Myanmar | Amnesty Int’l urges trials for military over Rohingya

Amnesty International released a report yesterday that details new evidence of atrocities inflicted on Myanmar’s Rohingya population and names 13 top military commanders the human rights group says should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.

The report is titled “We Will Destroy Everything.” Amnesty said those words, spoken by a military commander in a recording of a telephone call obtained by the group’s investigators, sum up the mindset of Myanmar soldiers in dealing with the Muslim Rohingya.

About 700,000 Rohingya have fled into neighboring Bangladesh since last August to escape what United Nations and U.S. officials have called an “ethnic cleansing” campaign by Myanmar’s government.

Amnesty said its investigative team spent nine months gathering evidence of the brutal treatment of Rohingya in a crackdown that began in August after a radical Rohingya group attacked Myanmar security force posts in the country’s western Rakhine state.

The report said the Amnesty team interviewed hundreds of victims and collected harrowing new evidence of the murderous methods used to drive the Rohingya out of Myanmar. Photographs and video clips, as well as expert forensic and weapons analysis, were used to bolster information.

Amnesty said its evidence implicates Myanmar’s military commander in chief, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, and 12 others in the commission of nine out of 11 types of crimes against humanity listed in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It says those 12 — nine of the general’s subordinates and three border guard police officers — are “those with blood on their hands.” It urged that they be put on trial by the international court.

“The explosion of violence — including murder, rape, torture, burning and forced starvation — perpetrated by Myanmar’s security forces in villages across northern Rakhine State was not the action of rogue soldiers or units,” Matthew Wells, an Amnesty crisis researcher who spent weeks at Myanmar’s border with Bangladesh, said in the report. “There is a mountain of evidence that this was part of a highly orchestrated, systematic attack on the Rohingya population.” AP