This photo taken on August 10, 2024 shows a burnt-out building in Lashio in Myanmar’s northern Shan State, following fighting between Myanmar’s military and Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) in the region.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by the Myanmar military have “escalated at an alarming rate”, U.N. investigators warned on Tuesday (August 13, 2024), citing systematic torture, gang rape and abuses against children.

The United Nations’ Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) said that in the last six months, more than three million people are estimated to have been forced to flee their homes, as conflict spirals within the country.

“We have collected substantial evidence showing horrific levels of brutality and inhumanity across Myanmar,” said IIMM chief Nicholas Koumjian.

“Many crimes have been committed with an intent to punish and induce terror in the civilian population.”

In its annual report, covering July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024, the IIMM said the conflict in Myanmar had “escalated substantially” in that time, “with reports of more frequent and brutal crimes committed across the country”.

The investigators said they had collected significant evidence of more intensive and violent war crimes, including aerial attacks on schools, religious buildings and hospitals, with no apparent military target.

They also cited physical mutilations against detainees, including beheadings and public displays of disfigured and sexually mutilated bodies.

The investigators are looking into unlawful imprisonment, including arbitrary detention and “manifestly unfair trials” of perceived opponents of the military junta.

“Thousands of people have been arrested and many tortured or killed in detention,” the IIMM said.

Rape and burnings

Myanmar’s ruling junta came to power in the February 2021 coup that ousted Aung San Suu Kyi’s elected government, ending a 10-year experiment with democracy and plunging the Southeast Asian nation into bloody turmoil.

The junta is struggling to crush resistance to its rule by long-established ethnic rebel groups and newer pro-democracy forces.

In suppressing post-coup dissent, the report said there was “abundant evidence of systematic torture” in detention.

Torture methods included beatings with bamboo sticks; electric shocks; pulling out fingernails with pliers; dousing detainees in petrol and setting them alight; waterboarding; strangulation; breaking fingers; and forcing detainees to punch each other.

The report said there was reliable evidence of sexual crimes in detention committed against all genders, and including children. These crimes included rape, burning of sexual body parts with cigarettes and sexual humiliation.

Mounting evidence against perpetrators

The IIMM was established by the UN Human Rights Council in 2018 to collect evidence of the most serious international crimes and prepare files for criminal prosecution.

The report’s findings were based on almost 28 million items of information collected from more than 900 sources. The team also studied evidence such as videos, geospatial imagery and forensics.

While most of the information concerns crimes allegedly committed by the Myanmar security forces, the monitor said there was also credible evidence of crimes committed by armed groups fighting against the military.

“This includes summary executions of civilians suspected of being military informers or collaborators,” the investigators said.

It is also probing potential crimes committed against the Rohingya during the Myanmar military’s 2016 and 2017 clearance operations.

“No one has been held accountable for any crimes, which emboldens perpetrators and deepens the culture of impunity in the country. We are trying to break this cycle,” said Koumjian.

He claimed the IIMM had made considerable progress in building criminal cases against those most responsible.

“The mechanism hopes that the evidence it collects will one day be presented in a court of law and that those responsible will face justice,” the report concluded.

Gutted buildings, vacant windows and blocks bombed to rubble show the price paid by the western Myanmar town of Pauktaw for victory against the junta in the country’s civil war.

Fighters from the Arakan Army (AA) ethnic minority armed group took control of the fishing port of 20,000 people in January, as the conflict sparked by the military’s coup entered its fourth year.

Pauktaw was one of a string of losses suffered by the junta across the country at the time, leading many to hope its decades-long stranglehold over Myanmar’s politics could be broken.

Four months later, the Arakan Army remains in control but Pauktaw is mostly empty of residents, who are living on the outskirts and fearful of a repeat of the junta’s heavy artillery attacks on the town.

“We are frightened of them (the military),” one man told AFP from his temporary home just outside Pauktaw, asking for anonymity for security reasons.

“We don’t know what will happen or what kind of weapon they will drop on us if we go and stay back at home in the town.

“We can’t detect their air strikes or bombs and we will be killed if they attack.”

Video taken by locals this month and obtained exclusively by AFP shows streets silent apart from birdsong and the sounds of AA soldiers sifting through piles of debris and sheets of corrugated iron.

Near a deserted market that once bustled with vendors buying and selling crabs and tiger shrimp, a ragged awning advertising a mobile phone carrier flutters above the doorway of a gutted shop.

Phone and internet services have been all but cut off.

No chance

The AA has fought an on-off war for years against the Myanmar military, seeking more autonomy for the state’s ethnic Rakhine population.

As the army has faced growing resistance to its rule, from multiple armed groups — some new, some long-established — the AA has stepped up its campaign.

As the junta has lost territory on the ground, it is increasingly calling on its air power to support its ground troops.

Rights groups accuse the junta of using the strikes to punish communities suspected of opposing its rule.

When a military helicopter hovered over Pauktaw and began shooting into the town last November, many fled in panic.

“There was no chance for us to take a single thing from our house,” one woman now living outside the town told AFP.

“We had cooked a pot of rice and we were not able to eat it,” she said, also asking for anonymity.

“We had no money when we fled. We only had some gold jewellery with us. We tried to pawn that but it wasn’t easy. The interest was too high.”

The fate of Pauktaw’s residents reflects a nationwide tragedy. Across Myanmar, around 2.7 million have been forced to flee by the civil war.

Looting

The AA has not allowed residents to live back in Pauktaw, citing the danger of more air or artillery strikes on the town, although it does allow them to come and go to pick up items.

The man who spoke to AFP said he had returned to check on his house and found it partly in ruins, with the family statue of the Buddha fallen onto the floor.

His savings box — containing money for a Buddhist ritual for his children and for timber to repair a roof damaged by a cyclone last year — was gone, he said.

“I have lost all of that money,” he said.

“Everything in our house got stolen… my father’s fishing nets were stolen,” another woman said, also requesting anonymity.

“I am a tailor, and luckily, I managed to save my sewing machines.”

During the fighting, both sides looted houses and damaged buildings, according to local reports.

In March, the AA said it would “investigate” any reports of looting by its members during the fighting.

‘Decisive battle’

The AA’s offensive has seized swathes of territory in Rakhine state and along the border with India and Bangladesh.

It has said it will capture the state capital Sittwe, 25 kilometres from Pauktaw and the last major town in northern Rakhine in the military’s hands.

In April, the AA warned residents of the town, which is home to an India-backed deep sea port, to leave ahead of a “decisive” battle.

Sittwe residents contacted by AFP said the military was restricting travel out of the town by road and river and the prices of basic foods such as rice and eggs had doubled.

Those already displaced from Pauktaw fear further fighting nearby.

“I am sad that we have fled our own house and we can’t live in it,” one resident told AFP.

“I have pawned my necklace for 18 lakhs ($850) so we have money to live. I still hope I can claim it back.”

Others said they wanted payback.

“I haven’t joined the Arakan Army because I am worried about who will look after my child,” one woman said.

“If I wasn’t… I would join them and fight back. I will be satisfied only if I can take revenge.”