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By AFP
Myanmar’s army has possible used air strikes and artillery barrages as “collective punishment” towards civilians opposing its coup, Amnesty Worldwide stated Wednesday, accusing the junta of struggle crimes.
Lethal clashes have ravaged swathes of the nation since final 12 months’s coup, which ousted State Counsellor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and the Nationwide League for Democracy, with the junta unable to crush resistance to its rule.
Between final December and March, the army ramped up its onslaught in Kayah and Kayin states alongside the Thai border, with troops finishing up extrajudicial killings and looting and burning villages, Amnesty stated.
Air strikes and shelling hit houses, well being amenities, temples and church buildings, the rights group stated, with villagers telling researchers some artillery barrages lasted for days.
Amnesty stated the onslaught constituted “a brand new wave of struggle crimes and certain crimes towards humanity”.
Air strikes killed 9 civilians and wounded no less than 9 others in the course of the reporting interval, the report stated.
“In nearly all documented [air] assaults, solely civilians seem to have been current,” it stated.
One air strike final January hit a camp for internally displaced folks in Kayah State, killing a person and two sisters sheltering in an space that activists stated “ought to have been well-known to the army”.
Researchers additionally documented situations when troopers had shot civilians fleeing clashes, together with one eyewitness who stated troops had shot lifeless six folks attempting to cross a river into Thailand.
Collective punishment
Amnesty stated the army’s operations “mirrored its signature coverage of collective punishment of civilian communities perceived to assist an armed group or, within the coup’s aftermath, the broader protest motion”.
Kayah and Kayin states have seen a number of the fiercest combating because the putsch, with anti-coup fighters usually teaming up with extra established ethnic armed teams.
In January, the army known as in air strikes on the Kayah State capital Loikaw to dislodge anti-coup fighters, a junta spokesman informed AFP.
On Christmas Eve final 12 months, greater than 30 burnt our bodies, together with these of girls and kids, had been found on a freeway within the state after a bloodbath blamed on junta troops.
The charity Save the Kids later stated two of its employees had been amongst these killed.
Myanmar’s army has been repeatedly accused of atrocities and struggle crimes throughout many years of inner battle.
Army violence towards the Rohingya minority in 2017 despatched an estimated 750,000 folks fleeing into neighbouring Bangladesh, bringing accounts of rape, homicide and arson.
Junta chief Senior Normal Min Aung Hlaing – who headed the military in the course of the Rohingya crackdown – stated in March that the army would “annihilate till the top” teams combating to overturn its rule.
Greater than 1,800 folks have been killed within the junta’s crackdown on dissent, in keeping with a neighborhood monitoring group.
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