Myanmar army killed, raped, torched houses in Rohingya cleansing: UN [ Tritiyo Matra News ]

Myanmar army killed, raped, torched houses in Rohingya cleansing: UN

Local February 04, 2017

ghts office said on Friday.
The Geneva-based UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner detailed in an interview-based report released on Friday, mass gang-rape, killings, including of babies and young children, brutal beatings, disappearances and other serious human rights violations by Myanmar’s security forces in a sealed-off area north of Maungdaw in northern Rakhine State, according to a press release.
The report concluded that the widespread violations against the Rohingya population indicated that crimes against humanity had been committed.
The majority of some 204 people individually interviewed by a team of UN human rights investigators reported witnessing killings, and almost half reported having a family member who was killed as well as family members who were missing.
Of the 101 women interviewed, more than half reported having suffered rape or other forms of sexual violence.
Especially mentionable were the accounts of children – including an eight-month old, a five-year-old and a six-year-old – who had been slaughtered with knives, said the UN.
One mother recounted how her five-year-old daughter was trying to protect her mother from rape when a man took out a long knife and killed her [girl] by slitting her throat.
In another case, an eight-month-old baby was reportedly killed while his mother was gang-raped by five security officers.
‘The devastating cruelty to which these Rohingya children have been subjected is unbearable – what kind of hatred could make a man stab a baby crying out for his mother’s milk. And for the mother to witness this murder while she is being gang-raped by the very security forces who should be protecting her – what kind of ‘clearance operation’ is this? What national security goals could possibly be served by this?’ UN high commissioner for human rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said, noting the report suggested the recent level of violence to be unprecedented.
He urged the international community to join, with all its strength, to ask the Myanmar leadership to bring such military operations to an end. The gravity and scale of these allegations call for robust reaction of the international community.
After the repeated failure of the Myanmar government to grant the UN Human Rights Office unfettered access to the worst-affected areas of northern Rakhine State, Zeid deployed a team of human rights officers to the Bangladeshi border with Myanmar.
UN Office for the Coordination of Human Rights said in a bulletin that at least 92,000 people were displaced due to Myanmar Army-led security operations in northern Rakhine State in four months since October 9, 2016.
Estimated 69,000, of the 92,000 people, fled to Bangladesh while more than 23,000 people were displaced to Maungdaw in Rakhine State.
All the individuals interviewed by the team had fled Myanmar after the October 9 attacks against three border guard posts, which had prompted intense military operations and a crackdown in north Maungdaw. The military indicated that it was conducting ‘area clearance operations’ in the region.
The report cited consistent testimony indicating that hundreds of Rohingya houses, schools, markets, shops, madrasas and mosques were burned by the army, police and sometimes civilian mobs.
Witnesses also described the destruction of food and food sources, including paddy fields, and the confiscation of livestock.
‘Numerous testimonies collected from people from different village tracts… confirmed that the army deliberately set fire to houses with families inside, and in other cases pushed Rohingyas into already burning houses,’ the report stated. ‘Testimonies were collected of several cases where the army or Rakhine villagers locked an entire family, including elderly and disabled people, inside a house and set it on fire, killing them all.’
The violence since October 9 followed a long-standing pattern of violations and abuses, systematic and systemic discrimination, and policies of exclusion and marginalization against the Rohingyas that have been in place for decades in northern Rakhine State, the report noted.
‘The killing of people as they prayed, fished to feed their families or slept in their homes, the brutal beating of children as young as two and an elderly woman aged 80 – the perpetrators of these violations, and those who ordered them, must be held accountable,’ high commissioner Zeid said.
The Myanmar government, he said, ‘must immediately halt these grave human rights violations against its own people, instead of continuing to deny they have occurred, and accepts the responsibility to ensure that victims have access to justice, reparations and safety’.