Amnesty accuses Myanmar junta of bombing villages and refugee camps

The Myanmar junta has indiscriminately bombed villages and refugee camps in their struggle against armed groups who oppose last year’s military coup, according to human rights investigators.

Amnesty International says that potential war crimes and crimes against humanity have been perpetrated by Myanmar soldiers, after the overthrow last year of the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi. The organisation’s report describes the horrific effects of aerial bombardment on Kayah and Karen states in the east of the country, including villages littered with the body parts of civilians.

 “Myanmar’s military has subjected Karen and Karenni civilians to collective punishment via widespread aerial and ground attacks, arbitrary detentions that often result in torture or extrajudicial executions, and the systematic looting and burning of villages,” the report said, based on 100 interviews around the border between Myanmar and Thailand.

Witnesses described one attack in February on Dung Ka Mee village in Kayah by a fighter jet. The villagers said that the evening was peaceful and that the closest resistance fighters were several miles away.

The jet launched a rocket that destroyed a two-storey building, injuring nine people and killing two. “We couldn’t even put them in a coffin, we put them in a plastic bag and buried them,” said a farmer, 40. “People had to pick up the body pieces and put them in a bag.”

The report documents 24 artillery or mortar bomb attacks between December last year and March that caused damage or deaths in homes, schools, clinics, churches and monasteries.

In January, the Myanmar armed forces, or Tatmadaw, launched an air strike on the Ree Khee Bu refugee camp, killing a man in his fifties and two sisters aged 15 and 12.

One man in Hpapun Township, in Karen state, described spending a night trapped in a house with the dead bodies of his relatives, including a pregnant woman, who had been killed by mortar shells while eating dinner.

“I stayed there and just looked at the dead bodies,” he told Amnesty. “I stayed overnight and the next morning the only thing I could do is bury them. I buried my family beside my house. I did it in the morning because I worried the military would fire more mortars.”

Meanwhile, the junta and its opponents blamed each other for an apparent hand grenade attack in Yangon yesterday that killed one person and wounded nine others. State-run media accused the People’s Defence Force, the opposition movement’s armed wing, but did not supply any evidence linking it to the blast.

The National Unity Government, the main opposition body that loosely commands the People’s Defence Forces, said the attack was part of a campaign by the junta of “senseless bombings and killings against its own civilian population”.

Some 16 months after the coup, peaceful demonstrations in cities have given way to ragged but bitter clashes between the army and an assortment of regional guerrilla groups, who fight in the name of the National Unity Government, a shadow government of deposed democratic politicians.

 “The military’s ongoing crimes against civilians in eastern Myanmar reflect decades-long patterns of abuse and flagrant impunity,” said Matt Wells, of Amnesty. “The international community . . . must tackle this festering crisis now. The UN security council must impose a comprehensive arms embargo on Myanmar and refer the situation there to the International Criminal Court.”