by Al Jazeera

Amnesty International has said it has strong evidence that the Myanmar army committed crimes against humanity in northern Rakhine State.

A new report published by the global rights group on Wednesday detailed mass killings, rape, torture and forcible transfers of Rohingya Muslims in the army’s ongoing campaign against fighters from the persecuted minority.

Amnesty has called for the UN Security Council to impose an arms embargo on Myanmar and set targeted sanctions against senior officials.

The report said hundreds of thousands of Rohingya men, women and children have been “the victims of a widespread and systematic attack”, and that “Myanmar’s security forces unleashed an attack against the Rohingya population in its entirety.”

The army’s Western Command was responsible for some of the worst violations, it said.

The Amnesty report, based on about 150 witness accounts, satellite data, and photo and video evidence, is the most detailed and comprehensive analysis to date since Rohingya refugees began pouring into Bangladesh in late August.

Efforts to reach the Myanmar government were unsuccessful.

Officials have previously denied any systematic violence against the Rohingya, who they consider as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.

Laura Haigh, Amnesty’s Myanmar researcher, said the crimes they documented were similar to the army’s abuses against other ethnic minorities in Myanmar, including the Kachin, Shan and the Palaung.

“There are common threads here: A military that is completely unaccountable, often out of control, and impunity that breeds further impunity,” she said.

“And it’s time for that to stop.”

The violence in Buddhist-majority Rakhine erupted after an armed group known as the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) attacked at least 30 security posts on August 25.

An estimated 582,000 refugees have now fled Myanmar and thousands more are continuing to make the perilous journey on foot to the country’s border with Bangladesh, the UN said on Tuesday.

Page after page in the Amnesty report, entitled “My World Is Finished”, provide detailed testimonies of widespread killings, rapes, and burning of entire villages.

‘Burned all over’
In one account, a 30-year-old woman from the village of Min Gyi, also known as Tula Toli, said soldiers killed scores of men and older boys, raped the women, torched Rohingya homes, and burned people, including children, to death.

“They [the soldiers] first hit us in the head, to make us weak … Then, they raped us,” she said.

Soldiers then set fire to the house she was assaulted in, but she said she managed to escape after her seven-year-old daughter found a weak point in the hut’s bamboo siding.

“I was burned all over,” she told Amnesty. “The flame was so hot. When I ran, the fire was still on me. The clothes we wore, they were all burned.”

The pattern was similar in dozens of villages across Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathetaung townships, the report said.

The Myanmar army killed at least hundreds of Rohingya women, men, and children in the hours and days since the ARSA attacks in August, it says. Many people were shot as they ran away.

The elderly and disabled were often unable to flee and were killed or burned in their homes.

Mohamed Zubair, 26, told Amnesty he left his 90-year-old grandmother in their home when the military opened fire on his village, Chut Pyin, in Rathetaung.

“I asked her to follow us to the hill. She said, ‘I’m old, they won’t do anything to me. Go,'” Zubair said.

In hiding, he watched as soldiers torched his village, including the house where he had left his grandmother.

When the military left, he found his grandmother dead, her body “burnt very seriously”.

More than a dozen other witnesses from Chut Pyin also described seeing soldiers, border guards and local vigilantes deliberately burn down Rohingya parts of the village, and leave the non-Rohingya areas intact, the report said.

The accounts of targeted burning were backed by satellite imagery.

“I was burned all over … The flame was so hot. When I ran, the fire was still on me.”
ROHINGYA RAPE SURVIVOR
Amnesty said the killing of the elderly, disabled and children demonstrated the military’s campaign “has been far from a ‘clearance operation’ in the sense of being designed to root out ARSA members.

“Instead, it has been an attack on the Rohingya population as a whole, with the seeming objective to ‘cleanse’ Rakhine state of that entire population”.

Amnesty said its investigations into the responsibility of specific units and individuals were ongoing, but testimony indicates that a unit led by Major-General Maung Maung Soe was disproportionately involved in some of the worst crimes.

Witnesses consistently described a patch on soldiers’ uniforms that match the one worn by Western Command, the report said.

Amnesty said it is also investigating claims that ARSA fighters killed Hindu men and women, and burned ethnic Rakhine villages.

Haigh, the researcher, said Amnesty wants to see the UN General Assembly adopt “a strong resolution on Myanmar” as a first step to end the violence.

“We’d like to see a strengthened call for a global arms embargo, in addition to targeted sanctions on specific senior military officials who are responsible for crimes,” she said.

Myanmar must also allow unfettered access to UN investigators, she said.

Myanmar has strongly denied allegations of human rights abuses.

On Monday, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of Myanmar’s army told UN officials that soldiers acted lawfully in their response to attacks by ARSA.

On his official Facebook page, Min Aung Hlaing said UN comments on Rakhine, which include allegations of ethnic cleansing, were “totally contrary to the situation on the ground”.

London: The “unique” and “extraordinary” novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” by noted American short story writer George Saunders that tells the story of Abraham Lincoln’s grief after the death of his young son has been declared as the winner of 2017 Man Booker Prize for Fiction.

Saunders’ win was announced by Lola Baroness Young, the chair of the judging committee, at a dinner at London’s Guildhall late on Tuesday night. He was presented with a trophy by the Duchess of Cornwall and a 50,000 pounds cheque by Luke Ellis, Chief Executive of the Man Group. Saunders also received a designer-bound edition of his book and a further 2,500 pounds for being shortlisted.

“The form and style of this utterly original novel reveals a witty, intelligent and deeply moving narrative. This tale of the haunting and haunted souls in the afterlife of Abraham Lincoln’s young son paradoxically creates a vivid and lively evocation of the characters that populate this other world. Lincoln in the Bardo is both rooted in, and plays with history, and explores the meaning and experience of empathy,” commented Young.

Her fellow judges this year were writer and critic Lila Azam Zanganeh, novelist and poet Sarah Hall, artist and author Tom Phillips and travel writer and novelist Colin Thubron.

Saunders thanked his wife, Paula, referring to her as his “precious friend and artistic hero” for supporting him to achieve the “wonderful honour”.

“If you haven’t noticed, we live in a strange time. So the question at the heart of the matter is pretty simple: Do we respond to fear with exclusion and negative projection and violence? Or do we take that ancient great leap of faith and do our best to respond with love? And with faith in the idea that what seems other is actually not other at all, but just us on a different day.

“In the US we’re hearing a lot about the need to protect culture. Well this tonight is culture, it is international culture, it is compassionate culture, it is activist culture. It is a room full of believers in the word, in beauty and ambiguity and in trying to see the other person’s point of view, even when that is hard,” Saunders said on receiving the prize.

The 58-year-old New York resident, born in Texas, is only the second American author to win the prize in its 49-year history. He was in contention for the prize with two British, one British-Pakistani and two American writers.

The novel is published by Bloomsbury, making it the third consecutive year the prize has been won by an independent publisher, following Oneworld Publications’ success in 2015 with Marlon James and 2016 with Paul Beatty. Bloomsbury has won the prize thrice before, with Howard Jacobson (2010), Margaret Atwood (2000) and Michael Ondaatje (1992).

The widely-read novel, which has now thrust Saunders into the limelight, focuses on a single night in the life of Abraham Lincoln: an actual moment in 1862 when the body of his 11-year-old son was laid to rest in a Washington cemetery. Strangely and brilliantly, Saunders activates this graveyard with the spirits of its dead.

The judges considered 144 submissions for this year’s prize. The books losing out on the prize were “4321” by Paul Auster (US), “Elmet” by Fiona Mozley (UK), “Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid (UK-Pakistan), “History of Wolves” by Emily Fridlund (US) and “Autumn” by Ali Smith (UK).

(IANS)

Valletta: A journalist who led the Panama Papers probe into corruption in Malta was killed on Monday in a car bomb near her residence, the media reported.

Daphne Caruana Galizia died on Monday when her car, a Peugeot 108, was destroyed by a powerful explosive device, reports the Guardian.

A blogger whose posts often attracted more readers than the combined circulation of the country’s newspapers, Caruana Galizia was recently described by the American news outlet Politico as a “one-woman WikiLeaks”.

Her latest revelations accused Malta’s Prime Minister Joseph Muscat and two of his closest aides, connecting offshore companies linked to the three men with the sale of Maltese passports and payments from the government of Azerbaijan.

No group or individual claimed responsibility for the attack, the Guardian reported.

Malta’s President Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca, called for calm. “In these moments, when the country is shocked by such a vicious attack, I call on everyone to measure their words, to not pass judgement and to show solidarity.”

In a statement, Muscat condemned the “barbaric attack”.

“Everyone knows Caruana Galizia was a harsh critic of mine,” said Muscat, adding “Both politically and personally, but nobody can justify this barbaric act in any way.”

He announced in parliament later on Monday that Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) officers were on their way to Malta to assist with the investigation, following his request for help from the US government.

According to local media reports, Caruana Galizia filed a police report 15 days ago to say that she had been receiving death threats.

The journalist posted her final blog on her Running Commentary website at 2.35 p.m. on Monday, and the explosion, which occurred near her home, was reported to police just after 3 p.m.

Over the last two years, her reporting had largely focused on revelations from the Panama Papers, a cache of 11.5 million documents leaked from the internal database of the world’s fourth largest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca.

(IANS)