The International Criminal Court, or ICC, issued an application for an arrest warrant on Wednesday for Myanmar’s army chief who now heads its junta, in connection with violence against the mostly Muslim Rohingya minority in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state in 2017, its prosecutor said.
Myanmar’s military conducted a sweeping crackdown on Rohingya communities in 2017 after Rohingya militants attacked police posts on the border with Bangladesh.
Thousands of people were killed when the military cleared and burned Rohingya communities. The violent campaign forced more than 740,000 people to flee to Bangladesh.
The United States and other counties said the attacks by Myanmar’s military against Rohingya civilians was genocide. U.N. investigators concluded that the military campaign had been executed with “genocidal intent”.
“After an extensive, independent and impartial investigation, my office has concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe that Senior General and Acting President Min Aung Hlaing, Commander-in-Chief of the Myanmar Defence Services, bears criminal responsibility for the crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of the Rohingya,” ICC prosecutor Karim Khan said in a statement.
“My Office alleges that these crimes were committed between 25 August 2017 and 31 December 2017 by the armed forces of Myanmar, the Tatmadaw, supported by the national police, the border guard police, as well as non-Rohingya civilians.”
Radio Free Asia was not immediately able to contact Myanmar’s military for comment.
In 2022, the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, rejected all of Myanmar’s objections to a case brought against it by Gambia that accuses it of genocide against the Rohingya minority.
Myanmar’s military regime had lodged four preliminary objections claiming the Hague-based court does not have jurisdiction and that the West African country of Gambia did not have the standing to bring the case over mass killing and forced expulsions of Rohingya in 2016 and 2017.
The ICC seeks to establish individual criminal responsibility for international crimes. The ICJ is concerned with state responsibility.
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Myanmar’s military and the then government, led by democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi, defended the 2017 crackdown in Rakhine state as a legitimate response to attacks by insurgents on security forces.
Suu Kyi and her government were ousted in a February 2021 coup by Min Aung Hlaing.
She and hundreds of pro-democracy colleagues and supporters are in prison, while war between anti-junta forces and the military has spread across large parts of the country, including Rakhine state, where Rohingya have again been subjected to violent attacks.
Edited by Taejun Kang and Kiana Duncan.