OPINION: Myanmar must face justice
Earlier this month, a special independent United Nations investigation concluded that the crimes committed against the Rohingya people in Myanmar by the country’s military constitute genocide.
The concise advance version of the report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar clearly lays out the scope of the atrocities perpetrated by military forces against the long-suffering Muslim minority community.
Under UN Resolution 34/22, the Mission was mandated “to establish the facts and circumstances of the alleged recent human rights violations by military and security forces, and abuses, in Myanmar, in particular in Rakhine State, […], with a view to ensuring full accountability for perpetrators and justice for victims.”
The UN Mission requested the cooperation of the Government of Myanmar, appealing for in-country access. “The Mission had limited informal contact with Government representatives, but received no official response to its letters,” notes the Mission’s report.
Investigation
The UN investigators gathered an impressive amount of evidence from many sources, conducting “875 in-depth interviews with victims and eyewitnesses, both targeted and randomly selected.” Investigators also “obtained satellite imagery and authenticated a range of documents, photographs and videos.”
The UN Mission verified information by checking it “against secondary information assessed as credible and reliable, including organizations’ raw data or notes, expert interviews, submissions, and open source material.”
According to the report of the Mission, the Rohingya have long been persecuted and discriminated against by the regime. Describing the position of the Muslim minority community as one of “extreme vulnerability,” the UN investigators attribute their plight to “State policies and practices implemented over decades, steadily marginalising the Rohingya.” And the report concludes that this has created “a continuing situation of severe, systemic and institutionalised oppression from birth to death.”
According to the independent report, the lack of legal status for the Rohingya within Myanmar is the crux of the minority community’s marginalisation. “Successive laws and policies regulating citizenship and political rights have become increasingly exclusionary in their formulation, and arbitrary and discriminatory in their application,” the report states. “Most Rohingya have become de facto stateless, arbitrarily deprived of nationality.”
In addition, the regime carried out mass expulsions of Rohingya in the 1970s and the 1990s in service of what the UN Mission describes as “the military regime’s implementation of this exclusionary vision.”
Read the full article on the Kingston Whig Standard’s website.