Catching up with villagers from Min Gyi who had escaped the Myanmar Army’s assault on their homes, the soldiers first killed all the men, shooting them and then methodically slitting the throats of those who lingered. Then they turned on the women and children.

The report of a United Nations fact-finding mission cited on Tuesday the slaughter in Min Gyi, in Rakhine, a western state of Myanmar, as evidence that the army had committed “the gravest crimes under international law” in clearance operations a year ago targeting the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority.

In Min Gyi, troops shot some of the children and snatched infants from their mothers, throwing some into the river to drown while tossing others onto a fire, the report said. They then led the women and girls back to their village to be robbed and raped. Many were stabbed; others were mutilated or shot. Soldiers locked some women, older men and young children in houses that they set ablaze with gas flown in by army helicopters.

The three-person United Nations panel named Myanmar’s army chief, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, last month as one of six top commanders who should stand trial in an international court for genocide and crimes against humanity.

The panel’s 444-page report, presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday, chronicles in excruciating detail the atrocities that drove more than 750,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee into neighboring Bangladesh and that prompted the group to level accusations of genocide.

Myanmar has flatly denied that the military committed atrocities. It said troops were reacting to attacks by Rohingya militants on border security police and several villages.

 “This explanation is flawed,” the United Nations panel retorted. “The killing was widespread, systematic and brutal.”

“At the core of every incident and every human rights violation we examined was the extreme brutality of the Myanmar military,” Marzuki Darusman, the panel’s chairman, told the United Nations Human Rights Council.

“The killing of civilians of all ages, including babies, cannot be argued to be a counterterrorism measure. There can be no military imperative to rape women and girls or to burn people alive,” he added. “It was a well planned, deliberate attack on a specific civilian population.”

The panel has called on the United Nations Security Council to refer Myanmar to the International Criminal Court or to set up an international tribunal to prosecute those, including the army chief, who have been identified as responsible for the violence. It also urged the Security Council to introduce an arms embargo on Myanmar and to impose targeted sanctions on individuals, including travel bans and asset freezing.

“Any engagement in any form with the Tatmadaw, its current leadership and its businesses is indefensible,” the panel said, referring to the military.

Unusually for a human rights investigation, the report called for an overhaul of the military and for constitutional changes to end the political dominance of generals. The panel said that Tatmadaw leaders should be replaced, the military placed under civilian oversight, and the generals’ grip on Parliament abolished.

“We see accountability as essential but not sufficient,” Christopher Sidoti, a member of the panel, told the rights council, urging fundamental change to Myanmar’s Constitution.

The transition from military rule to a civilian-led government, which allowed the Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to become the de facto head of state, ground to a halt and even regressed after she took office, he remarked later to reporters.

“Democracy can’t be built on a foundation of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes,” he said.

At least 750 villagers were killed in the attack on Min Gyi, the panel said. At least 10,000 people were killed in clearance operations lasting more than two months, it reported, drawing on 875 interviews with victims and witnesses from a range of ethnic groups and religious backgrounds. Satellite imagery showed that 40 percent of the villages in northern Rakhine had been totally or partly destroyed.

All the circumstances surrounding the clearance operations showed a genocidal intent, Mr. Darusman told the Human Rights Council.

The clearance operations were grossly disproportionate to any threat from militants, the panel said, noting that the security forces had made no attempt to identify a military target or distinguish between militants and civilians.

A systematic buildup of military forces in the area before the militant attacks and the involvement of all levels of the military from the commander in chief down pointed to “an organized plan of destruction, supporting an inference of genocidal intent,” the panel found.

The military’s use of consistent methods and tactics in operations carried out over a wide area for many weeks, demonstrated “significant levels of forethought and organization,” the panel said. And as in the authorities’ decades-old conflict with other minorities in Myanmar, sexual violence was said to have featured prominently as a tactic of war in Rakhine.

Troops systematically raped women and girls and specifically targeted children for killing. Moreover, “the brutality with which the underlying acts were carried out provides further support for a conclusion that they were committed with genocidal intent,” the panel said.

Eighty percent of the episodes of rape corroborated by the panel involved gang rape, often accompanied by the killing of the victims’ children. “The Tatmadaw was overwhelmingly the main perpetrator,” the panel found.

Troops often inflicted further injury and humiliation by biting women’s faces, breasts or thighs or mutilating reproductive organs in what the panel considered “an act akin to branding.”

“We are going to kill you this way, by raping,” a woman who was assaulted with her sister recalled a member of the military telling her. “We are going to kill Rohingya. This is not your country.”

What happened in Rakhine was “a disaster long in the making,” the mission concluded, pointing to decades of official discrimination that limited Rohingya access to citizenship or education, and to waves of violence fanned by virulent hate speech.

Ultranationalists and religious extremists had stoked racial antagonism, the panel said, demonizing the Rohingya as “Bengali” immigrants posing an existential threat to Buddhist identity in Myanmar.

General Min Aung Hlaing had clearly endorsed that view. The “Bengali problem” was an “unfinished job,” he said in a statement at the height of the clearance operations, the panel reported, and he added that the government was taking great care to solve it.

Source:
@BRUDIRECT.COM

by Nick Cumming-Bruce

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