Amnesty accuses Myanmar of crimes against humanity

Amnesty International has accused Myanmar’s security forces of committing crimes against humanity as hundreds of thousands of Rohingya women, men, and children have fled the country.
In a report released on Wednesday Amnesty cited testimony from more 120 Rohingya men and women who have fled to Bangladesh in recent weeks, part of a half-a-million-strong exodus of people escaping a bloody army campaign.
Thirty medical professionals, aid workers, journalists and Bangladeshi officials, were also interviewed for the research, titled “My World Is Finished”, and Amnesty also referred to satellite imagery, as well as on-the-ground video footage.
Evidence all points to the same conclusion, it said: “hundreds of thousands of Rohingya women, men, and children have been the victims of a widespread and systematic attack, amounting to crimes against humanity.”
“In this orchestrated campaign, Myanmar’s security forces have brutally meted out revenge on the entire Rohingya population of northern Rakhine State, in an apparent attempt to permanently drive them out of the country. These atrocities continue to fuel the region’s worst refugee crisis in decades,” said Tirana Hassan, Crisis Response Director at Amnesty.
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Shara Jahan, who has burn marks on face and arms. Photograph: Amnesty International
“Exposing these heinous crimes is the first step on the long road to justice. Those responsible must be held to account,” she added, specifically calling for Myanmar’s commander-in-chief, senior general Min Aung Hlaing, to take immediate action to stop his troops from committing atrocities.
Oppressed for decades, the minority Muslim Rohingya were forced to escape after soldiers launched a massive counteroffensive across Rakhine state, a response to around 30 coordinated attacks by Rohingya militants on army outposts on 25 August.
Myanmar has blocked media and major United Nations aid agencies from operating freely in Rakhine and newly-released satellite images from Human Rights Watch show that at least 288 villages were partially or totally destroyed by fire in northern Rakhine State.
One woman interviewed in the Amnesty report, Shara Jahan, 40, whose husband and son were shot and killed, said she was trapped in her home as the roof started to burn, with her clothes catching alight.
“I had this fire on my entire body, on my clothes. I was rolling, rolling toward the rice field. [When I got there], that’s when the fire was put out. I rolled in the little water there in the rice field,” she was quoted as saying.
I had this fire on my entire body, on my clothes. I was rolling, rolling toward the rice field.
                                                                                     Shara Jahan
An image of Jahan shows her face and arms covered in what appears to be burn scars. Amnesty referenced a forensic medical expert who said her appearance shows deep 2nd or 3rd degree burns.
Referring to the Rome Statute, a treaty that established the International Criminal Court, Amnesty said that it had documented at least six crimes against humanity.
They include murder, deportation and forcible displacement, torture, rape, persecution based on ethnic and religious grounds, including through burning of homes, and other inhumane acts such as denying food and other life-saving provisions.
Amnesty said eyewitnesses of the worst violence “consistently implicated specific units, including the Myanmar Army’s Western Command, the 33rd Light Infantry Division, and the Border Guard Police” and that troops were sometimes joined by local vigilantes.
The body said it documented events in five villages where at least a dozen people were killed, including Min Gyi, a settlement referred to by Rohingya as Tula Toli.
Ten people were interviewed from Min Gyi, whose horrific accounts Amnesty said “further corroborates what appears to be one of the worst atrocities of the Army’s ethnic cleansing campaign”.

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