Myanmar's army has used unfathomable levels of violence against minority Rohingya, UN investigators said Tuesday, calling for the military to be removed from politics and top generals to be prosecuted for genocide.
The UN report, which laid out in meticulous detail a vast array of violations committed by the country's powerful military, came just hours before the International Criminal Court's prosecutor announced a preliminary probe into crimes against Rohingya Muslims.
"It is hard to fathom the level of brutality of Tatmadaw operations, its total disregard for civilian life," head of the UN fact-finding mission Marzuki Darusman told the UN Human Rights Council, referring to the nation's military.
"I have decided to proceed to the next phase of the process and to carry out a full-fledged preliminary examination of the situation at hand," ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said in a statement.
Genocide
The UN team said the military's tactics had been "consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats", and said that estimates that some 10,000 people were killed in the crackdown was likely a conservative figure. It said there were reasonable grounds to believe that the atrocities were committed with the intention of destroying the stateless Rohingya, warranting the charges of "genocide".
Darusman provided excruciating details of massacres in Rohingya villages, pointing out that "the men were systematically killed. Children were shot, thrown into the river or onto a fire". Women and girls meanwhile were routinely gang-raped before being locked inside burning houses. Of those who survived, many had been severely bitten, in what appeared to be "akin to a form of branding," he said.