Episode: KPN 06-08-2022
Received new evidence of Rohingya case Documents collected by war crimes investigators and reviewed by Reuters show how the Myanmar military systematically defamed the Rohingya Muslim minority. It shows how […]
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New evidence shows how Myanmar’s military planned the Rohingya purge – Part two
In a private meeting with officials in Rakhine, which CIJA said was held around the time of the 2017 expulsion, the then-army chief and current junta leader, Min Aung Hlaing, told the Buddhist population to remain in place, and pointed to a demographic imbalance between Rohingya and the rest of the Rakhine population, the documents show.
Some of the officers who spearheaded the Rohingya expulsion and whose names appear in the documents have since been promoted.
In a private meeting with officials in Rakhine, was held around the time of the 2017 expulsion, the then-army chief and current junta leader, Min Aung Hlaing, told the Buddhist population to remain in place, and pointed to a demographic imbalance between Rohingya and the rest of the Rakhine population, the documents show.
CIJA report
Rohingya, who are mostly Muslim, trace their roots in Myanmar’s Rakhine area back centuries, a reading of history supported by independent scholars. While they now comprise a slim majority in the north of Rakhine state, they are a minority overall compared to the ethnic Rakhine, a mostly Buddhist group. Nationalists from the country’s Buddhist majority see the Rohingya as illegitimate migrants from neighboring Bangladesh.
The August 2017 pogrom was carried out with a ferocity that stunned the world. Refugees described massacres, gang rapes and children thrown into raging fires. The nonprofit Médecins Sans Frontières estimated at least 10,000 people died. Hundreds of Rohingya villages were burned to the ground. In March this year, the United States formally declared that the military’s actions amounted to genocide.
Many in Myanmar, where about 90% of people are Buddhist, supported the military, which denied committing atrocities and said the Rohingya had burned their own homes. Burmese rallied around Suu Kyi, whose political party came to power in 2015 after half a century of military rule, as she dismissed reports of atrocities as an “iceberg of misinformation.” In 2019, she went to the Hague to defend Myanmar against charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
But the military early last year toppled the democratically elected government under Suu Kyi, who has been detained since her overthrow. The coup has altered views in Myanmar and opened an unexpected window on the 2017 atrocities. After the military seized control, the country plunged into worsening civil war, as new armed resistance groups joined forces with existing ethnic armed actors in an effort to topple the junta. More than 2,000 civilians have been killed by the army, according to the rights group Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.
The public outrage over the coup and the killings has led to mass defections in the military. Some soldiers are now shedding light on the army’s practices for the first time.
One soldier, Captain Nay Myo Thet, told Reuters he was in Rakhine in 2017, where he said he was involved in logistical support, including transport and supplies, for the military. He described the looting of Rohingya villages after they were emptied. Soldiers took cattle, furniture and solar panels the Rohingya used to power their homes. Large items were loaded onto trucks, under the watch of a senior officer, he said. He was tasked with catching three goats belonging to Rohingya for a dinner party for the troops, he said.
“One soldier, Captain Nay Myo Thet, told Reuters he was in Rakhine in 2017, where he said he was involved in logistical support, including transport and supplies, for the military. He described the looting of Rohingya villages after they were emptied. Soldiers took cattle, furniture and solar panels the Rohingya used to power their homes. Large items were loaded onto trucks, under the watch of a senior officer, he said. He was tasked with catching three goats belonging to Rohingya for a dinner party for the troops. He deserted in November and fled to a neighboring country.”
Nay Myo Thet said he deserted in November and fled to a neighboring country.
While the Burmese military faces grave allegations under international law, there is no easy road to convictions. Myanmar hasn’t signed the Rome Statute that created the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has the power to try individual perpetrators for international crimes. As a result, the United Nations Security Council would typically have to refer allegations against Myanmar to the ICC. Such a move would likely be blocked by allies of Myanmar, say international law experts.
But other paths to trial exist. The ICC set a legal precedent in 2019 by allowing its chief prosecutor to begin investigating crimes against the Rohingya population, including deportation, because they fled to Bangladesh, which is a party to the court.
Also in 2019, majority-Muslim Gambia brought a case against Myanmar for genocide at the ICJ, on behalf of the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. In July, the court cleared the case to proceed, rejecting objections filed by Myanmar.
The non-profit Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK also filed a lawsuit against both Min Aung Hlaing and Suu Kyi in Argentina under “universal jurisdiction,” a legal principle that allows brutal acts to be tried in any court in the world. A spokesman for Suu Kyi’s party said at the time that such a case would violate Myanmar’s national sovereignty.
Legal experts say the chances senior military leaders will be tried soon are slim. They rarely leave Myanmar, and then only to friendly nations like Russia and China, which aren’t parties to the ICC.
Min Aung Hlaing didn’t respond to questions sent to the military junta. Reuters was unable to contact Suu Kyi, who in June was moved from an undisclosed location where she had been held to solitary confinement in a prison in the capital Naypyitaw, the junta said.
A spokesman for the newly formed civilian parallel government, which includes members of the former democratically elected administration who have escaped arrest, said it was their view that the Rohingya “were the victims of genocide.” It was of “dire importance,” the spokesman added, that the evidence of atrocities be presented to the ICJ.
CIJA has had success securing some convictions in tough environments. In Syria and Iraq, its investigators smuggled out more than a million pages of documents that implicated insiders from the Bashar al-Assad regime and Islamic State. The documents formed the basis of convictions in Germany and the Netherlands, including of a former Syrian regime member and an Islamic State militant, who are both now in prison.
CIJA has begun handing its Myanmar material to prosecutors in the Hague. The organization says the records implicate more than a dozen Burmese officials, most in the military. CIJA asked Reuters not to publish most of their names to ensure any future legal proceedings aren’t jeopardized.
Bill Wiley, the Canadian founder and director of CIJA, says he is confident the Myanmar material will help with prosecutions. “If anyone’s ultimately convicted of genocide, it’s going to be based on the CIJA-collected materials,” he told Reuters.
Wiley, a veteran of the Rwanda and Yugoslavia war crimes tribunals, is a former Canadian military officer. In his office, cloaked in a cloud of cigar smoke, Wiley, who is 58, recalled being contacted by Canadian officials at the height of the Rohingya exodus.
The foreign minister at the time and current deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, set up a working group of people from different government departments to tackle the crisis, he said. The brief was to “do something,” Wiley said. Because Canada helped fund CIJA in Iraq and Syria, the group asked him if he could replicate the model in Myanmar. Freeland’s office confirmed the account but declined to comment further.
This time, though, different methods were needed. In the early days of the Syrian uprising, CIJA had its investigators follow anti-Assad rebels as they took over government outposts. Their goal was to sweep up documents left behind by defeated forces. In Myanmar, though ethnic rebels were battling the military, such opportunities were few because the rebels weren’t taking control of large swathes of territory. The focus was on working with insiders willing to leak information and documents.
The Rohingya have long faced crushing discrimination and have had their citizenship rights stripped away. In the 1990s, authorities stopped issuing birth certificates for their children. Rohingya were forced to seek permits to marry or leave their villages. They had restricted access to university and were barred from holding government jobs. They were banned from having children out of wedlock, and married couples were barred from having more than two children.
The CIJA documents provide a snapshot of this bureaucracy of repression, including the creation in 2013 of a new Border Guard Police, a force charged with preventing “the dominance of Indians and Bengalis.”
This new force was to be given upgraded weapons and vehicles to prevent immigration and implement “response plans in times of crisis,” according to a 2014 document from a military-controlled department. The border police were also to enforce “population control activities” against the Rohingya and conduct an educational campaign that would “increase public knowledge about the danger of migration movement of Indians and Bengalis.”
The 2014 document emphasized the role of militias in various villages populated by taingyintha, members of officially recognized ethnic groups in Myanmar. These militias would serve as “the pillars for providing security to local ethnic people and the prevention of illegal immigration.”
The document advocates for a “national project” that would push “Bengalis” who want to avoid inspection by the authorities to leave the country. It calls for a campaign resembling an operation in 1977 that drove out hundreds of thousands of Muslims. Such an operation “should be implemented as before, when the rise of ethnic mixing is detected,” the document says.
“Everything in it points to this intention to engage in this kind of mass removal process.”
Stephen Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, talking about new evidence on the expulsion of the Rohingya
An opportunity to implement these plans presented itself in the early hours of October 9, 2016. A group of Rohingya overran several border guard posts in northern Rakhine state, killing nine police officers. The army sealed off the area and began hunting the attackers.
“He and others in his battalion were told they were conducting “clearance operations” in Rakhine. But their superiors didn’t give specific orders of what to clear. They should have given the soldiers a target – “who was the leader, who were the followers, which weapons they had,” he said. The military cleared out entire populations.”
Nay Myo Thet, a soldier on duty in Northern Arakan
Nay Myo Thet, the soldier who deserted, said he and others in his battalion were told they were conducting “clearance operations” in Rakhine. But their superiors didn’t give specific orders of what to clear.
They should have given the soldiers a target – “who was the leader, who were the followers, which weapons they had,” he said. The military cleared out entire populations, he added.
For months, security forces pillaged and burned villages across the north of Rakhine, according to human rights groups and the United Nations, which said about 70,000 Rohingya fled to Bangladesh in that purge. Security forces carried out killings and gang rape, according to a UN report.
In February 2017, the military declared the operations over. But hostility towards the Rohingya continued.
In July 2017, a group met in private to discuss operations in Rakhine, one record shows. Those present included Maung Maung Soe, the head of the Western Command, which had overseen the previous year’s crackdown, and Thura San Lwin, the head of the Border Guard Police. There were also commanders from the Military Operation Command-15 division and several local administrators.
One senior official said that at least 50% of the Rohingya population supported terrorism. A senior member of the security forces said Muslim villages were providing “protection” to militants.
Maung Maung Soe expressed frustration about the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the security forces in Muslim villages. A MOC-15 commander spoke about recruiting “kalars as spies and underlings” to obtain the latest news. “Kalar” is another racial slur for Muslims.
In the end, the group agreed to send health workers to villages to gather “valuable information.” They also determined that the army’s actions needed to be concealed from the outside world.
Thura San Lwin and Maung Maung Soe didn’t respond to questions sent to the military junta.
At another meeting in August between a MOC-15 commander and local administrators, the commander complained there were too many Muslims living near a military detachment. The majority of “Bengali” villages had been “trained for terrorism,” the group concluded. They resolved to demolish their homes and mosques, according to one record.
Around this time, according to another record, national and state-level officials visited a group of ultranationalist Buddhist monks in northern Rakhine state, who told them “illegal migrant Bengalis” were killing ethnic people to occupy the region. One of the monks said action needed to be taken.
Thura San Lwin, the border guard police chief, told the monks that forces were deployed for patrols and would carry out “area clearance” in cooperation with the military, according to the document. He didn’t specify where the clearance would take place. The officials urged the monks and other locals to cooperate with the security forces and share information.
By mid-August 2017, hundreds of troops had been flown into northern Rakhine, including two elite Light Infantry Divisions, the 33rd and 99th. The military said publicly it was trying to stabilize the situation there and that Muslim attackers had killed both Rakhine and Muslim villagers. Reuters couldn’t confirm this.
“In the early hours of August 25, some 30 police posts were attacked by Rohingya men across the north of Rakhine state, killing 12 members of the security forces, authorities said. The men were largely untrained and carrying mostly sticks, knives and homemade bombs, according to the UN. A group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which said it was seeking political rights for Rohingya, claimed responsibility for the attacks.”
In the early hours of August 25, some 30 police posts were attacked by Rohingya men across the north of Rakhine state, killing 12 members of the security forces, authorities said. The men were largely untrained and carrying mostly sticks, knives and homemade bombs, according to the UN. A group called the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), which said it was seeking political rights for Rohingya, claimed responsibility for the attacks.
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