UN Security Council Should Ensure Justice for All Victims of Myanmar Violence
Smoke is seen rising from Burma’s Taung Pyo Let War village from across the border in Bangladesh.
On June 26, the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced that Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda will request that the court’s judges open an investigation into crimes relating to two waves of violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Myanmar is not an ICC member. But last year, the court confirmed its jurisdiction over crimes where an element occurred in Bangladesh, an ICC member since June 2010.
Rohingya refugee girls cross a makeshift bamboo bridge at Kutupalong
refugee camp, where they have been living amid uncertainty over their
future after they fled Myanmar to escape violence a year ago, in
Bangladesh on Tuesday, August 28, 2018.
The Rohingya Muslims have faced persecution in Myanmar for decades. And yet no violence in their recent history has compared to that which the Myanmar military inflicted in August 2017. After militants from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army attacked police and army posts in northwestern Rakhine State on August 25, the military responded by killing thousands of Rohingya civilians, raping hundreds of Rohingya women and girls, and burning entire villages to the ground. In the course of a little more than three months, more than 700,000 Rohingya were forced to flee for their lives to Bangladesh. Myanmar authorities claimed they had conducted a “clearance operation” to rid the country of militants. In reality, they were fulfilling a long-standing dream of Myanmar’s Buddhist nationalists: the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims.
7 soldiers who murdered Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state set free, report claims
Human rights activists across the world have expressed concerns over the release of seven Myanmar soldiers who murdered 10 Rohingya Muslims in a 2017 military crackdown in its western Rakhine state.
“The only reason these seven soldiers were arrested is because Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo exposed these cold-blooded murders in an investigative news story that could not be refuted,” Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director of Human Rights Watch tweeted.
(New York) – Myanmar authorities should independently investigate the killing of detainees held by the military in Rakhine State, Human Rights Watch said today. On May 2, 2019, army soldiers shot and killed at least six villagers from among several hundred who had been detained in Kyauk Tan, Rathedaung township, for suspected links to the Arakan Army, an ethnic Rakhine armed group.
(New York) – Myanmar’s authorities have in recent weeks engaged in a series of arrests of peaceful critics of the army and government, Human Rights Watch said today. The parliament, which begins its new session on April 29, 2019, should repeal or amend repressive laws used to silence critics and suppress freedom of expression.
yasmin, a Rohingya who was expelled from Leda High School for being a child of a refugee, helps her younger sister to study in Leda camp in Teknaf, Bangladesh, March 5, 2019.
Reuters
Human Rights Watch on Tuesday called on Bangladesh to offer Rohingya refugees formal secondary education, saying school officials in the southeast had expelled scores of Rohingya children because they lacked citizenship papers although they were born inside the country.
(Bangkok) The Bangladeshi government has expelled scores of Rohingya refugee children from schools in southeast Bangladesh since late January 2019, Human Rights Watch said today. Officials have ordered secondary schools near the refugee settlements in the Cox’s Bazar district to dismiss Rohingya students, who lack Bangladeshi citizenship.
BANGKOK: Authorities in China and Myanmar are failing to stop the brutal trafficking of young women, often teenagers, from the conflict-ridden Kachin region for sexual slavery, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
A police officer guards near a
house which was burnt down during the last days of violence in Maungdaw,
northern Rakhine State, Myanmar August 30, 2017.
theindepedent 15 March, 2019 “Statelessness is first and foremost a minority issue because more than
three quarters of the world’s official 10 million stateless people are
from minorities”
Millions around the world, including Rohingyas, are deprived of citizenship because they belong to specific minorities, UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues Fernand de Varennes has said.
Relocating Refugees to Unsafe Island Would Risk Lives, Livelihoods
Satellite image time series of Bhasan Char camp development (October 2017 – March 2018).
Bangladesh authorities say they will soon start relocating over 100,000 Rohingya refugees to Bhasan Char, a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal. Officials said this is necessary to reduce pressure on the world’s largest refugee settlement in Cox’s Bazar, where nearly 1.2 million Rohingya have fled to escape military atrocities in Myanmar.
Bhasan Char is a spit of land made of accumulated silt. Officials say the island has been secured with embankments, and the homes and cyclone shelters are better than anything available to millions of Bangladeshis. But they have yet to provide convincing assurances that the refugees will be safe there, and their freedom of movement and right to livelihood protected.
The government brought some diplomats and other foreign officials to see the infrastructure on the island. But Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur on Myanmar, who visited in January, noted, “There are a number of things that remain unknown to me even following my visit, chief among them being whether the island is truly habitable.”
Residents from nearby Hatiya Island say it is not. “Part of the island is eroded by the monsoon every year,” one man told Human Rights Watch. “In that time, we never dare go to that island, so how will thousands of Rohingya live there?”
Humanitarian aid groups are concerned about refugee health and safety in the Cox’s Bazar settlement, but isolating them on Bhasan Char, with likely limited access to education and health services, could be even more problematic. Although Bangladeshi authorities say there will be no forced relocations, there is little evidence that any of the refugees would be willing to move there. “Bhashan Char will be like a prison,” one local journalist said.
Dumping a battered and traumatized people on Bhasan Char to face yet another threat to their survival is not a solution. Bangladesh should terminate the relocation plans unless or until independent experts determine that the island is suitable, and until the government ensures that refugees who consent to relocate there will be allowed freedom of movement on and off the island.
