Say 2 US bodies calling for probe into
atrocities
Two US organisations said they had found
clear evidence that Myanmar military committed genocide, war crimes and crimes
against humanity against the Rohingya and urged the international community to
set about a criminal investigation into the atrocities.
The Public International Law and Policy Group
(PILPG) and US Holocaust Memorial Museum, hired by the US State Department to
investigate last year's military crackdown on the Rohingya, revealed the
findings on Monday -- three months after “genocidal intent” was found in the
military campaign by UN investigators.
At a press conference in Washington DC,
PILPG's Paul Williams said, “It is clear from our intense legal review that
there is, in fact, a legal basis to conclude that the Rohingya were the victims
of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide."
PILPG Report Full video available here: https://lnkd.in/gciM_KZ
He demanded international criminal
proceedings against the perpetrators and urged the international community to
pursue legal accountability for the atrocity crimes, reports CNN.
Findings of the PILPG, an international law
firm, were based on the interviews with more than 1,000 Rohingya who fled to
Bangladesh along with more than 7,50,000 others after the latest crackdown
began in August last year.
PILPG also documented more than 13,000
instances of "grave human rights violations" during the crackdown.
About 20 percent of the interviewee told the
investigators that they had been physically wounded during the attacks.
Nearly 70 percent said they had watched their
homes or villages being destroyed while 80 percent witnessed the killing of a
family member, friend or acquaintance.
Human rights law group calls for tribunal on
crimes against Rohingya
Read more: https://lnkd.in/gk728cr
The military actions were
"highly-coordinated" and required both tactical and logistics
planning, said the law firm, adding that attacks by ARSA were simply a
"convenient justification" for the crackdown.
The scale and severity of the attacks and
abuses suggest that the perpetrators not only wanted to expel the Rohingya,
they also wanted to exterminate them, said the PILPG report.
Meanwhile, Naomi Kikoler, deputy director of
the US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of
Genocide, said their analysis concluded that there was compelling evidence that
Burmese authorities had intentionally sought to destroy the Rohingya people
because of their ethnic and religious identity.
“The Burmese military campaigns against the
Rohingya, specially the attacks of August 2017, have been deliberate,
systematic, and widespread,” said Lee Feinstein, a member of the Museum's
governing Council and the Chairman of its Committee on Conscience.
For decades, the Burmese government has
persecuted the Rohingya, stripping them of citizenship and subjecting them to
waves of mass violence, it added.
In March 2015, the Museum issued a report
warning that preconditions of genocide against the Rohingya were clearly
evident.
In August 2017, attacks on the Rohingya
community by Burmese military and others included mass killing, rape, torture,
arson, arbitrary arrest and detention.
The Museum's reporting shows that other
religious and ethnic communities in Burma --- including the Kachin and Shan --
are also at risk of mass atrocities by Burmese military.
Meanwhile, the US Commission on International
Religious Freedom yesterday called on the US government and the international
community to pursue strong policy responses, including the continued use of
targeted sanctions, against Myanmar.
Meanwhile, Myanmar's Minister for Religious
Affairs and Culture Thura Aung Ko yesterday said, Rohingya Muslim refugees
living in Bangladesh are being “brainwashed” into “marching” on Myanmar.
“While we Buddhists practice monogamy and
have only one or two children, an extreme religion encourages “having three or
four wives and giving birth to 15 to 20 children” he said in a video published
by Radio Free Asia.
He also said that the Buddhist community
would be a minority in the Myanmar after a couple of decades.