Min Aung Hlaing accused of crimes against humanity over deportation and persecution of Rohingya minority
The Guardian
The chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) is seeking an arrest warrant for Myanmar’s military leader, Min Aung Hlaing, for crimes against humanity over the deadly crackdowns against the country’s Rohingya minority that drove hundreds of thousands to flee to Bangladesh.
Karim Khan said that “after an extensive, independent and impartial investigation” his office had concluded there were reasonable grounds to believe that the Myanmar junta chief “bears criminal responsibility for the crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of the Rohingya committed in Myanmar and in part in Bangladesh”.
A panel of three ICC judges must now rule on the prosecutor’s request. More applications for arrest warrants will follow, the prosecutor’s office said.
Tun Khin, a prominent Rohingya activist and the president of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK, welcomed the news as “huge step forward in the quest for justice”.
In 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya were forced to flee their homes in Rakhine state and cross over the border to Bangladesh after an operation by the Myanmar military that UN investigators said was carried out with “genocidal intent”.
Rohingya who fled across the border gave harrowing testimonies of mass rape, murder, and of torched homes. The events shocked the world, and for the past five years the ICC prosecutor’s office has been investigating the waves of violence that occurred during 2016 and 2017. Myanmar has denied accusations of genocide.
At the time of the killings, the western-backed politician Aung San Suu Kyi was Myanmar’s democratically elected de facto leader. She was accused by rights groups of standing by while the army committed massacres. Her supporters claimed, however, that Myanmar’s most famous politician was unable to stand up to the military.
Read More
