Soldiers serve less than a year of 10-year term for killing Rohingya
Justice Not Serve For
Killing Muslim in Myanmar
28 May 2019
Soldiers serve less than a year of 10-year term for killing Rohingya
YANGON:
Myanmar has granted early release to seven soldiers jailed for the killing of
10 Rohingya Muslim men and boys during a 2017 military crackdown in the western
state of Rakhine, two prison officials, two former fellow inmates and one of
the soldiers said.
Unfair treatment: Rohingya men with
their hands bound are made to kneel as members of the Myanmar security forces
stand guard in Inn Din village in this 2017 file picture. — Reuters
The soldiers were freed in November last year, the two inmates said, meaning they served less than one year of their 10-year prison terms for the killings at Inn Din village.
They also served less jail time than two Reuters
reporters who uncovered the killings.
The journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, spent more
than 16 months behind bars on charges of obtaining state secrets.
The two were released in an amnesty on May 6.
Win Naing, the chief warden at Rakhine’s Sittwe
Prison, and a senior prison official in the capital Naypyidaw confirmed that
the convicted soldiers had not been in prison for some months.
“Their punishment was reduced by the military,” said
the senior Naypyidaw official, who declined to be named.
Both prison officials declined to provide further
details and said they did not know the exact date of the release, which was not
announced publicly.
Military spokesmen Zaw Min Tun and Tun Tun Nyi
declined to comment.
The seven soldiers were the only security personnel
the military has said it has punished over the 2017 operation in Rakhine, which
drove more than 730,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee to Bangladesh.
UN investigators said the crackdown was executed with
“genocidal intent” and included mass killings, gang rapes and widespread arson.
Myanmar denies widespread wrongdoing and officials
have pointed to the jailing of the seven soldiers in the Inn Din case as
evidence Myanmar security forces do not enjoy impunity.
“I would say that we took action against every case we
could investigate,” the military’s commander in chief, Senior General Min Aung
Hlaing, told officials from the UN Security Council in April last year,
according to an account posted on his personal website.
The army chief cited the Inn Din case specifically.
“The latest crime we punished was a killing, and ten years’ imprisonment was
given to seven perpetrators,” he said. “We will not forgive anyone if they
commit (a) crime.”
Reached by phone on Thursday, a man named Zin Paing
Soe confirmed that he was one of the seven soldiers and that he was now free,
but declined to comment further. “We were told to shut up,” he said.
The 2017 campaign was launched across hundreds of
villages in northern Rakhine in response to attacks by Rohingya insurgents.
Reuters exposed the killings in a report published in
February 2018.
Troops from the 33rd Light Infantry Division, a mobile
force known for its brutal counter-insurgency campaigns, worked with members of
a paramilitary police force and Buddhist vigilantes to drive out the entire
Muslim population of Inn Din, burning and looting Rohingya homes and property,
according to Buddhist and Muslim villagers and members of the security forces.
On Sept 1, 2017, soldiers and some villagers detained
a group of 10 Rohingya.
The military said the men were “terrorists”; their
family members said they were farmers, high school students and an Islamic
teacher.
The next morning, witnesses said, villagers hacked
some of the Rohingya men with swords.
The rest were shot by Myanmar troops and buried in a
shallow grave.
The two Reuters reporters discovered the grave and
obtained pictures of the 10 men before and after they were killed.
The journalists were arrested in December 2017 while
investigating the killings and later sentenced to seven years in prison under
the Official Secrets Act.
Defence lawyers argued their arrest and prosecution
were aimed at blocking their reporting, and one police officer testified that a
senior police official had ordered that the reporters be set up and arrested. —
Reuters
.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.