The UN’s rights office reported on Tuesday that as Myanmar’s military has struggled to eradicate opposition to its coup, it has increased its use of mass murders, air and artillery bombardment, and air and ground assaults.
The military is currently engaged in conflict with opponents over large areas of the country after overthrowing Aung San Suu Kyi’s administration in 2021.
In its most recent report on Myanmar, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) stated that it had discovered a “seemingly endless spiral of military violence” between April 2022 and July 2023.
Through interviews and open source data, it had found “a sharp rise” in serious human rights violations “including the increase… of incidents in which 10 or more individuals were killed”.
Investigators had now documented 22 instances of mass killings of 10 or more people, according to rights chief Volker Turk.
The OHCHR cited an air strike on a gathering in a village in an opposition stronghold last April it said killed about 150 people, and the bombing last October of a rebel-held concert in northern Kachin state that killed dozens.
According to the OHCHR, soldiers frequently committed rapes and extrajudicial executions of men, women, and children in communities where they were thought to be harboring or aiding anti-coup rebels.
According to the OHCHR, some forces had displayed “beheaded or otherwise defiled corpses” to scare locals, corroborating reports from the local media and a war monitoring organization.
Additionally, it claimed that Junta troops had set nearly 24,000 homes and buildings on fire since the start of 2023 as part of a “four cuts” tactic to cut off its adversaries’ access to food, money, intelligence, and recruitment.
The junta has in the past refuted media claims and eyewitness testimonies that its soldiers had set communities on fire, blaming the fires on “terrorists” opposed to the coup.
More than 24,000 people have been arrested during the military’s sweeping crackdown on dissent, according to a local monitoring group. According to the OHCHR, “reports of torture, sexual violence, and deaths in prisons or during prison transfers” were frequently received.
According to the OHCHR, anti-coup rebels had also killed citizens associated with the junta intentionally in order to violate their rights.
However, it stated that “their scale and intensity cannot be compared to the violations committed by the military”.
The military’s refusal to negotiate with its adversaries has hampered diplomatic efforts to end the war being led by the UN and the regional bloc of ASEAN.
