



In the past several months the international community has watched as a huge human tragedy unfolded for the Rohingya people living in the northern Burmese state of Rakhine.

In a culmination of many decades of discrimination, marginalisation and abuse, a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing" has been perpetrated by Burma's security forces against the Rohingya under the guise of an appropriate response to militia violence in the summer.

As a result of the most recent violence, over 655,500 Rohingya people have been forced to flee into Bangladesh in a matter of months.



The Bangladesh Deputy High Commissioner, Khondker M Talha, described the latest episode to us as:

"In the history of mankind, the fastest displacement of a persecuted population"

Given the number of cases reported, we were disappointed that the UK seemed reluctant to commit its full specialist team on sexual violence to assist in this regard.

There seems little point urging the Burmese authorities to self-regulate as they have already cleared their military personnel of any wrongdoing (something the UK Government described as "simply not credible").

We believe that an early, concerted and professional effort to gather the evidence of violent crimes against civilians — whether badged as atrocity crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide — is vital for three reasons:

1. To provide victims with a path towards justice in their individual case.

2. To establish an assumption of accountability, at some point, as a credible possibility to create an effective deterrent to repetition and imitation in other theatres of conflict

3. To establish the foundations for a meaningful process of resolution in the future between communities which is likely to require a robust basis for reconciling both victims and perpetrators to the trauma of the events of the past several months (if not years)

