Amnesty International said Thursday that Myanmar’s ongoing crackdown on the Muslim minority Rohingya population is “ethnic cleansing.”
In a scathing new report released Thursday, the humanitarian group said Myanmar’s security forces have engaged in an “orchestrated campaign of systematic burnings” of Rohingya villages across northern Rakhine State for almost three weeks.
“There is a clear and systematic pattern of abuse here,” said Tirana Hassan, crisis response director for Amnesty.
“Security forces surround a village, shoot people fleeing in panic and then torch houses to the ground. In legal terms, these are crimes against humanity, systematic attacks and forcible deportation of civilians.”
The report describes a targeted campaign to push out the Rohingya.
“The evidence is irrefutable — the Myanmar security forces are setting northern Rakhine State ablaze in a targeted campaign to push the Rohingya people out of Myanmar. Make no mistake: this is ethnic cleansing,” Hassan said.
More than 370,000 Rohingya — many of them women and children — have fled to Bangladesh to escape violence since August 25, according to the United Nations. That’s an average of almost 20,000 a day.
On Wednesday, the plight of the Rohingya prompted a rare rebuke from the UN Security Council.
In the statement, the first the UN’s most powerful body has made in nine years on the situation in Rakhine State, the 15-member council acknowledged militant attacks on Myanmar security forces but “condemned the subsequent violence,” and called for “immediate steps to end the violence in Rakhine.”
The government claims it is fighting a terrorist insurgency, targeting terrorists suspected of masterminding an attack on police posts in late August.
But the refugees tell a different story. They accuse the security forces of atrocities, burning villages, firing on civilians indiscriminately and of family members being taken away and never heard from again.
Amnesty said it had detected at least 80 large-scale fires in predominantly Rohingya-inhabited areas since August 25, when the military’s operation against insurgents began. Amnesty says it has matched satellite images of the burnings to eyewitness testimony and images of homes being torched.
While “the true number of fires and extent of property destruction is likely to be much higher,” Amnesty also says that satellite images form mixed ethnic areas show that non-Rohingya areas “appear to have been left untouched.”