Fire burns Rohingya camp in Myanmar
Geneva,06 Jumadil Awwal 1438/03 February 2017 (MINA) – Myanmar’s security forces have committed mass killings and gang rapes of Rohingya Muslims and burned their villages since October in a campaign that “very likely” amounts to crimes against humanity and possibly ethnic cleansing, the UN human rights office said on Friday.
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“The ‘area clearance operations’ have likely resulted in hundreds of deaths,” said the report from the United Nations human rights office, referring the military crackdown launched on October 10 in the wake of a deadly attack on military post.
Witnesses had testified to “the killing of babies, toddlers, children, women and elderly; opening fire at people fleeing; burning of entire villages; massive detention; massive and systematic rape and sexual violence; deliberate destruction of food and sources of food”, the report said.
The report based on interviews with 204 Rohingya refugees who have fled to Bangladesh recounted gruesome violations allegedly perpetrated by members of Myanmar’s security services or civilian fighters working alongside the military and police, Al Jazeera reported, citing news agencies.
“An eight-month-old baby was reportedly killed while his mother was gang-raped by five security officers,” the rights office said in a press release, citing witness accounts.
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The UN also said it had reports of three children aged six or younger being “slaughtered with knives”.
“What kind of hatred could make a man stab a baby crying out for his mother’s milk,” UN rights chief Zeid bin Ra’ad Zeid al-Hussein said in the statement.
‘Devastating cruelty ‘
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“What kind of ‘clearance operation’ is this? What national security goals could possibly be served by this?”, he added.
“The devastating cruelty to which these Rohingya children have been subjected is unbearable.”
The Rohingya numbering some 1.1 million are loathed by many among Myanmar’s Buddhist majority and live in apartheid-like conditions in Rakhine state.
Yangon refuses to recognise the Rohingya as one of the country’s ethnic minorities, instead describing them as Bengalis – or illegal immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh – even though many have lived in Myanmar for generations.
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Yangon’s own probe into the unrest denied that the security forces had carried out a genocidal campaign against the Rohingya.
Myanmar’s government, led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, has said the allegations are invented and has resisted mounting international pressure to protect the minority.
But Zeid, who has previously urged Yangon to act, hit back again on Friday demanding that impunity for such serious crimes had to stop.
“The Government of Myanmar must immediately halt these grave human rights violations against its own people, instead of continuing to deny they have occurred,” he said.
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Around 66,000 people have fled from the Muslim-majority northern part of Rakhine State to Bangladesh since Myanmar’s military launched a security operation in response to attacks on police border posts on October 9, the UN report said. The UN humanitarian office has recently put the figure at 69,000.
The UN report was issued in Geneva after the investigators gathered testimony last month from Rohingya victims and witnesses who fled the “lockdown area” in Maungdaw in Rakhine for the Cox’s Bazar district in Bangladesh. (T/RS05/RS01)
Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)
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