LICENCE TO RAPE - BY THE BURMESE ARMY

As woman after woman, young and old, narrate their stories of shame– of how they were raped, not once or twice but repeatedly by the Myanmar military – to the American news agency AP, the case becomes even more convincing for UN special representative of the Secretary General Pramila Patten to put the soldiers on dock at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, as she promised here in Dhaka during her visit last month.

I was held down by six men and raped by five of them. First, they shot and killed my brother … then they threw me to the side and one man tore my lungi [sarong], grabbed me by the mouth and held me still. He stuck a knife into my side and kept it there while the men were raping me. That was how they kept me in place. … I was trying to move and [the wound] was bleeding more. They were threatening to shoot me. Told -Fatama Begum, Balukali refugee camp, Bangladesh, October 2017.

Since August 25, 2017, Burmese security forces have committed widespread rape against women and girls as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s Rakhine State.

Widespread Rape in the Ethnic Cleansing of Rohingya in Burma

Killings, rapes, arbitrary arrests, and mass arson of homes by Burmese security forces in hundreds of predominantly Rohingya villages have forced more than 600,000 Rohingya to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Rohingya women, men, and children have arrived in Bangladesh in desperate condition—hungry, exhausted, and sometimes with rape, bullet, or burn injuries. The humanitarian crisis caused by Burma’s atrocities against the Rohingya has been staggering in both scale and speed.

The Burmese military’s brutal campaign follows attacks on 30 police posts and an army base by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on the morning of August 25, 2017 in northern Rakhine State. The government reported that 11 security force personnel were killed. While the government had a duty to respond to the attacks, the Burmese military, supported by Border Police and armed ethnic Rakhine villagers, not only pursued those responsible, but immediately launched large-scale attacks against scores of Rohingya villages under the guise of counter-insurgency operations. Human Rights Watch has found that the violations committed by members of Burma’s security forces against the Rohingya population in northern Rakhine State since August 25 amount to crimes against humanity under international law.

This report is based on 52 interviews with Rohingya women and girls, including 29 survivors of rape, who fled to Bangladesh since these operations began. Rape survivors were from 19 different villages in Burma’s Rakhine State, mostly in northern Buthiduang and Maungdaw Townships. They described similarly brutal circumstances of the rapes. Human Rights Watch also spoke to 17 representatives of humanitarian organizations providing health services to women and girls in the refugee camps, including representatives of United Nations agencies and international and national nongovernmental organizations. We also interviewed two Bangladeshi government health officials.

Human Rights Watch found that Burmese security forces raped and sexually assaulted women and girls both during major attacks on villages but also in the weeks prior to these major attacks sometimes after repeated harassment. In every case described to us, the perpetrators were uniformed members of security forces, almost all military personnel. While it is difficult to estimate the numbers of rapes that occurred, humanitarian organizations working with refugees in the camps in Bangladesh have reported receiving dozens or sometimes hundreds of cases.

Horrific accounts of sexual violence against Rohingya ‘just tip of the iceberg’ – UN agency

These likely only represent a proportion of the actual number of women and girls who were raped. Some witnesses reported seeing women raped and then killed. Others do not report rape because of the deep stigma that makes survivors reluctant to seek assistance. Fear of having to pay medical fees that they cannot afford, or the lack of confidence in ever obtaining redress, also are factors. Of the survivors that Human Rights interviewed, almost two-thirds had not reported their rape to authorities or humanitarian organizations.

Only one problem, and not a small one at that, may throw the spanner in the wheel – that Myanmar is not a signatory to the Rome Statute to the International Criminal Court. The ICC can only go after those rogue states which have signed this treaty and yet have committed such crimes and are unwilling to address them.

Should the ICC now go after Myanmar, it has to get the approval of the UN Security Council, a prospect that was and is very bleak because of the continued backing of Myanmar by China and Russia.

Nevertheless, the testimonies getting wide international coverage will help embolden the international effort to get recourse at the ICC. And it will add further ammo to the efforts of the lawmakers in Washington to impose economic and travel sanctions targeting the military and its business interests.

In an article in the Guardian on November 13, Republican representative Steve Chabot and Democratic representative Joseph Cowley said it was time to expeditiously impose sanctions.

The “time” they talked about was actually long overdue.

Back in 2014, the report of the Secretary General to the Security Council had reported “incidents of sexual violence including rape” in Myanmar during 2013.

In 2002, the Shan Women's Action Network and the Shan Human Rights Foundation based in Thailand jointly released a report “Licence to Rape”. It detailed 173 incidents of rape involving 625 girls and women by the Myanmar army, 83% of these committed by officers, in most cases in front of their troops. The report drew significant international attention.

And what was Myanmar's response?

Despite Myanmar's continuing to be the kind of rogue country against whom ICC should move for the Security Council's approval for action, it had denied the allegations all along of rape as an official instrument of strategy against the Rohingyas.

Myanmar conducted an investigation in August 2002 into the “Licence to Rape” report. People of the Central and Southern Shan State were forced to sign documents testifying that no incidents of sexual violence had been committed by the army. Fake demonstrations were staged in support of their “testimony”.

RAPE AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE BY THE BURMESE-ARMY

The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar reported in September 2013 that, “with respect to abuses perpetrated in Rakhine State, including rape and other forms of sexual violence”, Myanmar did not meet its obligation to investigate and hold perpetrators to account.

And this time around, Myanmar again denied rape of the Rohingyas by its troops. In a tell-tale demonstration of its denial and falsehood, Myanmar this time said its military's internal probe interviewed 2,817 people from 54 Rohingya villages and “found” that its army did not rape or commit sexual violence against women.

The facts speak otherwise –for the Myanmar army, rape is a conventional weapon of war. It is not a by-product of conflict but a well-thought-out military strategy as had been in cases of Bosnia or in Bangladesh in 1971 or in the occupied Nanking of China in 1937 by the Japanese army.

And Myanmar's de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi cannot become amnesic now of what she had said in May 2011 at the Nobel Women's Initiative Conference: “Rape is used in my country as a weapon against those who only want to live in peace, who only want to assert their basic human rights, especially in the areas of the ethnic nationalities. Rape is rife. It is used as a weapon by the armed forces to intimidate the ethnic nationalities to divide our country”.