Myanmar: New atrocities against Rohingya

(Bangkok) – Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar are facing their most serious threats since 2017, when the Myanmar military launched a large-scale campaign of massacres, rapes and arson in northern Rakhine State, Human Rights Watch said today. August 25, 2024, marks the seventh anniversary since the start of the military crimes against humanity and genocide that forced more than 750,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh.

In recent months, the Myanmar military and the ethnic Arakan Army have committed mass killings, arson and illegal recruitment against Rohingya communities in Rakhine State. On August 5, nearly 200 people were reportedly killed in drone strikes and shelling of civilians fleeing fighting in the town of Maungdaw, near the Bangladesh border, according to Rohingya witnesses. Some 630,000 Rohingya remain in Myanmar under an apartheid system that makes them extremely vulnerable to renewed fighting.

“Rohingya in Rakhine State are suffering abuses tragically reminiscent of the military’s brutality in 2017,” said Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “Once again, forces are forcing thousands of Rohingya from their homes through killings and arson, leaving them with nowhere safe to go.”

The Rohingya have been in the thick of the fighting since hostilities resumed in November 2023, ending a year-long unofficial ceasefire. As the Arakan Army rapidly expanded its control over Rakhine State, the military responded with indiscriminate attacks on civilians using helicopter gunships, artillery, and ground strikes. In late April, Arakan Army forces began attacking Rohingya villages in Buthidaung, culminating in their capture of the town on May 17, shelling, looting, and burning Rohingya neighborhoods.

Armed clashes have since shifted west to Maungdaw, leading to further abuses and displacement, including arson and looting. Four videos of the August 5 attacks shared on X, formerly Twitter, on August 6 show dozens of bodies of men, women and children. Geoconfirmed identified the location, which Human Rights Watch confirmed, as the western edge of Maungdaw town. Rohingya witnesses told Human Rights Watch they believed the Arakan Army was responsible. The junta and the Arakan Army have blamed each other for the attacks.

“For the past two months, there has been heavy fighting between the Arakan Army and the Myanmar army, with artillery shells and drones,” a 24-year-old Rohingya man from Myo Ma Ka Nyin Tan, Maungdaw, said in August. “Many Rohingya villagers were killed or injured every day. I went to several funerals.” He fled on August 5 when fighting broke out in his neighborhood. “We went to the riverbank to cross, where thousands of people were making the trek. Suddenly, drones appeared and started dropping bombs on the crowd. In our group of 70 to 80 people, nearly 20 were killed and 10 others, including me, were injured.”

“The Naf River was full of dead Rohingya bodies when we fled,” said another villager, 18, who told Human Rights Watch that his father had been killed in a drone strike. “I saw many dead bodies in the rice fields and on the riverbank.” His boat capsized in the river as he crossed into Bangladesh, drowning two dozen people. He and his brother found a plastic barrel that they floated to the shore. Bangladesh border guards arrested his mother as she tried to cross the border and have held her since then, he said. Border guards have stepped up pushbacks of asylum seekers along the Rakhine State border since January.

The conflict has displaced more than 320,000 people in Rakhine state and southern Chin state since November 2023. Meanwhile, the junta has stepped up its deadly blockades of humanitarian aid as a form of collective punishmentwhich is contrary to international humanitarian law and contrary to the 2022 United Nations Security Council resolution and the five-point consensus of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

Rohingya are facing pressure from all sides in Myanmar and Bangladesh, Human Rights Watch said. In recent months, the junta has illegally recruited thousands of Rohingya men and boys from Rakhine State and the refugee camps in Bangladesh, with support from armed Rohingya groups, increasing tensions between the Rohingya Muslim communities and the Buddhist communities in Rakhine.

In Bangladesh, around one million Rohingya refugees face increasingly dire conditions in camps in Cox’s Bazar amid rising violence by armed groups and criminal gangs. In August alone, there were reports of members of the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation and Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army carrying out killings, kidnappings, forced recruitment, extortion and robbery. Bangladeshi authorities have failed to provide refugees with access to protection, education, livelihoods and movement.

“My heart cries for the safety of our Rohingya students and the entire community in the area,” a Rohingya teacher in the camps wrote in a message to Human Rights Watch. His students are increasingly absent from class, he said, either kidnapped for ransom, illegally recruited, or kept home by their parents out of fear. “Brutal gang activity has created a climate of terror. The fear is palpable, a suffocating burden.”

Bangladesh’s interim Prime Minister Muhammad Yunus said he would “continue to support the more than one million Rohingyas who have been resettled in Bangladesh”, although his foreign policy adviser told Reuters they were not in a position to accept more refugees. Bangladesh is bound by the standard international ban on refoulement, and cannot forcibly return anyone to a place where they would face a threat to their life or a real risk of persecution, torture or other ill-treatment.

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh have consistently said they want to go home, but only if their safety, access to land and livelihoods, freedom of movement and civil rights can be guaranteed. Since January 2023, more than 5,000 Rohingya have attempted dangerous boat journeys to Indonesia and Malaysia in the hope of a better life. An estimated 520 of them are dead or missing.

While the international response to the 2017 violence has been lackluster and no one has yet been held to account for crimes against the Rohingya, some important steps toward justice have been taken, Human Rights Watch said. In June, an Argentine prosecutor sought arrest warrants for 25 individuals within Myanmar’s political and military authorities. The case was brought under the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows national authorities to prosecute suspects of serious crimes regardless of their nationality or where the crimes were committed.

In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accepted the interventions of seven governments in the case of Gambia v. Myanmar under the Genocide Convention. Hearings on the merits of the case are likely to take place in 2025. At the same time, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has an ongoing investigation into the situation, although its jurisdiction is limited to alleged crimes committed at least partly in Bangladesh, an ICC member state.

The UN Security Council should expand the ICC’s jurisdiction in the case by referring the situation in Myanmar to the court, Human Rights Watch said. Council members have so far failed to take concrete action on the December 2022 resolution, fearing vetoes from China and Russia.

Security Council members should support a public meeting to address the deteriorating situation in Rakhine State and build momentum for a follow-up resolution under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The council should also play a role in enforcing the binding provisional measures ordered by the ICJ in the genocide case, which the military has blatantly ignored.

“Over the past seven years, UN bodies and governments have not done enough to end the system of apartheid and persecution that has subjected Rohingya to further suffering,” Pearson said. “To end the ongoing cycle of abuse, destruction and displacement, international efforts are needed to hold those responsible to account.”