NEW YORK, June 26 (Reuters): Senior Myanmar military officials, including the commanders of its defense services and army, should face trial for crimes against humanity over the treatment of Rohingya minorities, Amnesty International (AI) said in a report on Tuesday.
Amnesty called for the United Nations Security Council to refer the report's findings to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and impose a "comprehensive arms embargo" on the Southeast Asian country and financial sanctions against senior officials.
Contacted late on Tuesday, neither the Russian delegation to the United Nations, currently presiding over the UN Security Council, nor the Myanmar Mission to the United Nations were available for comment.
A spokesman for the Myanmar government also was not available for comment.
About 700,000 mostly Muslim Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh from largely Buddhist Myanmar since a military crackdown last August that the United Nations has called a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing."
A separate Reuters special report https://reut.rs/2yLzrsV on Tuesday gave a comprehensive account of the roles played by two light infantry divisions in the offensive against the Rohingya.
Amnesty, which began its investigation in September, said in its report that the "military-led operations ... amounted to an orchestrated campaign of murder, rape, torture, and destruction aimed at punishing the Rohingya population in northern Rakhine State and at driving them out of the country."
It named Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, the commander of Myanmar's Defense Services, and his deputy and commander of the army, Vice Senior General Soe Win, and commanders of specific units that "committed many of the worst atrocities."
The report also named eight other military members and three members of the Border Guard Police.
Amnesty said these people should face justice "for their command responsibility, their direct responsibility, or both." A spokesman for the Myanmar military was not available for comment.
In Myanmar, Rohingya are widely called "Bengali," which they see as a derogatory term implying they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Despite many Rohingya tracing their roots in Myanmar back generations, they have been denied citizenship.
Amnesty called on Myanmar to halt restrictions on freedom of movement and restore citizenship to the Rohingya. In February, Reuters reported on the killing of 10 Rohingya men and boys by Rakhine Buddhists and security forces in the village of Inn Din.
Two Reuters journalists were jailed in December in Myanmar while reporting that story and remain in prison in Yangon, facing up to 14 years behind bars for allegedly violating Myanmar's Official Secrets Act.
Meanwhile, a senior Myanmar official has told Western diplomats that a proposal to review a citizenship law that effectively renders most Rohingya Muslims stateless could not be implemented, five people present at the meeting in Denmark in early June told Reuters.
At a meeting in Copenhagen on June 08, Myanmar's Social Welfare Minister Win Myat Aye told a group of diplomats, analysts and members of a commission chaired by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan that eight of its recommendations - including one that asks authorities to take steps to amend the 1982 law - were problematic in the current political climate and could not be immediately fulfilled, the people present said.
"He made it very clear that citizenship reform was a non-starter," said one of the people at the meeting.
Amending the law, which largely restricts citizenship to members of what it terms "national races" - the 135 ethnic groups deemed by the state to be indigenous - was a key recommendation of the Annan commission.
The admission by Win Myat Aye, who is overseeing plans for reconstruction in violence-ravaged Rakhine state, casts further doubt on plans to repatriate the roughly 700,000 Rohingya currently sheltering in crowded refugee camps in Bangladesh.
Many Rohingya refugee leaders say they won't return without guarantees of citizenship.
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