(Credit: Seyyed Mahmoud Hosseini/Tasnim News Agency)
Justice for more than 700,000 Rohingya who have fled military genocide in Myanmar since 2017 is moving very slowly.
A milestone in the arduous journey was the publication of the long-awaited report of the Commission on International Justice and Accountability, which was submitted to the International Criminal Court and raised barely a murmur in the British press.
It lays bare that the gang-rapes and massacres of at least 10,000 fleeing Muslim refugees were not part of counter-terrorism activities, but the result of Myanmar’s military chiefs holding covert meetings to expel Rohingyas from Rakhine State. (See p1).
A nonprofit founded by a veteran war crimes investigator, the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, has amassed a trove of documents on the expulsion of the Rohingya. They shared many of them with @Reuters. Here’s what they show https://t.co/QgOkCqY6Bz pic.twitter.com/hudzYCqLRv
— Reuters (@Reuters) August 5, 2022
Document after document reveals that “senior commanders maintained a detailed awareness of all subordinate activity, controlling every aspect of decision-making and operating procedures. Lower-level commanders were not trusted to make improvised decisions on the battleground, meaning that actions were always approved by the highest echelons of the armed forces.”
CIJA’s four-year investigation reveals the systematic demonisation of the Muslim minority and the military’s role in forming genocidal militias to ethnically cleanse the country of the Rohingya community.
Although Myanmar is not a party to the ICC, the Rohingya fled to Bangladesh, which is why the ICC investigates crimes such as genocide.
During the 2017 displacement, nearly 400 villages were partially or completely destroyed, mostly by fire, according to investigators from UN. The Myanmar security forces and Rakhine locals were responsible, according to the investigators.
The case was filed by the Gambia on behalf of 57 members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in 2019. An Argentine court is also investigating Myanmar’s war crimes.
The UK, like most Western countries, has played a very low-key role in helping the beleaguered Rohingyas in its former colony. In May 2021, the British government almost halved its aid to Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh to £27.6 million, which was slightly offset by a modest £9 million increase announced in March of this year.
Along with others, Britain elevated the British-educated Aung San Suu Kyi to saintly status before she fell dramatically out of favour as the country’s acting prime minister
Although she emerged as an apologist for the junta and even defended the genocide of the Rohingya in The Hague court, Suu Kyi was eventually deposed by military rulers 18 months ago and charged with corruption.
So much for the handpicked 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who served as State Counsellor of Myanmar, rather questionably being awarded along with many other honours for her apparent non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights.
Time is overdue for the countries that supported her to confess their blunders, if not their complicity, and distance themselves completely.
Myanmar’s colonial rulers, as often the case, historically played ethnic groups against each other, boosting the Christian Karen and other non-Buddhist minorities and importing large numbers of Indian and Chinese labourers.
As Suu Kyi even admitted herself in 1988, “the practice of encouraging the differences between the various racial groups was to have sad consequences for the independent nation of the future.”
The genocide of the Rohingya must be addressed quickly and comprehensively, but the blame goes far beyond Myanmar’s borders, where reparations must also be made.
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Myanmar’s Rohingya crackdown not counter terrorism campaign as claimed by Aung San Suu Kyi
