”
He said the study also shows the officer with the most links to serious human rights violations is General Mya Tun Oo, who became defense minister and a member of the ruling military council when the army seized power in 2021. He also became deputy prime minister in 2023.
The legal significance leans on the established doctrine of “command responsibility,” which allows the prosecution under international law of military commanders for war crimes perpetrated by their subordinates. “We’ve applied lessons learned from researching militaries around the world to our work in Myanmar, and we would not have been able to map the Myanmar Army without those lessons,” said Wilson.
“Establishing the command structures of militaries and other groups involved in atrocities is the lifeblood of properly conducting investigations into international crimes,” Mark Kersten, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at Canada’s University of the Fraser Valley, said in an email.