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Myanmar: Crimes Against Humanity Terrorize and Drive Rohingya Out
More than 530,000 Rohingya men, women and children have fled northern Rakhine State in terror in a matter of weeks amid the Myanmar security forces' targeted campaign of widespread and systematic murder, rape and burning, Amnesty International said today in its most detailed analysis yet of the ongoing crisis.
Oct 18, 2017
More than 530,000 Rohingya men, women and children have fled northern Rakhine State in terror in a matter of weeks amid the Myanmar security forces' targeted campaign of widespread and systematic murder, rape and burning, Amnesty International said today in its most detailed analysis yet of the ongoing crisis.
'My World Is Finished': Rohingya Targeted in Crimes against Humanity in Myanmar describes how Myanmar's security forces are carrying out a systematic, organized and ruthless campaign of violence against the Rohingya population as a whole in northern Rakhine State, after a Rohingya armed group attacked around 30 security posts on 25 August.
Dozens of eyewitnesses to the worst violence consistently implicated specific units, including the Myanmar Army's Western Command, the 33rd Light Infantry Division, and the Border Guard Police.
"In this orchestrated campaign, Myanmar's security forces have brutally meted out revenge on the entire Rohingya population of northern Rakhine State, in an apparent attempt to permanently drive them out of the country. These atrocities continue to fuel the region's worst refugee crisis in decades," said Tirana Hassan, Crisis Response Director at Amnesty International.
"Exposing these heinous crimes is the first step on the long road to justice. Those responsible must be held to account; Myanmar's military can't simply sweep serious violations under the carpet by announcing another sham internal investigation. The Commander-in-Chief, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, must take immediate action to stop his troops from committing atrocities."
Crimes against humanity
Witness accounts, satellite imagery and data, and photo and video evidence gathered by Amnesty International all point to the same conclusion: hundreds of thousands of Rohingya women, men, and children have been the victims of a widespread and systematic attack, amounting to crimes against humanity.
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court lists 11 types of acts which, when knowingly committed during such an attack, constitute crimes against humanity. Amnesty International has consistently documented at least six of these amid the current wave of violence in northern Rakhine State: murder, deportation and forcible displacement, torture, rape and other sexual violence, persecution, and other inhumane acts such as denying food and other life-saving provisions.
This conclusion is based on testimonies from more than 120 Rohingya men and women who have fled to Bangladesh in recent weeks, as well as 30 interviews with medical professionals, aid workers, journalists and Bangladeshi officials.
Amnesty International's experts corroborated many witness accounts of the Myanmar security forces' crimes by analysing satellite imagery and data, as well as verifying photographs and video footage taken inside Rakhine State. The organization has also requested access to Rakhine State to investigate abuses on the ground, including by members of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), the Rohingya armed group. Amnesty International continues to call for unfettered access to the UN Fact-Finding Mission and other independent observers.
Murder and massacres
In the hours and days following the ARSA attacks on 25 August, the Myanmar security forces, sometimes joined by local vigilantes, surrounded Rohingya villages throughout the northern part of Rakhine State. As Rohingya women, men, and children fled their homes, the soldiers and police officers often opened fire, killing or seriously injuring at least hundreds of people.
Survivors described running to nearby hills and rice fields, where they hid until the forces left. The elderly and people with disabilities were often unable to flee, and burned to death in their homes after the military set them alight.
This pattern was replicated in dozens of villages across Maungdaw, Rathedaung, and Buthidaung townships. But the security forces, and in particular the Myanmar military, appear to have unleashed their most lethal response in specific villages near where ARSA carried out its attacks.
Amnesty International documented events in five such villages where at least a dozen people were killed: Chein Kar Li, Koe Tan Kauk, and Chut Pyin, all in Rathedaung Township; and Inn Din and Min Gyi, in Maungdaw Township. In Chut Pyin and Min Gyi, the death toll was particularly high, with at least scores of Rohingya women, men, and children killed by Myanmar security forces.
Amnesty International interviewed 17 survivors of the massacre in Chut Pyin, six of whom had gunshot wounds. Almost all had lost at least one family member, with some losing many. They consistently described the Myanmar military, joined by Border Guard Police and local vigilantes, surrounding Chut Pyin, opening fire on those fleeing, and then systematically burning Rohingya houses and buildings.
Fatima, 12, told Amnesty International that she was at home with her parents, eight siblings, and grandmother when they saw fire rising from another part of their village. As the family ran out of their house, she said men in uniform opened fire on them from behind. She saw both her father and 10-year-old sister get shot, then Fatima was also hit in the back of her right leg, just above the knee.
"I fell down, but my neighbour grabbed me and carried me," she recalled. After a week on the run, she finally received treatment in Bangladesh. Her mother and older brother were also killed in Chut Pyin.
Amnesty International sent photographs of Fatima's wound to a forensic medical expert, who said it was consistent with a bullet wound that "would have entered the thigh from behind." Medical professionals in Bangladesh described treating many wounds that appeared to have been caused by gunshots fired from behind -matching consistent witness testimony that the military fired on Rohingya as they tried to run away.
In Chein Kar Li and Koe Tan Kauk, two neighbouring villages, Amnesty International documented the same pattern of attack by the Myanmar military.
Sona Mia, 77, said he was at home in Koe Tan Kauk when Myanmar soldiers surrounded the village and opened fire on 27 August. His 20-year-old daughter, Rayna Khatun, had a disability that left her unable to walk or speak. One of his sons put her on his shoulders, and the family slowly made its way toward the hill on the village's edge. As they heard the shooting get closer and closer, they decided they had to leave Rayna in a Rohingya house that had been abandoned.
"We didn't think we'd be able to make it," Sona Mia recalled. "I told her to sit there, we'd come back... After arriving on the hill, we spotted the house where we left her. It was a bit away, but we could see. The soldiers were burning [houses], and eventually we saw that house, it was burned too."
After the military left the village in the late afternoon, Sona Mia's sons went down and found Rayna Khatun's burnt body among the torched house. They dug a grave at the edge of that house's courtyard, and buried her there.
Rape and other sexual violence
Amnesty International interviewed seven Rohingya survivors of sexual violence committed by the Myanmar security forces. Of those, four women and a 15-year-old girl had been raped, each in a separate group with between two and five other women and girls who were also raped. The rapes occurred in two villages that the organization investigated: Min Gyi in Maungdaw Township and Kyun Pauk in Buthidaung Township.
As previously documented by Human Rights Watch and The Guardian, after entering Min Gyi (known locally as Tula Toli) on the morning of 30 August, Myanmar soldiers pursued Rohingya villagers who fled down to the riverbank and then separated the men and older boys from the women and younger children.
After opening fire on and executing at least scores of men and older boys, as well as some women and younger children, the soldiers took women in groups to nearby houses where they raped them, before setting fire to those houses and other Rohingya parts of the village.
S.K., 30, told Amnesty International that after watching the executions, she and many other women and younger children were taken to a ditch, where they were forced to stand in knee-deep water:
"They took the women in groups to different houses. ...There were five of us [women], taken by four soldiers [in military uniform]. They took our money, our possessions, and then they beat us with a wooden stick. My children were with me. They hit them too. Shafi, my two-year-old son, he was hit hard with a wooden stick. One hit, and he was dead... Three of my children were killed. Mohamed Osman (10) [and] Mohamed Saddiq (five) too. Other women [in the house] also had children [with them] that were killed.
"All of the women were stripped naked...They had very strong wooden sticks. They first hit us in the head, to make us weak. Then they hit us [in the vagina] with the wooden sticks. Then they raped us. A different soldier for each [woman]."
After raping women and girls, the soldiers set fire to the houses, killing many of the victims inside.
Deliberate, organized village burnings
On 3 October, the UN Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT) reported that it had identified 20.7 square kilometres of buildings destroyed by fire in Maungdaw and Buthidaung Townships since 25 August. Even that likely underestimated the overall scale of destruction and burning, as dense cloud cover affected what the satellites were able to detect.
Amnesty International's own review of fire data from remote satellite sensing indicates at least 156 large fires in northern Rakhine State since 25 August, also likely to be an underestimate. In the previous five years, no fires were detected during the same period, which is also the monsoon season, strongly indicating that the burning has been intentional.
Before and after satellite images strikingly illustrate what witnesses also consistently told Amnesty International - that the Myanmar security forces only burned Rohingya villages or areas. For example, satellite images of Inn Din and Min Gyi show large swathes of structures razed by fire virtually side by side with areas that were left untouched. Distinct features of the untouched areas, combined with accounts from Rohingya residents as to where they and other ethnic communities lived in those villages, indicate that only Rohingya areas were razed.
Amnesty International has noted a similar pattern in at least a dozen more villages where Rohingya lived in close proximity to people from other ethnicities.
"Given their ongoing denials, Myanmar's authorities may have thought they would literally get away with murder on a massive scale. But modern technology, coupled with rigorous human rights research, have tipped the scales against them," said Tirana Hassan.
"It is time for the international community to move beyond public outcry and take action to end the campaign of violence that has driven more than half the Rohingya population out of Myanmar. Through cutting off military cooperation, imposing arms embargoes and targeted sanctions on individuals responsible for abuses, a clear message must be sent that the military's crimes against humanity in Rakhine State will not be tolerated.
"The international community must ensure that the ethnic cleansing campaign does not achieve its unlawful, reprehensible goal. To do so, the international community must combine encouraging and supporting Bangladesh in providing adequate conditions and safe asylum to Rohingya refugees, with ensuring that Myanmar respects their human right to return safely, voluntarily and with dignity to their country and insisting that it ends, once and for all, the systematic discrimination against the Rohingya and other root causes of the current crisis."
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World Worries as Trump Set to Dump Paris Climate Deal
Trump has called climate change a "hoax." Tweeted: "This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop."
May 07, 2017
The world is worried as Decision Day nears.
At a April 29th rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Trump said he would make a "big decision" on Paris within the next two weeks and vowed to end "a broken system of global plunder at American expense."
Now the Trump administration has a meeting scheduled this Tuesday to decide whether to drop out of the Paris Agreement.
During last year's campaign Trump called the Paris climate agreement, COP21, a "bad deal" for the U.S. and promised more oil drilling and to revive the fading coal industry. He's also called climate change a "hoax."
Trump's senior strategist Steve Bannon, White House counsel Don McGahn, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Attorney General Jeff Sessions are leading the climate deniers urging Trump to officially pull the United States from the accord. But, sources say, they are clashing with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and First Daughter Ivanka Trump.
\u201cThe concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.\u201d— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump) 1352229352
\u201cIce storm rolls from Texas to Tennessee - I'm in Los Angeles and it's freezing. Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!\u201d— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump) 1386342836
\u201cWe should be focused on magnificently clean and healthy air and not distracted by the expensive hoax that is global warming!\u201d— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump) 1386344308
\u201cThis very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps,and our GW scientists are stuck in ice\u201d— Donald J. Trump (@Donald J. Trump) 1388623196
Trump's scorched-earth approach to environmental protections has shocked current and former government officials overseas who are waiting nervously to see whether the US will destabilize the agreement by pulling out of the deal, the Guardian reports.
- Izabella Teixeira, the former Brazilian environment minister: "Trump's actions on the climate are worrying. Although it is still too early to be sure what his strategy is for the US, the signs so far of backsliding are a concern to anyone who was involved in the long process that lead up to the Paris agreement. We certainly could not have imagined this political picture when we signed the agreement in Paris. It is a concern because we saw a similar situation when George W Bush came to power and backed away from the Kyoto protocol."
- Erik Solheim, UN environment chief: "There is no doubt where the future is and that is what all the private sector companies have understood. The future is green. Obviously if you are not a party to the Paris agreement, you will lose out. And the main losers of course will be the people of the United States itself because all the interesting, fascinating new green jobs would go to China and to the other parts of the world that are investing heavily in this."
- Frank Bainimarama, the prime minister of Fiji: "Climate change is not a hoax. it is frighteningly real. Billions of people are losing the ability to feed themselves. Don't let the whole side down by leaving, just when we have a game plan."
- Hilda Heine, the president of the Marshall Islands: said she was "extremely disappointed to see the United States seeking to roll back its efforts to reduce emissions. My country's survival depends on every country delivering on the promises they made in Paris. Our own commitment to it will never waiver."
- Ramon Mendez, former head of Uruguay's climate policy: "I'm very worried by what is happening in the US regarding climate change. It was an extraordinarily strong shock to hear that Trump has signed a decree to revise the clean power plan. Of all of Trump's policies, this is the one with the worst consequences for the world. If an important country like the US, which has the second biggest emissions after China, doesn't abide by the Paris agreement, then the Paris agreement is broken. It will make it harder for other countries to maintain their ambitions."
"If the U.S. pulls out, it will be a pariah," said Andrew Light, a climate adviser at the World Resources Institute. "It will be on the sidelines, and that's going to hurt American businesses."
\u201cThe Paris Agreement has disappeared from the Department of Energy's climate change page https://t.co/cYbNpR4SFW\u201d— Climate Central (@Climate Central) 1494121021
\u201cUrge @IvankaTrump to fight to keep the U.S. in the Paris Climate Agreement. Add your voice: https://t.co/ZD8vCu5f20\u201d— NRDC \ud83c\udf0e\ud83c\udfe1 (@NRDC \ud83c\udf0e\ud83c\udfe1) 1494169208
\u201cSome of the kids suing Trump over climate change have already experienced its effects firsthand @youthvgov https://t.co/wqA5WrSFns\u201d— BillMoyers.com (@BillMoyers.com) 1494112800
\u201cThe @EPA just scrubbed the #ClimateChange section of its site.\nYou can scrub websites \u2013 but you can\u2019t change reality https://t.co/BIrVx3dCIi\u201d— Climate Reality (@Climate Reality) 1494133561
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350.org on World Meteorological Organization Confirming 2016 Hottest Year on Record
Jan 18, 2017
Just days before climate-denying President-elect Trump's inauguration, the World Meteorological Organization released a statement on the status of the global climate showing that 2016 was the hottest year on record. This comes as the Senate prepares for confirmation hearings of Trump's climate denial cabinet, including climate denier Scott Pruitt to head the EPA, and recent former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State.
In response to this report, 350.org Climate Impacts Programme Coordinator Aaron Packard issued the following statement:
"2016 was the year climate change took hold of the world more clearly than ever, with serious humanitarian and environmental consequences. No part of the world can now avoid the fact that climate change is striking harder and faster than many scientists predicted, and that its impacts are taking a higher toll on the most vulnerable communities. As important as marking that the record is yet again broken, we need to loudly mark what needs to be done to hold back such destruction: we need to keep fossil fuels in the ground. To make that clear, that means no new oil, coal or gas projects.
Decades of progress from scientists and engineers has made renewable energy the cheapest and cleanest source of energy in the world, creating the technological momentum that is matched by the millions of people in all parts of the world demanding climate action. Elected representatives must heed this momentum - it won't cost the earth to keep fossil fuels in the ground, but it will cost the earth if they are dug up."
Around the world, weather events such as storms, droughts, floods and wildfires are causing the loss of human lives, threatening the livelihoods of millions and the natural systems.
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Key climate impacts in 2016
In the US, NOAA declared 2016 as the second hottest year on record with 15 weather and climate disasters caused 138 deaths, $46B in damages.
Last November, WMO published a provisional statement for 2016 to inform the United Nations Climate Change conference taking place in Marrakech, Morocco (COP22). The final statement will be released in early 2017. For the first time, the assessment considers the humanitarian impact. The following impacts are highlighted in the statement:
The most serious drought affected much of southern Africa.
The Yangtze basin in China experienced, overall, its most significant flood season since 1999.
Extreme heatwaves hit South Africa, and high temperatures set new national records in Kuwait, Iran, Thailand and India.
The most damaging wildfire in Canadian history broke out near Fort McMurray, in Alberta.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that weather-related hazards triggered 14.7 million displacements in 2015, and no region of the world remained unaffected.
24 million people have been reported as being in a situation of food insecurity as a consequence of the droughts in eastern Africa
The Great Barrier Reef suffered the worst bleaching on record with 92% of coral being affected. Six months after bleaching scientists discover more than two thirds of the northern section of the Reef is dead.
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