The UK-based rights group, Burmese Rohingya Organization UK (BROUK) has warned in a new report that the 600,000 Muslim Rohingya remaining in Rakhine State have been subject to an “intensifying genocide” since the armed conflict between Myanmar’s military and the Arakan Army (AA) resumed last October.
The Mulsim Rohingya minority has long suffered persecution at the hands of successive military dictatorships in Myanmar.
In 2017 a brutal military offensive drove approximately 750,000 Rohingya civilians into Bangladesh.
An Independent International Fact-Finding Mission (UNFFMM) on Myanmar was established by the UN Human Rights Council in March of 2017. In 2019 the UNFFMM found that “Myanmar had committed four out of the five underlying acts of genocide enumerated in the Genocide Convention”.
The fact-finding mission concluded that “genocidal intent to destroy the Rohingya people in whole or in part could be inferred from the State’s pattern of conduct”.
On 23 January 2020, the International Court of Justice ordered provisional measures that require Myanmar to prevent the commission of genocidal acts.
In its new report, BROUK states that the military has been subjecting Rohingya in areas under their control to a “slow death” by depriving them of resources indispensable for survival.
The rights group adds that the Myanmar military has been forcibly recruiting Rohingya men and youth. Conscripted Rohingya have been “subjected to forced labour and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, then sent to the frontlines in Rakhine State to be used as cannon fodder”.
The report which covers the period from 13 November 2023 to 23 May 2024, alleges that the Myanmar military, its proxies, and the Arakan Army have committed “war crimes against Rohingya communities, including murder, torture, cruel treatment, extrajudicial executions, sexual violence, rape, taking hostages, conscripting and using children, pillaging and deliberately attacking civilians”.
BROUK has warned that the international community could not afford to fail the Rohingya again. The group emphasized that Myanmar has failed to act on the ICJ’s 2020 provisional measures.
The rights organization has called for an open meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the military’s “repeated breaches” of the ICJ’s orders as well as action to end what it called a “cycle of impunity” in the country.
Read the full BROUK report here and read more on Al Jazeera.
