UN report: Myanmar army killed 7,100 Rohingya Muslims since 2021 coup

Arab Sea Newspaper - News Updates

A report issued by the United Nations Human Rights Office revealed that the Myanmar army has killed 7,100 Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State (Arakan) since the military coup in 2021, a third of whom were women and children. The report considered the escalating crisis in Myanmar's Rakhine State to be a stark reminder of the "atrocities committed by the army in 2017," pointing to the escalation of killings, torture, burning of villages, and mass forced displacement. The UN report recorded the arrest of at least 29,560 people for political reasons, and confirmed that more than 22,000 people remain in detention without respect for fair trial guarantees in courts controlled by the army. The report also highlighted the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people since the escalation of hostilities in Rakhine, as the United Nations estimates that about 150,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since November 2023, joining about one million others who had previously sought refuge in the Muslim country. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said, "Civilians from the Rohingya and Rakhine communities continue to suffer the consequences of hostilities, with widespread patterns of indiscriminate attacks by the military against civilians," confirming that it is committing forced displacement, involved in enforced disappearances and arbitrary arrests, burning and destruction of property, and committing repeated atrocities. Türk attributed the recurrence of violations amid the suffering of the civilian population to the Myanmar army's actions amid near-total impunity, highlighting that videos and images of death and destruction that we saw during the 2017 atrocities against the Rohingya are "happening again." In the face of these crimes and violations of international law, the High Commissioner for Human Rights renewed his previous calls for "the Security Council to refer the entire situation in Myanmar to the International Criminal Court." Türk stressed that the time has come to take concrete action to end the senseless violence against the people of Myanmar, and stressed the importance of providing immediate humanitarian assistance to the population who have suffered "violence, hunger and displacement for years and have been denied humanitarian assistance by the army." The UN official pointed out that humanitarian funding is urgently needed to meet these needs, and urged member states to work to pressure the parties to fulfill their obligations and allow aid to reach those in need, and to support international efforts to hold those responsible for violations of international law accountable.