UNITED NATIONS: Amnesty International released a report Wednesday 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 US 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.
Myanmar government spokesman Zaw Htay was not available for comment Wednesday morning, with calls to his cellphone not going through.
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.”
Myanmar’s senior command deployed fighting battalions with a reputation of being the military’s most brutal units, Amnesty said.
Wells said several hundred Rohingya villages were burned down and people were tortured, raped and starved. Some men and boys were hanged upside down and then beaten to death. He said homes for other ethnic groups in Myanmar are now being built in the decimated villages, some of which lie under new roads.
Soldiers used systematic rape of women and girls as a war weapon in at least 16 villages, according to Amnesty, which interviewed 11 who were gang-raped. The group said satellite images it obtained show fires set to consume entire villages, with people burning inside their homes.
The report said massacres took the lives of thousands who were bound and executed or fatally shot while fleeing. The military especially targeted the elderly and children, it said.
The 200-page report also provides detailed information on the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, the armed Rohingya group whose attacks set off the crackdown by Myanmar. It said that fighters who were detained were often tortured for information, using waterboarding or having their genitals burned.
One farmer told Amnesty he was standing with his hands tied behind his head when a border police guard pulled down his sarong-like garment “and put a candle under my penis.” The soldier’s superior ordered the farmer to “tell the truth or you will die.”
Wells expressed “extreme disappointment” in Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s Nobel Prize-winning de facto political leader, who does not have direct control of the military.
“Her office failed to speak out against the crimes that have been committed,” Wells said, adding that her aides “often inflamed the situation further by repeatedly denying that any crimes have taken place.”
Amnesty Intl urges trials for Myanmar military over Rohingya
Amnesty Intl urges trials for Myanmar military over Rohingya
- About 700,000 Rohingya have fled into neighboring Bangladesh since last August to escape what United Nations and US officials have called an “ethnic cleansing” campaign by Myanmar’s government
- 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
Bangladesh mourns Khaleda Zia, its first woman prime minister
- Ousted ex-premier Sheikh Hasina, who imprisoned Zia in 2018, offers condolences on her death
- Zia’s rivalry with Hasina, both multiple-term PMs, shaped Bangladeshi politics for a generation
DHAKA: Bangladesh declared three days of state mourning on Tuesday for Khaleda Zia, its first female prime minister and one of the key figures on the county’s political scene over the past four decades.
Zia entered public life as Bangladesh’s first lady when her husband, Ziaur Rahman, a 1971 Liberation War hero, became president in 1977.
Four years later, when her husband was assassinated, she took over the helm of his Bangladesh Nationalist Party and, following the 1982 military coup led by Hussain Muhammad Ershad, was at the forefront of the pro-democracy movement.
Arrested several times during protests against Ershad’s rule, she first rose to power following the victory of the BNP in the 1991 general election, becoming the second woman prime minister of a predominantly Muslim nation, after Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto.
Zia also served as a prime minister of a short-lived government of 1996 and came to power again for a full five-year term in 2001.
She passed away at the age of 80 on Tuesday morning at a hospital in Dhaka after a long illness.
She was a “symbol of the democratic movement” and with her death “the nation has lost a great guardian,” Bangladesh’s interim leader Muhammad Yunus said in a condolence statement, as the government announced the mourning period.
“Khaleda Zia was the three-time prime minister of Bangladesh and the country’s first female prime minister. ... Her role against President Ershad, an army chief who assumed the presidency through a coup, also made her a significant figure in the country’s politics,” Prof. Amena Mohsin, a political scientist, told Arab News.
“She was a housewife when she came into politics. At that time, she just lost her husband, but it’s not that she began politics under the shadow of her husband, president Ziaur Rahman. She outgrew her husband and built her own position.”
For a generation, Bangladeshi politics was shaped by Zia’s rivalry with Sheikh Hasina, who has served as prime minister for four terms.
Both carried the legacy of the Liberation War — Zia through her husband, and Hasina through her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, widely known as the “Father of the Nation,” who served as the country’s first president until his assassination in 1975.
During Hasina’s rule, Zia was convicted in corruption cases and imprisoned in 2018. From 2020, she was placed under house arrest and freed only last year, after a mass student-led uprising, known as the July Revolution, ousted Hasina, who fled to India.
In November, Hasina was sentenced to death in absentia for her deadly crackdown on student protesters and remains in self-exile.
Unlike Hasina, Zia never left Bangladesh.
“She never left the country and countrymen, and she said that Bangladesh was her only address. Ultimately, it proved true,” Mohsin said.
“Many people admire Khaleda Zia for her uncompromising stance in politics. It’s true that she was uncompromising.”
On the social media of Hasina’s Awami League party, the ousted leader also offered condolences to Zia’s family, saying that her death has caused an “irreparable loss to the current politics of Bangladesh” and the BNP leadership.
The party’s chairmanship was assumed by Zia’s eldest son, Tarique Rahman, who returned to Dhaka just last week after more than 17 years in exile.
He had been living in London since 2008, when he faced multiple convictions, including an alleged plot to assassinate Hasina. Bangladeshi courts acquitted him only recently, following Hasina’s removal from office, making his return legally possible.
He is currently a leading contender for prime minister in February’s general elections.
“We knew it for many years that Tarique Rahman would assume his current position at some point,” Mohsin said.
“He should uphold the spirit of the July Revolution of 2024, including the right to freedom of expression, a free and fair environment for democratic practices, and more.”
