UN member states must hold the Myanmar military junta accountable for Monday’s massacre of dozens of internally displaced people (IDPs) in Kachin State, a group of former UN experts on Myanmar demanded on Thursday.
At least 29 people including 13 children were killed at the displacement camp in Mung Lai Hkyet Village in Kachin’s Waingmaw Township on Monday night. The site is about 3 km north of Laiza, where the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) has its headquarters. The ethnic armed group is fighting the junta.
The Special Advisory Council for Myanmar (SAC-M) said the latest junta attack on a displacement camp could constitute a war crime. Some 100 families displaced by junta violence were taking refuge at the camp at the time of the attack.
“The abhorrent junta attack in Mung Lai Hyket is a result of the utter failure of the international community to act for the protection of the Myanmar people,” said the SAC-M’s Chris Sidoti, a former member of the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (IIFFMM).
Monday’s attack is the deadliest junta attack on civilians in Kachin State so far this year and comes almost a year after a junta air strike on a music concert killed around 75 people in the village of A Nang Pa in the state on Oct. 23, 2022.
The junta has denied involvement and blamed an explosion at an ammonium nitrate store in a KIA training camp near the village. KIA spokesman Colonel Naw Bu told The Irrawaddy on Wednesday that the regime’s account of the explosion was propaganda, saying the armed group would never position a gunpowder warehouse near civilians.
Yanghee Lee of SAC-M, former UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar, said the Myanmar military had become so emboldened by the indifference of the international community to its decades of atrocities that it is now attacking IDP camps.
“The military is flagrantly massacring the most vulnerable people in society, and yet UN entities in Myanmar will not even publicly name the military as the perpetrator. At what point will the UN decide to stand with the Myanmar people?” she asked.
The SAC-M said the junta had escalated its campaign of brutal violence against civilians across the country this year in wilful defiance of UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2669 adopted in December 2022, which demands an immediate end to all forms of violence throughout the country.
UNSC demands within resolutions are considered legally binding under international law but the resolution lacks measures that would enable the council to enforce it, the SAC-M said.
“Attacking a camp for displaced people is an act so utterly depraved that it defies humanity. Such depraved acts of violence are the reason the Myanmar people have been forced into a nation-defining struggle to liberate themselves entirely from the Myanmar military’s influence,” said the SAC-M’s Marzuki Darusman, former chair of the IIFFMM.
The SAC-M urged the UNSC to enforce the junta’s compliance with its resolution through the imposition of a global arms embargo and targeted financial sanctions, and the referral of the situation in Myanmar to the International Criminal Court.
If the Security Council won’t, or can’t, act, UN member states must take action through the General Assembly and pass an urgent resolution during the current 78th session, it stated.
