Annan commission to submit final report this month: Rohignya Muslim women 'raped by Burma soldiers and abandoned'
03 August 2017By Coconuts Yangon and
Samuel Osborne
The Rakhine State Advisory Commission is expected to submit its final report
to the office of State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi by the middle of this month
following almost a year of observing conflict and inequality in Myanmar's
westernmost province.
The report is now being finalized in Geneva, according to commission member
Aye Lwin.
Aye Lwin told Anadolu Agency last week that the report will include
recommendations for a durable solution to conflicts between ethnic Rakhine
Buddhists and stateless Rohingya Muslims.
However, he said, it will not include comments on alleged human rights
violations by Myanmar security forces against the Rohingya, which began after
a Rohingya rebel group killed nine police officers in northern Rakhine State
last October.
"The commission's mandate is to just find out the root cause of the problems,
not to investigate the rights violations by the security forces," he said.
The human rights violations are being investigated by a separate commission
appointed by the State Counsellor, which is led by Myanmar vice president
Myint Swe, a former army general. The commission previously reported that it
has found no cases of genocide or religious persecution against Muslims in
northern Rakhine State, and it has claimed there is insufficient evidence to
take action against soldiers accused of rape, despite detailed reports of rape
compiled by the UN.
The advisory commission, which is led by former UN secretary-general Kofi
Annan, submitted an interim report in March, which calls for human rights
training for soldiers, the closure of IDP camps, and Muslim representation in
local administrations.
Few of these recommendations have been carried out. The Rakhine State
government began closing three IDP camps in April, but many of their Muslim
residents were forcibly moved to Yangon rather than to their original villages
in Rakhine State.
Critics of the Myanmar government's failure to enact peace and justice in
Rakhine State are now calling on Kofi Annan to seek guarantees from Aung San
Suu Kyi that the commission's recommendations will be heeded.
"Kofi Annan needs to get directly involved now to get renewed commitments from
Suu Kyi and her government that all of the commission's recommendations will
be supported and implemented," Human Rights Watch deputy Asia director Phil
Robertson told Anadolu Agency.
"He must be very clear that any effort to sideline or drop the final report's
conclusions and recommendations will be met with strong and continuous
denunciation by the commission and its supporters in the international
community."
Rohignya Muslim women 'raped by Burma soldiers and abandoned'
Samuel Osborne
'My husband told me he is going to leave me. He blamed me for not running
away'
Rohingya Muslims say they have been abandoned by their husbands after telling
them they were raped by government soldiers.
Women and girls have accused soldiers and police officers of rape and sexual
assault during months of violence between Muslims and Buddhists in Burma.
One woman, Ayamar Bagon, told AFP she has been forced to live on handouts
after her husband left her when she told him she was gang-raped by soldiers.
"I was raped close to my due date, in my ninth month of pregnancy. They knew I
was pregnant but didn't care," Ms Bagon said.
Clutching her baby daughter to her chest, the 20-year-old added: "My husband
blamed me for letting it happen. Because of this, he married another woman and
now lives in another village."
Hasinnar Baygon, a 20-year-old mother-of-two, told the agency her husband had
also threatened to leave her after she was raped by three soldiers.
She alleged they took turns to violate her after all Rohingya men had fled the
village, leaving only the women, children and elderly.
"My husband told me he is going to leave me. He blamed me for not running
away," she added.
Earlier this year, a Human Rights Watch report alleged Rohingya women and
girls as young as 13 had been raped and sexually assaulted by soldiers.
Human Rights Watch said members of the army and border guard police took part
in rape, gang rape, invasive body searches and sexual assaults against women
and girls in at least nine villages in the Rohingya-dominated Maungdaw
district in the final months of 2016.
The attacks were reportedly often carried out in groups, with women being held
down or threatened at gunpoint by some men while others raped them.
The report stated that more than half of the 101 women UN investigators
interviewed said they were raped or suffered other forms of sexual violence at
the hands of Burmese security forces.
The Burmese government had repeatedly denied allegations of persecution
against the Rohingya.
Last week, the UN's human rights envoy to Burma expressed disappointment over
a lack of government effort to tackle problems underlying the violence in the
western state of Rakhine after completing a 12-day fact-finding tour.
Yanghee Lee, on her fifth mission to the country, said she saw little
improvement in the situation for the Rohingya in Rakhine, where the army has
been accused of human rights violations on a vast scale during
counterinsurgency operations following an attack on police outposts along the
border with Bangladesh last October.
She also said the government prevented her from visiting several areas in
Rakhine state and in the north where there is armed conflict.
"The general situation for the Rohingya has hardly improved since my last
visit in January, and has become further complicated in the north of Rakhine,"
she said. "I continue to receive reports of violations allegedly committed by
security forces during operations."
She accused the government of disrupting her scheduling to make it difficult
to plan visits, as well as barring some visits completely.
"As well as increasing restrictions on my access, individuals who meet with me
continue to face intimidation, including being photographed, questioned before
and after meetings and in one case even followed," she said. "This is
unacceptable."
Ms Lee said she would present details of her findings in a report to the UN
General Assembly.
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