{"id":186928,"date":"2018-10-25T04:23:50","date_gmt":"2018-10-25T08:23:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=186928"},"modified":"2018-10-25T04:23:50","modified_gmt":"2018-10-25T08:23:50","slug":"un-investigator-genocide-still-taking-place-myanmar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/10\/25\/un-investigator-genocide-still-taking-place-myanmar\/","title":{"rendered":"UN investigator: Genocide still taking place in Myanmar"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cIt is an ongoing genocide that is taking place at the moment,\u201d he told a news conference Wednesday. (File Photo By Wikimedia commons, Public Domain<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

CAMEROON, Cameroon \u2014 Genocide is still taking place against Rohingya Muslims remaining in Myanmar and the government is increasingly demonstrating it has no interest in establishing a fully functioning democracy, U.N. investigators said Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Marzuki Darusman, chair of the U.N. fact-finding mission on Myanmar, said thousands of Rohingya are still fleeing to Bangladesh, and the estimated 250,000 to 400,000 who have stayed following last year’s brutal military campaign in the Buddhist-majority country \u201ccontinue to suffer the most severe\u201d restrictions and repression.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is an ongoing genocide that is taking place at the moment,\u201d he told a news conference Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Darusman said the requirements for genocide, except perhaps for killings, \u201ccontinue to hold\u201d for Rohingya still in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state. These include causing serious bodily harm, inflicting conditions designed to destroy the Rohingya, and imposing measures to prevent births, he said.<\/p>\n

Myanmar’s U.N. ambassador, Hau Do Suan, called the fact-finding mission \u201cflawed, biased and politically motivated\u201d and said the government \u201ccategorically rejects\u201d its inference of \u201cgenocidal intent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yanghee Lee, the U.N. special investigator on human rights in Myanmar, said she and many others in the\u00a0international\u00a0community hoped the situation under Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi \u201cwould be vastly different from the past \u2014 but it is really not that much different from the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lee added later that she thinks Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former political prisoner who now leads Myanmar’s civilian government, \u201cis in total denial\u201d about accusations that the military in Buddhist-majority Myanmar raped, murdered and tortured Rohingya and burned their villages, sending over 700,000 fleeing to Bangladesh since August 2017.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe government is increasingly demonstrating that it has no interest and capacity in establishing a fully functioning democracy where all its people equally enjoy all their rights and freedoms,\u201d Lee said. \u201cIt is not upholding justice and rule of law\u201d that Suu Kyi \u201crepeatedly says is the standard to which all in Myanmar are held.\u201d<\/p>\n

If this were the case, she said, fair laws would be applied impartially to all people, impunity would not rein, \u201cand the law would not be wielded as a weapon of oppression.\u201d<\/p>\n

Suu Kyi’s government has rejected independent\u00a0international\u00a0investigations into the alleged abuses of Rohingya and has commissioned its own probe. The government has also rejected the report by the fact-finding mission, which said some top military leaders should be prosecuted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide against the Rohingya.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Myanmar government’s hardened positions are by far the greatest obstacle,\u201d Darusman told reporters.<\/p>\n

\u201cIts continued denials, its attempts to shield itself under the cover of national sovereignty and its dismissal of 444 pages of details about the facts and circumstances of recent human rights violations that point to the most serious crimes under\u00a0international\u00a0law\u201d strengthens the need for\u00a0international\u00a0action because \u201caccountability cannot be expected from the national processes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Darusman and Lee spoke ahead of a Security Council meeting that began with a vote on whether Darusman should be allowed to brief members.<\/p>\n

He was given a green light with the minimum nine \u201cyes\u201d votes from the U.S., Britain, France, Netherlands, Sweden, Ivory Coast, Kuwait, Peru and Poland. China, which is Myanmar’s neighbour and ally, Russia and Bolivia voted \u201cno\u201d and Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia and Kazakhstan abstained.<\/p>\n

Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia accused supporters of the briefing of \u201ctorpedoing consensus\u201d in the council and forcing council members \u201cto engage in loud-speaker diplomacy.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the fact-finding mission didn’t go to Rakhine state, called its report \u201ctoo biased,\u201d and said the\u00a0international\u00a0community should help Myanmar and Bangladesh resolve the Rohingya refugee problem.<\/p>\n

Chinese Ambassador Ma Zhaoxu later echoed Nebenzia, calling the report’s conclusions \u201clopsided\u201d and \u201cnot credible\u201d and saying the\u00a0international\u00a0community should work on returning the refugees.<\/p>\n

Lee stressed that their \u201crepatriation is not possible now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI will not encourage any repatriation,\u201d the U.N. envoy said. \u201cConducive conditions means they should not go back to … the oppressive laws, the discrimination. The minimum they need is freedom of movement, access to basic health services.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lee said \u201cthere’s been a lot of progress in terms of economic development and infrastructure, but in the area of ‘democratic space’ and people’s right to claim back their land … there is no progress.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRight now, it’s like an apartheid situation where Rohingyas still living in Myanmar … have no freedom of movement,\u201d Lee said. \u201cThe camps, the shelters, the model villages that are being built, it’s more of a cementing of total segregation or separation from the Rakhine ethnic community.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the council meeting, Darusman said the fact-finding mission concluded that last year’s events were \u201ca human rights catastrophe that was foreseeable and planned,\u201d and it conservatively estimates there were \u201c10,000 Rohingya deaths.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRemaining Rohingya in Rakhine state are at grave risk,\u201d he said, and returning Rohingya from Bangladesh would be \u201ctantamount to condemning them to life as sub-humans and further mass killing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Darusman said the Security Council should the situation in Myanmar to the\u00a0International\u00a0Criminal Court or another\u00a0international\u00a0tribunal and also impose an arms embargo on Myanmar, a ban on transactions with all military-related enterprises and sanctions against those alleged to be most responsible for atrocities against the Rohingya.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere can be no ‘moving on’ from this crisis without addressing its root causes \u2014 all of which continue to exist today, primarily the presence of an unaccountable military that acts with complete impunity,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Netherlands’ deputy U.N. ambassador, Lise Gregoire Van Haaren, said her government will push quickly for a Security Council resolution that would refer Myanmar to the ICC.<\/p>\n

But council action appeared highly unlikely because of its deep divisions and almost certain opposition from China and Russia, both veto-wielding council members.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’m very aware that there might be pushback, but having pushback is never a reason not to try,\u201d Van Haaren said. \u201cSo we are going to have a really ambitious aim for the negotiations\u201d on a possible resolution \u201cand let’s see where we get.\u201d<\/p>\n

Myanmar’s Suan said the Independent Commission of Inquiry established by the government will investigate alleged human rights violations, and \u201cwe will never accept any calls for referral of Myanmar to the ICC.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CAMEROON, Cameroon \u2014 Genocide is still taking place against Rohingya Muslims remaining in Myanmar and the government is increasingly demonstrating …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":186929,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-news","category-news-w","mauthors-edith-m-lederer","mauthors-the-associated-press"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186928\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/186929"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}