Latest flash report on Rohingyas by a four-member team of Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) stated that the widespread violations against the Rohingya population indicate the very likely commission of crimes against humanity.
The team travelled to Bangladesh from 8 to 23 January 2017 to interview Rohingyas who had entered Bangladesh from northern Rakhine State (nRS) in the aftermath of the 9 October 2016 attacks. The team gathered testimony from more than 220 persons who had fled nRS.
The report detailed the mass gang-rape, killings – including of babies and young children, brutal beatings, disappearances and other serious human rights violations by Myanmar’s security forces in a sealed-off area north of Maungdaw in northern Rakhine state.
Of the 204 people individually interviewed by a team of UN human rights investigators, the vast majority reported witnessing killings, and almost half reported having a family member who was killed as well as family members who were missing. Of the 101 women interviewed, more than half reported having suffered rape or other forms of sexual violence, OHCHR said in its website.
The devastating cruelty to which these Rohingya children have been subjected is unbearable – what kind of hatred could make a man stab a baby crying out for his mother’s milk. And for the mother to witness this murder while she is being gang-raped by the very security forces who should be protecting her,” United Nations High Commissioners for human Rights Zeid Bin Ra’ad said.
“I call on the international community, with all its strength, to join me in urging the leadership in Myanmar to bring such military operations to an end. The gravity and scale of these allegations begs the robust reaction of the international community,” he added.
The flash report suggests that operations by security forces in the area have continued into January 2017, although the intensity might have reduced.
View the flash report here.
