Two Myanmar soldiers have confessed to have taken part in the indiscriminate mass killing and rape of Rohingya Muslims in 2017.
The video confessions are said to correspond with individual accounts given by survivors of the alleged atrocities.
The footage of the military deserters represents the first admission by members of Myanmar’s army that launched a violent and brutal campaign against the Muslim minority group in the country’s western Rakhine State.
The United Nations and human rights organisations have previously described the government-sponsored crackdown as having the “hallmarks of genocide.”
Private Myo Win Tun and Private Zaw Naing Tun’s video confessions were filmed in July by the Arakan Army, a rebel group currently fighting the Myanmar military.
It was released by the non-government organisation Fortify Rights, which says it has analyzed the footage and found it to be credible.
“We destroyed the Muslim villages near Taung Bazar village. We implemented the clearance operations in the night-time as per the command to ‘shoot all that you see and that you hear.’ We buried a total number of 30 dead bodies in one grave,” said Myo Win Tun in his video statement.
The two soldiers are believed to now be in the Hague at the International Criminal Court where an investigation into the Rohingya crisis is underway.
There have been reports of a campaign of mass violence by Myanmar’s military in the country’s Western Rakhine state from 2016, specifically targeting the Muslim minority Rohingya.
More than 740,000 Rohingya refugees fled into Bangladesh, bringing with them allegations of indiscriminate killing, rape and property destruction.
The Myanmar government, led by former human rights campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi, has denied the allegations, telling the International Court of Justice in December 2019 that the claims were incomplete and misleading.
But a UN fact-finding commission described the violence against the Rohingya as “genocide.” Doctors Without Borders has estimated that at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed within the first month of the campaign alone, including 730 children under the age of 5.
Myanmar considers the one million or so Rohingya as illegal immigrants from neighboring Bangladesh, despite the fact that many Rohingya families have lived in Rakhine state for generations.
