Myanmar security forces may be guilty of genocide against Rohingya: UN

Myanmar's security forces may beguilty of genocide against Rohingya, the United Nations' top human rights official said on Tuesday,adding that more members of theMuslim minoritywere fleeing despite an agreement betweenMyanmar and Bangladesh to send them home.

Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, UNhigh commissioner for human rights, said that none of the 626,000 Rohingya who have fledviolence since August should be repatriated to Myanmar unlessthere was robust monitoring on the ground.

Myanmar's ambassador Htin Lynn said that his government wasworking with Bangladesh to ensure returns of the displaced inabout two months and "there will be no camps."

Zeid, who has described the campaign in the past as a"textbook case of ethnic cleansing," was addressing a special session of the UN Human Rights Council called by Bangladesh,which is struggling to accommodate Rohingya who have fled.

He described "concordant reports of acts of appallingbarbarity committed against the Rohingya, including deliberately burning people to death inside their homes;murders of childrenand adults; indiscriminate shooting of fleeing civilians; widespread rapes of women and girls;and the burning anddestruction of houses, schools, markets and mosques."

"Can anyone can anyone rule out that elements ofgenocide may be present?" he told the 47-member state forum.

The United Nations defines genocide as acts intended todestroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in whole or in part. A UNconvention requires all countries to act tohalt genocide and to punish those responsible.

Shahriar Alam, Bangladesh's junior foreign affairs minister,told the session in Geneva that his country was hosting nearlyone million "Myanmar nationals" following summary executions andrapes "as a weapon of persecution."

Mainly Buddhist Myanmar denies the Muslim Rohingya are itscitizens and considers them foreigners.

These crimes had been "perpetrated by Myanmar securityforces and extremist Buddhist vigilantes,"Alam said, calling for an end to what he called "xenophobic rhetoricincludingfrom higher echelons of the government and the military."

Criminal investigations

Zeid urged the council to recommend that the UNGeneralAssembly establish a new mechanism "to assist individual
criminal investigations of those responsible."

Prosecutions for the violence and rapes against Rohingya bysecurity forces or by civilians "appear extremely rare," Zeidsaid.

Marzuki Darusman, head of an independent internationalfact-finding mission on Myanmar, said by video from Malaysia: "We will go where the evidence leads us.Our focus is on factsand circumstances of allegations in Myanmar as a whole since2011."

His team has interviewed Rohingya refugees, includingchildren in the Bangladeshi port city of Cox's Bazar, who recounted "acts of extreme brutality" and "displayed signs ofsevere trauma."

Myanmar has not granted the investigators access to Rakhine,the northern state from which the Rohingya have fled, he said."We maintain hope that it will be granted early in 2018."

Pramila Patten, special representative of the secretary-general on sexual violence in conflict, whointerviewed survivors in Bangladesh in November, said: "I heardthe most heart-breaking and horrific accounts of sexualatrocities reportedly committed in cold blood out of a lethalhatred of these people solely on the basis of their ethnicityand religion."

Crimes included "rape, gang rape by multiple soldiers,forced public nudity and humiliation, and sexual slavery in military captivity,"Patten said.

Myanmar denies committing atrocities against the Rohingya.Its envoy Htin, referring to the accounts, said: "People will say what they wanted to believe and sometimes they will say whatthey were told to say."

Kelley Currie, U.S. ambassador to the UNEconomic andSocial Council, said the Rohingya's lack of Myanmar citizenshipwas "the fundamental root cause of this crisis,"adding: "Stopdenying the seriousness of the current situation."