UN: gang rapes and mass killings of Rohingya by Myanmar military

Rohingya children have been subjected to “devastating cruelty", says UN rights chief.

Rohingya Muslims who fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar to escape a brutal military crackdown huddle in a room at an informal refugee camp in Teknaf, near Cox’s Bazar, 296 kilometres south of Dhaka. A M Ahad / AP Photo/ December 2, 2016Show less

GENEVA // Myanmar’s security forces have committed mass killings and gang rapes of Rohingya Muslims and burned their villages since October in a campaign that probably amounts to crimes against humanity and possibly ethnic cleansing, the UN human rights office said on Friday.

Witnesses had testified to “the killing of babies, toddlers, children, women and elderly; opening fire at people fleeing; burning of entire villages; massive detention; massive and systematic rape and sexual violence; deliberate destruction of food and sources of food”, the report said.

One woman told UN investigators how her eight-month baby boy had had his throat slit. Another was raped by soldiers and saw her five-year-old daughter killed as she tried to stop them.

“The devastating cruelty to which these Rohingya children have been subjected is unbearable,” said UN high commissioner for human rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein.

Around 66,000 people have fled from the Muslim-majority northern part of Rakhine state to Bangladesh since Myanmar’s military launched a security operation in response to attacks on police border posts on October 9, the UN report said.

“The ‘area clearance operations’ have likely resulted in hundreds of deaths”, some of them through helicopters shooting at villages and dropping grenades on them, the report said.

Four UN investigators gathered testimony last month from 220 Rohingya victims and witnesses who fled the “lockdown area” in Maungdaw in Rakhine for the Cox’s Bazar district in Bangladesh.

Nearly half reported a family member had been killed or disappeared while 101 women reported having been raped or subjected to sexual violence, the report said.

The investigators took evidence including photographs of bullet and knife wounds, burns, and injuries resulting from beatings with rifle butts or bamboo sticks.

The plight of the stateless Rohingya, of whom some 1.1 million live in apartheid-like conditions in Rakhine, has long been a source of friction between Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Myanmar, a majority Buddhist country where Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi is de facto leader, has denied almost all allegations of human rights abuses in northern Rakhine and says a lawful counterinsurgency campaign is under way.

In Yangon, the spokesman for president Htin Kyaw’s office said the government had not yet seen the report.

“We will review the report from the UN and we will respond, either in an official statement or in an individual response,” Zaw Htay said.

While denying observers and independent journalists access to the conflict area, officials have accused Rohingya residents and refugees of fabricating stories of killings, beatings, mass rape and arson in collaboration with insurgents who they say are Rohingya terrorists with links to extremists overseas.

Mr Al Hussein called for a robust reaction from the international community and said Myanmar must accept responsibility for committing grave human rights violations against its own people.

The report said the attacks on the Rohingya “seem to have been widespread as well as systematic, indicating the very likely commission of crimes against humanity”.

Bangladesh is determined to relocate Rohingya Muslims fleeing violence in Myanmar to an island in the Bay of Bengal, a Bangladeshi minister said on Wednesday. Critics say the island is uninhabitable. The minister said the move was temporary and Myanmar would ultimately have to take the Rohingya back.

Meanwhile, a Malaysian ship carrying food, clothes and medical supplies for the Rohingya departed for Myanmar on Friday.

The Nautical Aliya was carrying about 2,200 tonnes of rice, medical aid, clothes and other essentials, as well as 238 activists and medical personnel. It will travel first to Yangon, where authorities have agreed to take some of the supplies and distribute them to the Rohingya in Rakhine. The rest of the shipment, which has been sponsored by a coalition of aid groups based mainly in Malaysia, will be delivered to Teknaf port in Bangladesh to support Rohingya refugees there.

* Reuters with additional reporting from Agence France-Presse