More than 600,000 Rohingya who remain in Myanmar face systematic persecution and live under the threat of genocide according to a United Nations (UN) report released on September 16.
UN investigators said the deplorable living conditions of Rohingya still inside Myanmar had worsened in the last year and continuing persecution had become a way of life in Rakhine State.
The report said the factors that “contributed to the killings, rapes and gang rapes, torture, forced displacement and other grave human rights violations” by the Myanmese military and other government authorities were still present.
“Myanmar continues to harbour genocidal intent and the Rohingya remain under serious risk of genocide,” the investigators said in the report which was presented in Geneva on September 17.
The report said the country was “denying wrongdoing, destroying evidence, refusing to conduct effective investigations and clearing, razing, confiscating and building on land from which it displaced Rohingya.”
Marzuki Darusman, chairperson of the UN’s Fact-Finding Mission, said, “The threat of genocide continues for the remaining Rohingya. Myanmar is failing in its obligation to prevent genocide, to investigate genocide and to enact effective legislation criminalising and punishing genocide.”
The mission, set up by the Human Rights Council last year, found genocidal acts in clearance operations in 2017 that killed thousands and drove more than 740,000 Rohingya to flee into Bangladesh.
It again called for the UN Security Council to refer Myanmar to the International Criminal Court (ICC) or to establish an ad hoc tribunal, as it did for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
It said it had a confidential list of more than 100 names, including Myanmese officials, suspected of being involved in genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, in addition to six generals who were publicly named last year.
Christopher Sidoti, an expert consulted by the mission, said, “The scandal of international inaction has to end.”
He said the military operations against the Rohingya in 2017, as exceptionally intense and brutal as they had been, were part of a bigger, longer, more general pattern of extreme military violence.
“Unless the United Nations and the international community take effective action this time, this sad history is destined to be repeated,” Sidoti said.
Myanmar has largely rejected the UN reports and those of international human rights groups and it would not grant permission members of the UN fact-finding mission access to the country.
UN special rapporteur, Yanghee Lee, told the Human Rights Council on September 16 that Myanmar had “done nothing to dismantle the system of violence and persecution” against the Rohingya, who still lived in the same dire circumstances that they did before the events of August 2017.
She cited satellite imagery which revealed the development of 34 “camps, the precise purpose of which was unclear,” but “they may be intended to detain the remaining Rohingya population and those who decide to return.”
Aung San Suu Kyi’s government and Myanmar’s military have long faced pressure from the international community over alleged atrocities against Rohingya in Rakhine.
Lee told the Human Rights Council that the situation in Myanmar was of extreme concern and not what she and others had hoped to see nearly four years after the election of the National League for Democracy.
“I would like to ask the state counsellor (Suu Kyi) if the Myanmar that exists today is what she had truly aspired to bring about throughout the decades of her relentless fight for a free and democratic Myanmar,” Lee said.
She implored Suu Kyi “to open your eyes, listen, feel with your heart and please use your moral authority before it is too late.”
A UN fact-finding mission report last August found that the military had committed four of the five acts constituting genocide against Rohingya. It therefore said Min Aung Hlaing and five other senior generals should be prosecuted for genocide and crimes against humanity. UCAN
