UN envoy: sexual attacks against Rohingya may be war crimes

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UN envoy: sexual attacks against Rohingya may be war crimes

2017-11-23 13:58 Last Updated At：13:58

Widespread atrocities against Rohingya Muslim women and girls have been orchestrated and perpetrated by Myanmar's military and may amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide, the U.N. envoy on sexual violence in conflict said Wednesday.

Pramila Patten, who met many Rohingya victims of sexual violence in Bangladesh camps during a visit this month, said she fully endorses the assessment by U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein that Rohingya have been victims of "ethnic cleansing."

Patten said at a news conference that the widespread use of sexual violence "was clearly a driver and push factor" for more than 620,000 Rohingya to flee Myanmar. It was "also a calculated tool of terror aimed at the extermination and removal of the Rohingya as a group," she added.

Myanmar's government has denied committing any atrocities as has its military. The government refused a request from Patten to visit northern Rakhine state where many Rohingya lived.

Buddhist-majority Myanmar doesn't recognize the Rohingya as an ethnic group, insisting they are Bengali migrants from Bangladesh living illegally in the country. It has denied them citizenship, leaving them stateless.

The recent spasm of violence began when Rohingya insurgents launched a series of attacks Aug. 25. Myanmar security forces then began a scorched-earth campaign against Rohingya villages that the U.N. and human rights groups have called a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Patten said that during her visit to camps for the displaced, she heard "the most heartbreaking, most shocking, and horrific accounts of abuses committed cold bloodedly with unparalleled hatred against the Rohingya community."

Patten, a former member of the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, said sexual violence including gang rape by soldiers, forced public nudity and sexual slavery and it was clearly being used "as a tool of dehumanization and as a form of punishment."

She said a number of eyewitnesses "reported rapes of the most extreme and brutal nature, which included the tying of women and girls to a rock or tree before being gang raped by multiple soldiers — and many were literally gang-raped to death."

Some girls who were raped in their houses were left to die when their houses were torched, she added.

Witnesses also said that even before Aug. 25, Myanmar troops would throw Rohingya babies into fires or into village wells to contaminate the water and deprive residents of drinking water, Patten said.

"My observations point to a pattern of widespread atrocities, including sexual violence against Rohingya women and girls who have been systematically targeted on account of their religion and ethnicity," said Patten, a lawyer from Mauritius.

"And a clear picture has emerged about the alleged perpetrators of these atrocities and their modus operandi," she said. "The sexual violence has been commanded, orchestrated, and condoned and perpetrated by the armed forces of Myanmar, the Tatmadaw. And other actors involved include the Myanamar border guard police and militia composed of Rakhine Buddhists and other ethnic groups."

Patten said the U.N. population agency has provided services to 1,644 survivors of various forms of sexual and gender-based violence. "My guess is that this is the tip of the iceberg," she said.

Patten said she believes "there is a prima facie case for pursuing these atrocities in an international court, especially given that the sexual violence was targeted against the women on the basis of their religion and ethnicity as a form of collective punishment and persecution against the group as a whole."

"I can also see a basis for characterizing these violations as war crimes, crimes against humanity and acts of genocide, but it is not my role to make that determination," she said.

Patten said she plans to participate in a Human Rights Council meeting on Myanmar in Geneva on Dec. 5 and hopes to be able to brief the Security Council in New York on sexual violence against Rohingya on Dec. 12.

The council would have to refer Myanmar to the International Criminal Court for the violence against Rohingya to be considered as possible war crimes. That appears highly unlikely as China, an ally of Myanmar, is one of the council's five powers that can veto any action.

Nonetheless, Patten said she plans to meet with the court's prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, next month at U.N. headquarters in.

Rape, terror and death at sea: How a boat carrying Rohingya children, women and men capsized

2024-05-08 11:19 Last Updated At：11:21

MEULABOH, Indonesia (AP) — Huddled on board the boat, the 12-year-old girl quaked with fear.

The captain and crew who she says had tortured her and three other women and girls were not finished. And the punishment for disobedience, the men warned, would be death.

It was the third night that the girl and around 140 other ethnic Rohingya refugees had been trapped on the fishing boat off Indonesia’s coast. They had fled Bangladesh and their homeland of Myanmar in a bid to escape violence and terror, only to face the same at sea.

The 12-year-old — identified in this story only by the initial N, because she is a sexual assault survivor — tried to hide. She had already survived a night in the captain’s bedroom, where she says he and several crew members had beaten and sexually abused her.

Like most of the passengers, she had survived attacks by Myanmar’s military that forced her and her family to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. There, she had survived nearly seven years in violence-plagued refugee camps. And she had thus far survived this journey without her family, who hoped she’d make it to Malaysia, where she was promised as a child bride to a man she had never met.

The captain ordered more girls to join him and his crew in the bedroom.

“If you don’t come to us,” he shouted, “then we will capsize this boat!”

What happened next would force N and the other Rohingya on board into yet another battle for survival.

For many, this would be the battle they finally lost.

In March, Indonesian officials and local fishermen rescued 75 people from the overturned hull of a boat off the coast of Indonesia’s province of Aceh. Another 67 passengers, including at least 28 children, were killed when the boat capsized, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Until now, little was known about why the boat capsized. This account, as told to The Associated Press in interviews with eight surviving passengers, provides the first insight into what happened.

N’s journey began in Bangladesh, where a series of boats ferried her and other Rohingya across the Bay of Bengal.

The bedlam began, the passengers say, when they were transferred to a cramped Indonesian vessel that was supposed to take them to Indonesia. From there, they would be smuggled into Malaysia.

The Indonesian captain and crew separated the men from the women and forced the men into the boat’s cargo holds. Anyone who protested was beaten, says Muhammed Amin.

The captain and crew — who warned they were armed, though no one saw a gun — forced N and four other women and girls into the captain’s bedroom.

One of the women slipped out, but N and the others were trapped. The assaults by the captain and five of his six crew lasted all night, N says.

When morning dawned, N was allowed out to use the toilet. She hid among the other women, but the other three girls were abused for a second night.

On the third night, the three girls emerged from the captain’s room, sobbing and speechless.

The captain and crew demanded fresh victims. The women refused.

The captain and crew had been drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana, the passengers say. The furious captain threatened to capsize the boat unless the women complied.

Soon after, Jannat Ullah says, he saw the captain push the steering wheel with his leg.

The vessel tilted violently, sending passengers tumbling. And then it smashed into a wave.

In the blackness of the water, people screamed for salvation, for God, for their children.

N battled her way onto the boat’s overturned hull. Once again, she had managed to survive. But the three girls who were abused alongside her had not.

Amin spotted the captain and three crew members swimming away.

In the morning, a small fishing boat arrived, and took six people to shore.

Meanwhile, worsening waves had destabilized the capsized boat, which overturned again, killing more people.

Rain spared passengers death by dehydration. But as another night passed, it was clear not everyone would survive. Rahena Begum’s 9-year-old daughter stopped breathing.

The passengers prayed, then slid the child's body into the sea.

Around 30 minutes later, Rahena says, the rescue ship finally arrived.

The bodies of 12 women and three children have since been recovered off Aceh, according to the UNHCR.

Although the fishing boat’s crew rescued the initial six people the morning of March 20, search vessels weren’t launched until that evening. Officials didn’t finish rescuing the passengers until midday on March 21.

Ibnu Harris Al Hussain, chief of Banda Aceh’s search and rescue agency, said the rescue operation began shortly after his agency learned about the boat.

“The most important thing is that we have ensured their safety when they were found,” Hussain wrote in a message to the AP.

On April 2, police announced they had arrested three crew members, plus a fourth man who was not on the boat. They were charged with people smuggling, which carries a maximum 15-year prison sentence. Police are searching for the remaining crew, including the captain, who fled to Malaysia, West Aceh Police Chief Andi Kirana told the AP.

Police are not considering murder charges, Kirana says, because they believe the capsize was an accident.

But N and the other passengers believe the disaster was a deliberate act of revenge by a sadistic captain and crew. And for that, N says, the punishment should fit the crime.

“They tortured us. They treated us like animals,” she says. “We want the government to treat them like animals.”

Kirana also said police are not considering rape charges, because they haven’t received reports of sexual assault. But N says police have never questioned her.

N hopes to make it to Malaysia and to the man who wants her as his wife.

Maybe then, she says, she will finally be free — though in reality, Rohingya child brides in Malaysia often become prisoners to abusive husbands.

For now, all she can do is fight to survive another day.

“I don't want to suffer anymore,” she says.

Gelineau reported from Sydney.