Rohingyas to be shifted, UN calls Myanmar brutality unfathomable

Bangladesh will next month start moving 100,000 Rohingya refugees to a remote island, officials said Tuesday, despite warnings the silty strip is prone to violent weather.

Prime minister Sheikh Hasina is scheduled on 3 October to officially open newly-constructed shelters for the displaced Muslims on Bhashan Char, a muddy islet that only emerged from the Bay of Bengal in 2006.

The controversial plan is already behind schedule. Officials previously said they wanted to start moving refugees from overcrowded camps near the border with Myanmar to the island in June, before the monsoon began.

The navy has fast-tracked construction of shelters and evacuation centres for 100,000 refugees and nearly three-quarters of the project is complete, a senior disaster management official told AFP.

"Initially, 50 to 60 Rohingya families will be relocated in the first phase beginning next month," said the official, Habibul Kabir Chowdhury.

Bangladesh, a low-lying riverine country vulnerable to rising sea levels, is prone to tropical cyclones, especially in the Bay of Bengal between April and November.

Hundreds of thousands have died from natural disasters in the last 50 years, mostly in coastal areas near Bhashan Char.

The island is one hour by boat from the nearest land but violent storms make the journey by sea dangerous or sometimes impossible.

The plan to relocate refugees there was revived after 700,000 Rohingya Muslims, fleeing a violent crackdown in Myanmar in August last year, poured into southeast Bangladesh and overwhelmed existing refugee camps.

Rights groups have warned the silty strip is uninhabitable and prone to flooding and other natural disasters, and urged Bangladesh to drop the idea.

But the government pumped $280 million last November into transforming it into a habitable site.

A navy official told AFP a three-metre-high (nine feet) embankment had been erected around the entire island to make it flood-resistant.

"We're ready to receive refugees," he said, asking for anonymity as he was not authorised to speak to the press.

Secretary of the disaster ministry, Shah Kamal, said the refugees would be able to access humanitarian relief on the island and receive training in skills such as fishing.

Officials say refugees will not be forced to leave existing camps in Cox's Bazar district, among the most crowded places on earth and prone to landslides, disease and other dangers.

"If we can ensure full humanitarian assistance to them, I don't see any reason why they won't come to the island. We'll convince them," said Chowdhury, the disaster official.

Myanmar military brutality 'hard to fathom'

AFP reports from Geneva: The level of brutality used by Myanmar's military against the Rohingya minority is "hard to fathom", a UN investigator said Tuesday, presenting a damning report calling for top generals to be prosecuted for genocide.

"It is hard to fathom the level of brutality of Tatmadaw operations, its total disregard for civilian life," Marzuki Darusman, who heads a fact-finding mission into violations in Myanmar, told the UN Human Rights Council, referring to the nation's military.

He presented the mission's 444-page report which lays out in horrifying detail a vast array of violations committed by Myanmar's powerful military, especially against the Rohingya Muslims.

A brutal military crackdown last year forced more than 700,000 Rohingyas to flee over the border to Bangladesh. Demands have mounted for those who waged the campaign to face justice.

Myanmar's army has denied nearly all wrongdoing, insisting its campaign was justified to root out Rohingya insurgents who staged deadly raids on border posts in August 2017.

But the UN team said the military's tactics had been "consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats".

The report said an estimated 10,000 people were killed in the crackdown and that was likely a conservative figure.

In his presentation Tuesday, Darusman detailed massacres in Rohingya villages, describing how people unable to escape "were rounded up and separated by sex."

"The men were systematically killed. Children were shot, thrown into the river or onto a fire."

Women and girls meanwhile were routinely gang-raped, with many of them "physically and mentally tortured while being raped," he said, pointing out that many had been severely bitten, in what appeared to be "akin to a form of branding."

Darusman said the "scale, cruelty and systematic nature (of the sexual violence) reveal beyond doubt that rape is used as a tactic of war."

"We have concluded that... the acts of the Tatmadaw and other security forces fall within four of the five categories of genocidal acts," he said.

"All the circumstances are such as to warrant an inference of genocidal intent."

A shorter version of the mission's report, published last month, had already called for Myanmar's army chief to resign and for him and five other top military commanders to be prosecuted in an international court for genocide.

The longer version, presented Tuesday, also called for Myanmar's military, which dominates the Buddhist-majority nation -- holding a quarter of all seats in parliament and controlling three ministries -- to be completely removed from politics.

Darusman lamented that Myanmar's government had not cooperated with the mission's probe.

"Democracy requires a government that accepts scrutiny," he said, stressing that "it requires a legal framework that guarantees these rights for all, without discrimination."

"In this regard, the democratic transition in Myanmar had barely begun and now it has come to a standstill."