Alwaght- Myanmarese regime’s army had made systematic preparations for genocide against Rohingya Muslims in the country’s western state of Rakhine, according to a human rights group.
The independent group Fortify Rights said in a landmark report said on Thursday that Myanmar’s military had systematically planned a genocidal campaign to rid the country of Rohingya Muslims, and the mass atrocities perpetrated against the ethnic minority had been the culmination of months of meticulous planning by the security forces.
“Myanmar authorities made extensive and systematic preparations for the commission of mass atrocity crimes against indigenous Rohingya civilians during the weeks and months before Rohingya-militant attacks on August 25, 2017,” Fortify Rights says in the 162-page report.
The group has called on the U.N. Security Council to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for criminal investigation.
“Genocide doesn’t happen spontaneously,” said Matthew Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Fortify Rights. “Impunity for these crimes will pave the path for more violations and attacks in the future. The world can’t sit idly by and watch another genocide unfold, but right now, that’s exactly what’s happening.”
Fortify says that the campaign to expel them was not merely a response to the alleged militant attack, as the dominant narrative holds, but that it was premeditated. The August ARSA attack was the second of its kind; the group’s first fatal ambush was carried out in October 2016, which the Myanmar military met with a brutal campaign of rape and extrajudicial killing that forced tens of thousands to flee.
Fortify suggests that the international community’s failure to effectively respond to the October violence may have emboldened security forces, who appear to have been poised and waiting for a second attack to trigger the group’s violent expulsion.
The group says these actions resemble “preparatory actions” for genocide and crimes against humanity as outlined by the UN’s Framework for Analysis of Atrocity Crimes.
The brutal campaign has forced some 700,000 Rohingya to flee their homeland since August 2017 and seek refuge in Bangladesh.
Many of the displaced Rohingya are either living in squalid camps or just across the border in a plot of land known as "no man’s land."
The Rohingya, who have lived in mainly Buddhist Myanmar for generations, are denied citizenship and are branded illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, which likewise denies them citizenship.
Last December, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra‘ad al-Hussein said enocide charges could be brought against Myanmar following the country’s campaign against the country's Rohingya Muslims. He pointed out that attacks on the Rohingya had been “well thought out and planned.”
