By Kyaw Ye Lynn
YANGON, Myanmar (AA) – Hundreds of people have been killed during the military crackdown on the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar’s western Rakhine state, the United Nations human rights office said Friday.
Myanmar security forces have committed mass gang-rape, killings – including of babies and young children, brutal beatings, disappearances and other serious human rights violations in northern part of Rakhine State since early October, said a new report commissioned by the U.N. Human Rights Chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein.
“The area clearance operations have likely resulted in several hundred deaths,” said the report, referring to the military operations following the deaths of nine police officers in early October in Maungdaw area near the country’s border with Bangladesh.
The report is based on interviews with 204 Rohingya refugees who fled to neighbouring Bangladesh.
“Numerous testimonies collected from people from different village tracts…confirmed that the army deliberately set fire to houses with families inside, and in other cases pushed Rohingyas into already burning houses,” the report read.
“The killing of people as they prayed, fished to feed their families or slept in their homes, the brutal beating of children as young as two and an elderly woman aged 80 – the perpetrators of these violations, and those who ordered them, must be held accountable,” High Commissioner Zeid said in the report.
Zeid called on the government of Myanmar for an immediate halt to the grave human rights violations in the area.
“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,” said Zeid.
“The gravity and scale of these allegations begs the robust reaction of the international community.”
