Volker Turk’s call for global action is a moral challenge to our collective consciences
By Benedict Rogers in UCA News
Myanmar’s human rights crisis is “plumbing new depths,” the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk told the UN Human Rights Council earlier this week. Civilians throughout the country are “suffering the cruelest toll.”
Ever since his appointment three years ago, Turk has been particularly outspoken and active about Myanmar, using consistently strong language.
In 2023, he described the country’s crisis as an “unspeakable tragedy,” with the junta’s conduct representing “inhumanity in its vilest form.” He warned that Myanmar was in “deadly freefall” into “even deeper violence and heartbreak.”
In 2024, he said the world was “bearing witness to a country being suffocated by an illegitimate regime.”
And in February this year, he decried the “litany of human suffering” in Myanmar.
This week, equally impassioned, Turk pleaded for action.
“For more than four years now, my office has reported horrible violations.… We have issued recommendations for action to stop the wanton violence and rampant impunity.… You, the international community, have all the information you need to act,” he told the Human Rights Council.
His strong rhetoric is not hyperbole. It is rooted in a well-documented fact. And UN member states are well advised to take action based on his expertise. It is high time the world listened to his voice and, through him, heard the cries of the people of Myanmar.
The latest report by the high commissioner claims that more than 7,000 civilians have been killed by the military and almost 30,000 political prisoners have been jailed since the 2021 coup.
Last month alone, an estimated 277 civilians were killed across the country. The military, he added, is “burning villages at alarming rates and abducting and forcibly recruiting civilians” and launching attacks that “reveal an utter disregard for civilian lives.”
The military’s use of airstrikes is well documented in the UN report, which was released in the same week as a report by Fortify Rights, titled Crashing Down on Us, which documents at least ten indiscriminate and deliberate attacks in Myanmar’s Kachin and Karenni states, as well as the 22 junta officials responsible.
The UN highlights the attack on a crowded market in Let Pan Ha village in Mandalay in March, in which a jet fighter dropped two 500-pound bombs, killing at least 27 civilians. It also details the air strike on a school in Oe Htwin Kwin village in Sagaing region, which killed 24 civilians, including children and teachers.
And it reports on three separate air strikes on a camp for displaced people in La Ei village in Shan state, one of which destroyed the parish priest’s house and a church in the camp.
My colleagues in Fortify Rights have documented similar strikes targeting churches, schools, hospitals, homes and camps for internally displaced people, killing scores of civilians, including children, and displacing entire communities. The evidence detailed by the UN is consistent with what our team has found and with the findings of community-based organizations.
The gruesome details of the UN report are difficult to read.
In an attack by the military on Sipa (also known as Si Par) village in Sagaing Region on Oct. 17 last year, just as villagers prepared to celebrate a Buddhist holiday, villagers described the “carnage,” recalling some people had been shot dead in the head or chest, while three male bodies were found beheaded and eviscerated, with body parts charred and left in piles or spread across the village.
“They chopped the bodies like when we chop the chicken,” one villager recounted to the UN. “The head, the legs, the arms, and they also opened their stomachs. The heart was put on a plate.”
Fortify Rights also documented the beheadings in Sipa. One survivor told Fortify Rights, “Three more severed heads were put onto the fence of a neighboring home.”
But the horror in Myanmar is not only perpetrated by the military regime.
The human rights violations committed against Rohingya by the Arakan Army in Rakhine state are, the UN claims, “reminiscent” of the genocide in 2017, and are being perpetrated with similar impunity.
Thousands are alleged to have been killed, with tens of thousands more fleeing violence. As many as 150,000 Rohingya may have fled to Bangladesh in the past two years, adding to the one million or more refugees already there.
Turk speaks of “death, destruction and desperation” shown by videos and pictures from Rakhine state, “distressingly similar” to the atrocities perpetrated by the military against the Rohingya in 2017.
Yet despite suffering the most egregious mass atrocity crimes at the hands of the military and the Arakan Army, the Rohingya have also faced compounded terror at the hands of some of their own armed groups.
The UN reports, as has Fortify Rights — at grave risk to some of their team – violations perpetrated by militant Rohingya groups against their own people, including killings, forced recruitment, and displacement.
And other anti-junta armed groups are far from blameless.
The targeted killing of individuals suspected of association with the military, often wrongly, is alarming. On Feb. 14 in Kan Gyi village in Sagaing region, an anti-junta group murdered a Catholic priest in the Our Lady of Lourdes church with a sword, accusing him of being a military informant.
While the UN rightly makes clear that the violations perpetrated by anti-regime groups are “not comparable in scale, scope, intensity and brutality” with those of the military — which are widespread and systematic and a matter of policy — nevertheless, they are deeply concerning.
On top of all this, the new UN report reveals 26 allegations of the use of chemicals attached to explosives in six states and regions.
It also details rising food insecurity, as a result of the conflict and recent natural disasters, for at least 15.2 million people, almost a third of the population.
The junta’s forcible conscription of young people into its armed forces has added to the reign of fear and terror in the country. An estimated 65,000 young people have so far been forcibly conscripted, often leaving families without their breadwinners or their livelihoods.
In these conditions, the decision by the junta leader General Min Aung Hlaing to hold so-called “elections” on Dec. 28 is absurd — and should be robustly rejected.
The call for elections — by a man who overthrew a democratically-elected government four and a half years ago and jailed its leaders — is a cynical attempt to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the world.
But when more than a third of the population is facing hunger, four million are displaced, the majority of the country is in conflict or under the control of anti-regime forces, pro-democracy and ethnic political parties are banned, tens of thousands of dissidents are in jail, independent media is shuttered, civil society operates in hiding and at grave risk, and the rule of law is in tatters, talk of an election is ludicrous.
If it goes ahead, it will be a sham. It won’t be a general election, but a selection of generals. As Turk argues, as does the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), “de-escalation and humanitarian access are the way out of this crisis,” not these sham elections.
The people of Myanmar — and those of us around the world who care about human rights — are fortunate to have a UN human rights chief who speaks with such shocking clarity, if only the rest of the world would listen.
All too often, the cries from Myanmar’s people get lost when our television screens are — understandably — filled with the horrors of Ukraine and Gaza. But as Turk says, the international community has the information it needs — and the recommendations for action.
The UN’s High-Level Conference on the Rohingya at the General Assembly later this month is a welcome opportunity to coordinate international action. But a wider effort to bring attention and effort to Myanmar as a whole is urgently needed.
Steps must be taken to end impunity, ensure accountability, secure justice and pursue genuine peace and real democracy.
The flow of arms — including jet fuel that facilitates the junta’s air strikes, and dual-use goods — must be stopped.
More targeted sanctions must be applied, and the temptation to legitimize the junta and roll out the red carpet — as happened in Beijing last week — resisted.
Only when we cut the lifelines that keep the brutal military dictatorship alive, and provide a lifeline — of humanitarian aid, political support, and moral encouragement — to the people, will Turk’s reports become a record of history.
For now, they must serve as a living account of tragedy, a moral challenge to our collective consciences, and a manifesto for action.
Failure to act would be an indictment on all of us and a travesty.
This article was originally published in UCA News.