'Myanmar guilty of genocide'

Myanmar has been committed genocide against Rohingyas and its other Muslim minorities, according to the Perm-anent Peoples' Tribunal. The seven-strong panel of the international opinion tribunal delivered its verdict yesterday after five days of hearing at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur, reported The Star Online.

"The tribunal ruled that Myanmar is guilty of genocide against the people of Kachin and Muslim groups there," said Judge Daniel Feierstein who headed the panel, reports bdnews24.com.

The Myanmar regime was guilty of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, he said.The judges have revie-wed documentary, expert evidence besides the testimony of around 200 victims of Myanmar's atrocities at the moot court of the university's law faculty.

 "Visas and free access must be granted to the United Nation's Fact Finding Mission to probe the atrocities committed against the Rohingya, Kachin and other groups in Myanmar," said Judge Feierstein. More than 400,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar's Rakhine across the border to Bangladesh following a counter-insurgency offensive by Myanmar's army in the wake of militant attacks on security forces.

UN officials have described Myanmar's strategy as "ethnic cleansing". The findings are not legally binding and cannot be enforced by law.  In its judgement, the bench said that from the evidence presented before the tribunal, it is clear that the general intent of the government of Myanmar has been to “destroy the  identity of these different groups as a part of the Myanmar community”.

The attack by the Myanmar military is “intentionally” directed against the civilian population or against individual civilians not taking direct part in hostilities, said the bench.

The tribunal said it has watched, on the screen, “the images of shellings on wretched villages; was shown photographic evidence of dead bodies and of tortured persons and heard accounts of violence of witnesses and of victims. The victims were not combatants.”

The systematic targeting of civilians and all of the other acts committed by the Myanmar Army “must be qualified, for all legal purposes, as war crimes committed as part of a plan or policy or as part of a large-scale commission of such crimes”, it opined.

“The limited and incomplete democracy” of Myanmar, “yet strongly dependent on military power, shows, in this conflict, intolerance and lack of respect for human rights and reveals its negative and dark side, conflicting with the principles of civilisation and with the religious beliefs of its people”, said the tribunal.

The tribunal heard first-hand horrific accounts of Rohingya women who had been raped in their homes in Rakhine State by the military forces. These women also witnessed other women who were raped or gang-raped in front of their eyes.

The four survivors’ testimonies also presented a horrific pattern that the Rohingya women who had been raped by the military were raped again several times and for months by the smugglers and other people who took advantage of the situation, in all their way from Rakhine to Thailand and Malaysia.

These Rohingya women were also subjected to other forms of physical and psychological sexual violence such as violation of bodies’ integrity by groping their private parts during body search as well as forcing them to undress in public.