World: Once again, the world’s most oppressed nation is in the spotlight

The Rohingya are one of the most severely oppressed nations, but they may also be the most disadvantaged national community in the world, ”António Guterres said recently. The UN secretary general, a 55 million-member Buddhist-majority Myanmar, formerly Burma, living in just over 1.5 million Muslim communities, has been living in exile and under constant harassment for decades. .

The Rohingya were, among other things, excluded from the 1982 Citizenship Act, so they could not be granted citizenship, and discrimination continued during the 2014 census, when authorities refused to recognize the community as a nation. . While the state of Myanmar says that the Rohingya living in the northwestern part of the country are Muslims who have seeped in from neighboring Bangladesh, the Rohingya who have lived in the region for centuries consider themselves descendants of Arab merchants established in the region of Myanmar. Southeast Asian.

Thousands of dead

Rising oppression peaked in 2017. After the Rohingya militia carried out a concerted attack on some thirty police buildings, Myanmar soldiers killed more than six thousand people, including some seven hundred children under the age of five, in weeks of retaliation. The attackers destroyed almost three hundred Rohingya villages and raped countless vulnerable women and girls. Some 900,000 people have fled the genocide, most of them in Bangladesh, leaving just over half a million Rohingya in their homeland.

Although the killings sparked a serious international reaction, it was in vain that Myanmar was unanimously condemned by the world’s governments, Prime Minister Aun San Suu Kyi, who was still awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for fighting a violent dictatorship. in his country. He denied allegations of genocide and reiterated that no more than 400 Rohingya could have lost their lives in “ordering” terrorist acts. Later, the official position changed somewhat: the army acknowledged that some soldiers may have committed war crimes, but the authorities continued to deny the charge of genocide, claiming that members of the minority themselves set their villages on fire to gain sympathy. of the world. Some soldiers were even punished, but the short prison sentence imposed on them was disproportionate to the true gravity of the crimes.

Irrefutable evidence

Although the evidence was slowly accumulating and the International Criminal Court (ICJ) and later the International Criminal Court (ICC) had already condemned Myanmar for the massacres in a non-final verdict, so far there has been no direct evidence that the soldiers have fired at civilians on stilts. However, a few days ago, two ex-soldiers who had fled abroad also denounced in a video confession that their commanders had ordered them to shoot everything and everyone, and not spare women or children either.

I don’t know how many people I killed. Sixty? Seventy? We fired indiscriminately at everyone, shot men in the forehead and kicked the corpses into mass graves.

Said one of the soldiers. The other soldier confirmed that her companions had raped several women. “Since my rank was low, my job was to stand guard while others raped women,” he confessed.

The content of the confessions was also partially confirmed by UN officials investigating actions against the Rohingya, who said that there were indeed mass graves the location of which had been precisely determined by the escaped former soldiers. Your statements can be very valuable and will be used as evidence in future ICC negotiations. (Although Myanmar is not part of the court, Bangladesh, which has hosted the vast majority of the refugees, is a member state of the ICC, so the mandate of the judiciary can be extended to Myanmar.) Not all perpetrators are likely to be convicted, but UN officials emphasize: partial justice is also better than not touching all perpetrators.

Impossible circumstances

While justice is slow, the Rohingya crowded into refugee camps live in inhumane conditions. Although several UN agencies, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), are working to improve conditions and provide the refugees with food and clean water, some of the camps were built on the slopes of the hills. , flooded by the period of strong monsoons from May to October. weeks. There are tens of thousands of children living in the camps, their education is practically completely unsolvable, even in the world’s largest refugee camp, Kutapalong, where around half a million people live together, there are very few tents or informal buildings where students can study.