AFP, Bangkok :
Myanmar’s military engaged in “extensive and systematic” preparations for a bloody crackdown on Rohingya Muslims, a rights group said Thursday (Jul 19), in a damning new report that it says justifies a genocide investigation.
A bloody military campaign that started last August forced some 700,000 of the effectively stateless minority over the border into Bangladesh, where they have recounted allegations of rape and extrajudicial killings.
The UN and US have called the campaign ethnic cleansing. Myanmar denies the accusations, saying it was responding to an attack by Rohingya militants. But Fortify Rights said its report, based on months of research in Myanmar and Bangladesh and hundreds of interviews with both victims and authorities, found that security forces disarmed Rohingya civilians and trained non-Rohingya communities to fight. The Myanmar army also cut off food aid from Rohingya and removed fencing from their homes for a clearer line of sight, according to the report. “Myanmar authorities made extensive and systematic preparations for the commission of mass atrocity crimes against indigenous
Rohingya civilians during the weeks and months before Rohingya militant attacks on Aug 25, 2017,” Fortify said. The report also said that deadly August attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, which Myanmar has cited as a reason for its counteroffensive, was a far more ad hoc operation than previously believed, and that crackdown plans were already under way. Fortify co-founder Matthew Smith told journalists at the report’s launch in Bangkok that security forces made the Rohingya Muslim population in Rakhine weaker and vulnerable to attack. The Rohingya have long lived in Rakhine but are seen as outsiders in Buddhist-majority Myanmar after years of marginalisation propaganda from successive military regimes.
Myanmar’s military engaged in “extensive and systematic” preparations for a bloody crackdown on Rohingya Muslims, a rights group said Thursday (Jul 19), in a damning new report that it says justifies a genocide investigation.
A bloody military campaign that started last August forced some 700,000 of the effectively stateless minority over the border into Bangladesh, where they have recounted allegations of rape and extrajudicial killings.
The UN and US have called the campaign ethnic cleansing. Myanmar denies the accusations, saying it was responding to an attack by Rohingya militants. But Fortify Rights said its report, based on months of research in Myanmar and Bangladesh and hundreds of interviews with both victims and authorities, found that security forces disarmed Rohingya civilians and trained non-Rohingya communities to fight. The Myanmar army also cut off food aid from Rohingya and removed fencing from their homes for a clearer line of sight, according to the report. “Myanmar authorities made extensive and systematic preparations for the commission of mass atrocity crimes against indigenous
Rohingya civilians during the weeks and months before Rohingya militant attacks on Aug 25, 2017,” Fortify said. The report also said that deadly August attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, which Myanmar has cited as a reason for its counteroffensive, was a far more ad hoc operation than previously believed, and that crackdown plans were already under way. Fortify co-founder Matthew Smith told journalists at the report’s launch in Bangkok that security forces made the Rohingya Muslim population in Rakhine weaker and vulnerable to attack. The Rohingya have long lived in Rakhine but are seen as outsiders in Buddhist-majority Myanmar after years of marginalisation propaganda from successive military regimes.
