They’ve watched as their villages were razed and their loved ones were murdered -- but the atrocities do not end there. According to a shocking new report by Human Rights Watch, Myanmar’s “security forces have committed widespread rape against women and girls as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims.”
The report, which is based on interviews with 29 rape survivors, describes the sexual assaults in horrific detail.
“In every case described to us, the perpetrators were uniformed members of security forces, almost all military personnel,” the report says. “These likely only represent a proportion of the actual number of women and girls who were raped.”
“The vast majority of the women and girls that I spoke to were gang raped,” Skye Wheeler, a Human Rights Watch researcher, adds in a video. “Sometimes by as many as nine or ten perpetrators and in all of the cases that I documented, there were many soldiers involved.”
In one interview, Fatama Begum, 33, described such a gang assault.
“(One man) grabbed me by the mouth and held me still,” she told Human Rights Watch from a refugee camp in Bangladesh. “He stuck a knife into my side and kept it there while the (five) men were raping me. That was how they kept me in place.”
Myanmar has categorically denied that such atrocities have been committed by its security personnel. One Myanmar lawmaker has even refuted such claims by saying that Rohingya women are too “dirty” for its soldiers to rape.
Human Rights Watch is calling on the international community to impose individual sanctions on Myanmar’s military leaders, including asset freezes and travel plans.
Since August, more than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled targeted violence in Myanmar for the relative safety of neighbouring Bangladesh.
With a report from CTV News’ Daniele Hamamdjian
