Special Rapporteur Tom Andrews says the people of Myanmar are increasingly frustrated with an international community that they feel has let them down.
Tom Andrews, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, said conditions for Myanmar’s 54 million people have gone from “bad to worse to appalling” since the military seized power last year.
Speaking to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Andrews said the international response to the crisis caused by the February 2021 coup had “failed” and that the Myanmar military was also campaigning against committing war crimes and crimes against humanity, including sexual violence and torture civilians and murder.
Andrews addressed the council on Wednesday, a day after it was revealed that at least 11 children had been killed in a helicopter attack on a school in north Sagaing where the armed forces claimed anti-coup militants were hiding.
Myanmar was thrown into crisis when Senior General Min Aung Hlaing arrested re-elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and took power on the day of the new parliament’s session.
People took to the streets in mass protests, starting a nationwide civil disobedience movement, to which the military responded with violence and prompted some civilians to take up arms. More than 2,300 people have been killed and thousands arrested since the coup, according to the Political Prisoners Relief Association, a civil society group monitoring the situation.
Andrews told the Human Rights Council that 295 children were among those detained, while at least 84 political prisoners were on death row.
The military caused outrage in July when it hanged four pro-democracy activists, including a prominent former member of Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, in the first use of the death penalty since the late 1980s.
Senior General Min Aung Hlaing secured a coveted meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Vladivostok earlier this month [File: Valery Sharifulin/Sputnik via AFP]
Earlier this week, the head of the UN team investigating human rights abuses in Myanmar also spoke to the Human Rights Council, telling member states that the scope and scale of alleged international crimes in Myanmar had “increased dramatically”.
Nicholas Koumjian of the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) told the council that the post-coup incidents are now also a “key focus” of its investigation.
Western sanctions have hit high-ranking generals and those linked to the military, as have some of the military’s own companies, while some international companies have pulled out of the country.
In response, the generals have deepened ties with Russia, which has also been isolated over its invasion of Ukraine.
Given the situation, Andrews said the international community must “take stronger and more effective action to deprive the junta and its forces of revenue, arms and legitimacy.”
The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which admitted Myanmar as a member in 1997, has led diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis, but the generals have ignored the five-point consensus agreed in April 2021.
As a result, ASEAN has excluded military appointments from its annual summit, but earlier this week Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah said the group needs to consider whether more needs to be done and whether the consensus should be “replaced with something better”.
Saifuddin has also argued that ASEAN should work with the Government of National Unity (NUG), which was installed by elected officials who have been pushed out of power, prompting an angry rebuke from the Myanmar military.