The UN warned that a threat of genocide hangs over 600,000 Rohingya in Myanmar and accused the Burmese army

[Inkriql]

The threat of genocide weighing over 600,000 Rohingya is clear, according to a UN investigative commission on the crimes perpetrated in the last year in Myanmar (Burma) and of which other minorities present in the country have also been their victims.

An overwhelming majority of documented crimes have been perpetrated by the Burmese Army (called "Tatmadaw") and are not confined to the brutal attacks against the Rohingya Muslim minority, but instead extend to other communities of the Rakáin ethnic group (predominantly Buddhist) to prevent them from supporting the rebel movement that has resurfaced, said in a report released on Monday by the UN commission.

"The threat of genocide continues for the remaining Rohingya" in Myanmar, it is added in the document, which will be presented on Tuesday to the Human Rights Council that is meeting in Geneva and entrusted with the mission of conducting this investigation.ç

The investigation arose after the worldwide alarm generated by the mass exodus of Rohingya between August and December 2017, as a result of attacks by the Army against their villages, which were burned, while the livelihoods were decimated and their inhabitants died for thousands.

The closure of the region that the Burmese Government has maintained has made it impossible to establish the exact number of victims of that episode, which generated a flow of 740,000 refugees to neighboring Bangladesh.

"The military operations against the Rohingya in 2017, as brutal as they were, are part of a scheme of extreme, larger and more lasting military violence," the researchers said in their report.

Therefore, the mission to determine the facts of the UN in Burma indicated that it had "reasonable grounds to conclude that the evidence that allows to deduce the intention of genocide of the State (...) was reinforced" since last year.

It is a "State responsibility", which means that Myanmar should be brought before the International Criminal Court for breach of its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention, one of the few international instruments relating to the human rights that has ratified "that country, estimated the mission.