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Myanmar: if Security Council won’t act, other nations should step in, urges top rights expert

Horrific testimonies from civilians targeted by Myanmar’s military are yet another reason for the international community to take practical measures to halt the bloodshed, a top human rights expert said on Thursday.

“It is incredibly important for the world to give a damn,” said Tom Andrews, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar. “It is very important for the nations of the world to stop failing the people of Myanmar and act.”

Mr. Andrews, who reports to the Human Rights Council, insisted that the military continued to bomb civilians, in an attempt to subdue opposition to their de facto rule.

He described how the junta’s military forces had attacked a school in Sagaing region last Friday, killing at least 13, including 11 children; the coordinated attack from the air and ground had ended with soldiers picking up children’s bodyparts and taking them away, the Special Rapporteur said.

“A school in a monastery, two helicopter gunships, foreign-made, foreign-provided swooping in on this school while soldiers entered the grounds with automatic weapons firing away; children terrified, running, looking for cover. Eleven of them at least killed, literally blown up, and the story of a young boy whose arm had been blown off screaming to mother to kill him because the pain was so great.”

The Special Rapporteur, who works in an independent capacity, told journalists in Geneva that since a coup by the country’s military last February, the generals in charge had been “holding a nation of 54 million people hostage. I think the best way to think of them is not as any kind of governmental entity but as a criminal gang that has literally taken over a country and are holding its leaders and its people hostage.”

In the absence of unified condemnation of the coup in the UN Security Council and the establishment of targeted economic sanctions, an arms embargo and a request for an international criminal inquiry, Mr. Andrews called for a “coalition of likeminded countries” to take action. “If it can’t be done by the Security Council, then it must be done by those nations who were speaking yesterday and will speak today in support of the people of Myanmar”, he said, in reference to the great gathering of world leaders attending the UN General Assembly in New York this week.

Without action, the situation risked spiralling out of control, the Special Rapporteur warned, noting that South-East Asian nations including China would be hardest-hit, in the first instance.

“I can see a major, major flow of refugees out of that country if the trajectory that we’re on right now continues,” he said.

Ahead of elections planned next year in Myanmar, Mr. Andrews urged countries not to give a “veneer of legitimacy” to them.

Among the war crimes and crimes against humanity that the Myanmar military was committing on a daily basis, the top rights expert listed sexual violence, torture and murder – including the execution of four opposition advocates in July. “They included a former parliamentarian and a prominent, pro-democracy activist,” the Special Rapporteur told the Human Rights Council on Wednesday.

“This is not an election, and to call it an election is to participate in a great wrongdoing of the people of Myanmar,” he said. “If the fundamentals of a free and fair election – the opportunity for people to have a choice, a voice in their future, it’s impossible if you’ve locked up and are killing the opposition”

ends

HRC Myanmar Presser - Tom Andrews 22 SEPTEMBER 2022

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