German filing alleges war crimes in Burma

Democrat Gazette
by GRANT PECK
The Associated Press
January 25, 2023 

Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Fortify Rights Matthew Smith talks to reporters during a news conference in Bangkok, Thailand, Tuesday, Jan. 24, 2023. The human rights group and 16 people from Myanmar have filed a criminal complaint in Germany seeking punishment of Myanmar's generals for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity they alleged were committed in that country after their 2021 government takeover and during a 2017 crackdown on Muslim Rohingya. (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

BANGKOK -- A human-rights group and 16 people from Burma have filed a criminal complaint in Germany seeking punishment of the country's generals for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity that alleged to have been committed in that country after their 2021 government takeover and during a 2017 crackdown on minority Rohingya Muslims.

Fortify Rights, a complainant in the case announced Tuesday in Bangkok, said "the individuals responsible for crimes related to both have yet to be held accountable."

Criminal Complaint Filed in Germany Accuses Myanmar Military of Genocide, War Crimes

New Delhi Times

NDT Bureau
January 25, 2023

Campaign group Fortify Rights and 16 Myanmar nationals have filed a genocide and war crimes complaint against Myanmar’s military leaders in Germany in the latest bid to leverage the principle of universal jurisdiction against the country’s generals.

Fortify Rights announced the case Tuesday in Thailand, which shares a long and porous border with Myanmar, and says a 215-page complaint was filed with Germany’s federal public prosecutor on January 20. The prosecutor’s office must now decide whether to open an investigation.

The prosecutor’s office confirmed receipt of the complaint in an email to VOA but declined further comment.

Universal jurisdiction holds that some crimes, including genocide, are so heinous they transcend national borders and that they and their perpetrators can be tried anywhere.

Prominent Rohingya leader shot dead in Bangladesh refugee camp

Aljazeera
29 Sep 2021

Rights groups call for urgent investigation after Mohibullah shot dead outside his office.

Mohibullah, centre, formed the Rohingya group ARPSH in a Bangladeshi camp months after the influx hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing prosecution in Myanmar in 2017 [File: Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters]

A prominent Rohingya Muslim leader has been shot dead in a refugee camp in southern Bangladesh.

Mohibullah, who was in his late 40s, led one of the largest of several community groups to emerge since more than 730,000 mostly Muslim Rohingya fled Myanmar amid a brutal military crackdown in August 2017. 

Why Joe Biden Should Help the Rohingya People of Myanmar

TIME

By Matthew Smith and Andrew Riley

January 6, 2021 

A large group of Rohingya people, fled from ongoing military operations in Myanmar's Rakhine state, try to cross the border at Palongkhalii, Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, on October 17, 2017.
Stringer/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

 

Matthew Smith is CEO and co-founder of Fortify Rights and a Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Follow him on Twitter @matthewfsmith.
Andrew Riley is a consultant to Fortify Rights and was the principal author of “The Torture in My Mind”: The Right to Mental Health for Rohingya Survivors of Genocide in Bangladesh and Myanmar. Follow him on Twitter @andrewkyleriley.

 

Then the Myanmar Army attacked and massacred ethnic Rohingya civilians in 2017, more than 700,000 men, women, and children fled to Bangladesh, some riddled with bullets, burns, and gaping wounds. Hundreds of villages were in ashes, razed by soldiers and their civilian proxies.

But long after the physical wounds scarred over, Rohingya continue to suffer mental harm on a massive scale. President-elect Biden can and should do something about it.

ရုိဟင္ဂ်ာသတ္ျဖတ္မႈ စစ္သားႏွစ္ဦးထြက္ဆုိခ်က္ ယုံၾကည္ ရေလာက္ (Fortify Rights)

VOA

ဗြီအိုုေအ (ျမန္မာဌာန)

09 စက္တင္ဘာ၊ 2020
ေက်ာ္ေက်ာ္သိန္း

ရခိုင္ျပည္နယ္ ေမာင္ေတာၿမိဳ႕မွာ တပ္စဲြထားတဲ့ ျမန္မာ့စစ္တပ္ တပ္ဖဲြ႔၀င္မ်ား။ (ၾသဂုတ္ ၃၁၊ ၂၀၁၇)  

ရခုိင္ျပည္နယ္ စစ္ဆင္ေရးေတြအတြင္း ႐ိုဟင္ဂ်ာေတြကို အစုအေဝးလိုက္ သတ္ျဖတ္မႈနဲ႔ တျခားရာဇဝတ္ မႈေတြမွာ ပါဝင္ခဲ့တယ္ဆိုတဲ့ စစ္သားႏွစ္ဦးရဲ႕ ထြက္ဆိုခ်က္ေတြဟာ ယံုၾကည္ႏုိင္ေလာက္တဲ့ ထြက္ဆိုခ်က္ ေတြျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ Fortify Rights လူ႔အခြင့္အေရးအဖြဲ႔ရဲ႕ အမႈေဆာင္အရာရွိခ်ဳပ္ Matthew Smith က ဗီြ အုိေအကိုေျပာပါတယ္။

Facebook Wanted to Be a Force for Good in Myanmar. Now It Is Rejecting a Request to Help With a Genocide Investigation

TIME

By Matthew Smith
August 18, 2020

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook, listens during a meeting at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. on Sept. 27, 2015.
David Paul Morris—Bloomberg/Getty Images

 

Just when it seemed like Facebook’s controversies might have peaked, the company now appears to be obstructing a genocide investigation, and it’s using U.S. law to do it.

The West African nation The Gambia is seeking to hold Myanmar accountable for charges of genocide against the Rohingya people, an ethnic and religious minority. In 2016 and 2017, Myanmar soldiers and their civilian proxies massacred Rohingya men, women and children, raped women and girls and razed villages, forcing more than 800,000 to flee into neighboring Bangladesh.

For Myanmar's Elections to Be Free and Fair Rohingya Must Get the Right to Vote

TIME
By Matthew Smith
July 27, 2020

Rohingya refugees watch televised proceedings at the U.N.'s International Court of Justice from a refugee camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh Dec. 12, 2019.
Allison Joyce—Getty Images

Americans won’t be the only voters going to the polls in November. Myanmar’s third national election since transitioning from half a century of military rule is slated for Nov. 8.

Already, several questions loom over this test of the country’s democratic trajectory. How will the government ensure ethnic civilians displaced by armed conflict can vote? How will Facebook protect voters from disinformation? How will the government manage campaigns and polling in the age of COVID-19?