Myanmar soldiers jailed for Rohingya killings freed after less than a year
YANGON (Reuters) -
Myanmar has granted early release to seven soldiers jailed for the killing of
10 Rohingya Muslim men and boys during a 2017 military crackdown in the western
state of Rakhine, two prison officials, two former fellow inmates and one of
the soldiers told Reuters.
The soldiers were
freed in November last year, the two inmates said, meaning they served less
than one year of their 10-year prison terms for the killings at Inn Din
village.
They also served
less jail time than two Reuters reporters who uncovered the killings. The
journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, spent more than 16 months behind bars on
charges of obtaining state secrets. The two were released in an amnesty on May
6.
Win Naing, the
chief warden at Rakhine’s Sittwe Prison, and a senior prison official in the
capital, Naypyitaw, confirmed that the convicted soldiers had not been in
prison for some months.
“Their punishment
was reduced by the military,” said the senior Naypyitaw official, who declined
to be named.
Both prison
officials declined to provide further details and said they did not know the
exact date of the release, which was not announced publicly.
Military spokesmen
Zaw Min Tun and Tun Tun Nyi declined to comment.
The seven soldiers
were the only security personnel the military has said it has punished over the
2017 operation in Rakhine, which drove more than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims to
flee to Bangladesh. U.N. investigators said the crackdown was executed with
“genocidal intent” and included mass killings, gang rapes and widespread arson.
Myanmar denies
widespread wrongdoing and officials have pointed to the jailing of the seven
soldiers in the Inn Din case as evidence Myanmar security forces do not enjoy
impunity.
“I would say that
we took action against every case we could investigate,” the military’s
commander in chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, told officials from the
U.N. Security Council in April last year, according to an account posted on his
personal website.
The army chief
cited the Inn Din case specifically. “The latest crime we punished was a killing,
and ten years’ imprisonment was given to seven perpetrators,” he said. “We will
not forgive anyone if they commit (a) crime.”
Reached by phone
on Thursday, a man named Zin Paing Soe confirmed that he was one of the seven
soldiers and that he was now free, but declined to comment further. “We were
told to shut up,” he said.
‘FIRST STEP’
The 2017 campaign
was launched across hundreds of villages in northern Rakhine in response to
attacks by Rohingya insurgents. Reuters exposed the killings in a report
published in February 2018. (Read the story here: here)
Troops from the
33rd Light Infantry Division, a mobile force known for its brutal
counter-insurgency campaigns, worked with members of a paramilitary police
force and Buddhist vigilantes to drive out the entire Muslim population of Inn
Din, burning and looting Rohingya homes and property, according to Buddhist and
Muslim villagers and members of the security forces.
(Read more about
the 33rd Light Infantry Division here: here)
On Sept. 1, 2017,
soldiers and some villagers detained a group of 10 Rohingya. The military said
the men were “terrorists”; their family members said they were farmers, high
school students and an Islamic teacher.
The next morning,
witnesses said, Buddhist villagers hacked some of the Rohingya men with swords.
The rest were shot by Myanmar troops and buried in a shallow grave.
The two Reuters
reporters, Wa Lone, 33, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 29, discovered the grave and obtained
pictures of the 10 men before and after they were killed. The journalists were
arrested in December 2017 while investigating the killings and later sentenced
to seven years in prison under the Official Secrets Act.
Defence lawyers
argued their arrest and prosecution were aimed at blocking their reporting, and
one police officer testified that a senior police official had ordered that the
reporters be set up and arrested.
Ten Rohingya men with their hands bound kneel as members of the Myanmar
security forces stand guard in Inn Din village of Rakhine State, Myanmar, September
2, 2017. Handout via REUTERS
In April 2018,
after launching an investigation into the killings, the military announced that
four officers and three soldiers of other ranks had been dismissed from the
military and sentenced to 10 years with hard labour for “contributing and
participating in murder”. Neither their names nor details of their roles in the
killing were disclosed.
Civilian leader
Aung San Suu Kyi welcomed the convictions, telling reporters at the time the
sentencing was Myanmar’s “first step on the road of taking responsibility”.
Suu Kyi’s
spokesman, Zaw Htay, did not pick up a call seeking comment on the release of
the seven soldiers.
‘YEAR THAT CHANGED MY LIFE’
Two men who
recently spent time in Sittwe Prison told Reuters the seven soldiers were
well-known among prisoners there.
“We were in the
same building but different cells,” said one of the men, Aung Than Wai, a
political activist from Sittwe, who spent nearly six months in prison under a
privacy law after he criticised a state official and posted an image of the
official online.
Aung Than Wai, who
was released from Sittwe in December, said he wanted to speak publicly about
the soldiers’ early release because an ethnic Rakhine Buddhist villager also
jailed over the Inn Din killings was still in prison. The villager, school
teacher Tun Aye, is serving a five-year sentence for murder at Buthidaung
Prison in northern Rakhine, said his lawyer, Khin Win.
The convicted
soldiers in Sittwe were given beer and cigarettes even though such indulgences
were off-limits to other prisoners, Aung Than Wai said.
The soldiers were
also visited by army officials, said the second man who was in the prison at
the time and asked not to be named. In November, the seven men were taken away
in a military vehicle, he said.
The same month,
Zin Paing Soe, one of the convicted soldiers, set up a new Facebook account,
noting in his biography that he attended the military’s elite Defence Services
Academy.
In one of the
account’s first public posts, he said he was looking forward to the end of a
year spent mostly in prison.
“When will these
unfortunate things end for me?” the post reads. “The year that totally changed
my life: Fuck 2018.”
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