Rohingya Face ‘Campaign of Terror’ in Myanmar, U.N. Finds

GENEVA — Members of Myanmar’s Army and the police have slaughtered hundreds of men, women and children, gang-raped women and girls, and forced as many as 90,000 Rohingya Muslims from their homes, according to a United Nations report released on Friday.

The report, the world body’s first official account of a four-month government crackdown on ethnic Rohingya in Myanmar, said the actions of members of the army and the police “very likely” were crimes against humanity.

“The gravity and scale of these allegations begs the robust reaction of the international community,” said Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, whose office released the 50-page report.

Mr. al-Hussein demanded that the government halt the security forces’ counterinsurgency operations in Rakhine, a state on the western coast, which began in October, and he said he delivered that message to Myanmar’s leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, by telephone on Friday.

“I impressed on her that she is an individual of high moral standing in the international community and she must use that and every means at her disposal to exert pressure on the military to end this operation,” he said in an interview. “I hope this is exactly what she will do now.”

Myanmar’s government has repeatedly rejected accusations, from human rights groups and others, that the military has systematically abused members of the Rohingya ethnic group, a long-persecuted minority in the country, and resisted calls for an international investigation.

In their telephone conversation, Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi “seemed to be genuinely moved by what she had read,” Mr. al-Hussein said. “There was no defensiveness. There was no denial.”

Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi said the government needed more information, he added, and, in an apparent shift from the government’s previous public position, she asked for help from the United Nations in learning more, Mr. al-Hussein said.

On Friday, the presidential spokesman U Zaw Htay said the government was taking the allegations in the report seriously and announced that an existing commission led by Vice President U Myint Swe would investigate.

“Where there is clear evidence of abuses and violations, we will take all necessary action,” Mr. Htay said, according to Reuters.

Mr. al-Hussein was skeptical of the commission, and he said an independent inquiry would be necessary. “In our view, this would not meet international standards, and there would need to be an international commission of inquiry,” he said.

More than 200 Rohingya villagers who fled Myanmar to neighboring Bangladesh gave harrowing testimony to United Nations investigators about the treatment they received.

The investigators’ report said that soldiers and police officers, helped by local villagers, carried out “a calculated campaign of terror” against the Rohingya in Rakhine after insurgents attacked military posts on the border with Bangladesh, killing nine guards.

Witnesses, some with scars from gunshot wounds or beatings, told investigators how security forces swept through their villages, often before dawn, shooting indiscriminately with rocket launchers and from helicopters. They killed people who tried to flee and burned them alive in their homes, villagers said, according to the report.

A 14-year-old girl told investigators that soldiers had raped her, beaten her mother to death and killed her two younger sisters. “They were not shot dead but slaughtered with knives,” she said, according to the report.

The report said that security forces members sometimes beat, raped or killed people in front of their relatives with the intention of “humiliating and instilling fear.”

“They beat and killed my husband with a knife,” a 25-year-old woman told investigators, describing how five soldiers then raped her and killed her 8-month-old son, who was crying. “To silence him, they killed him, too, with a knife.”