The
U.N. could help investigate the country’s recent atrocities and save a
generation of Rohingya from radicalization.
By MATTHEW SMITH
The rattle of gunfire awoke a Rohingya man on the morning
of Oct. 9 in his hometown of Wa Peik, a dusty hamlet of Kyee Kan Pyin village
in a remote corner of Burma’s Rakhine state. “We were very scared,” he told me
on the Bangladesh border. “All we could hear was yelling and gunfire.”
Several hundred ethnic Rohingya men and boys had attacked
the local police headquarters. Rohingya militants simultaneously targeted two
other police posts in the state. In total they killed nine policemen and
wounded five, according to the government.
The Burmese army responded with brutal efficiency,
rolling into Wa Peik in six vehicles, weapons at the ready. “When the soldiers
entered the village, they started shooting,” the man recalled. “I saw them
shoot at people as they fled.”
Since December, my colleagues and I at Fortify Rights, a
human-rights organization based in Southeast Asia, conducted more than 70
in-depth interviews with Rohingya eyewitnesses and survivors from Maungdaw
township, where the army has been conducting “clearance operations” in response
to the October attack.
Our findings are horrific. Soldiers raped Rohingya women
and girls, razed entire villages and killed unarmed civilians with abandon.
State security forces slit men’s throats and burned people alive, in some cases
killing children and infants.
A 25-year-old widowed Rohingya mother witnessed soldiers
shoot and kill her 7-year-old son in Sali Parang, a village also known as Myau
Taung. She then watched a soldier slit her husband’s throat before burning both
bodies in their home. “I saw when my son was shot,” she told me. “He was
running to his father.”
Men and boys who survived attacks on several villages in
Maungdaw township were arrested en masse. They have not been heard from since.
Such atrocities aren’t new to the Rohingyas. Denied
citizenship since 1982, they have suffered wave after wave of attacks. The last
episode was in 2012, when tit-for-tat violence between Buddhists and Muslims
escalated into state-sponsored assaults on Rohingyas throughout Rakhine state.
I arrived on the scene shortly after the attacks began.
Entire villages were razed. To this day the government confines 120,000
Rohingya survivors of those attacks to more than 40 internment camps in what
amounts to a situation of mass arbitrary detention.
The Trump administration has not determined its policy
toward Burma. But there are indications officials understand that the country
doesn’t represent the foreign-policy success story previously claimed by
President Barack Obama.
In a written response to a question about the Rohingya
from Senator Ben Cardin of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, U.S.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson correctly warned that the mistreatment of
Rohingya in Burma “threatens to radicalize a generation of young Rohingya.” Mr.
Tillerson called upon the U.S. “to support regional and international efforts
to investigate abuses and pressure the Burmese [Myanmar] government and
military.”
A United Nations-mandated Commission of Inquiry would do
just that. When the U.N. Human Rights Council meets next month in Geneva, it
should pass a resolution mandating a Commission of Inquiry into possible
violations of international criminal law in Rakhine state.
There is already explicit high-level support for such an initiative.
“There must be at least a Commission of Inquiry, if not more,” said U.N. Human
Rights chief Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein earlier this month, suggesting also a
possible referral to the International Criminal Court. Mr. Zeid was responding
to a damning U.N. report released on Feb. 3 documenting “widespread human
rights violations against the Rohingya population,” including “mass gang-rape”
and killings “of babies and young children.”
The U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in Burma,
Yanghee Lee, also said she’ll call for an inquiry when she reports to the U.N.
Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 13. This echoes 40 Burma-based
civil-society organizations that in January called for a “truly independent”
international investigation—an unexpected domestic rebuke to the government.
Commissions of inquiry aren’t unusual. Various U.N.
bodies have established them over the years in response to human-rights
violations in places like Burundi, North Korea and Syria. They play a vital
role in establishing the facts, identifying perpetrators with a view to
ensuring accountability and stemming violations.
A U.N. commission would focus attention where it
belongs—on the military and state security forces. State Counselor Aung San Suu
Kyi’s callous inaction and shameful propaganda campaign denying abuses against
Rohingya—alleging “fake rape” while suggesting Rohingya burned down their own
homes—shouldn’t get a pass. But the commission should expose the extent to
which the military continues to dominate the elected government.
Some diplomats and U.N. member states are hesitant to
establish a commission of inquiry lest it destabilize Burma. That’s an
understandable concern. But allowing atrocities to continue unpunished would be
even more destabilizing for Burma and the region.
Mr.
Smith is co-founder and chief executive officer at Fortify Rights.