The UN team said that Myanmar's military tactics had been “consistently and grossly disproportionate to actual security threats,” leaving 10,000 Rohingya Muslims dead and driving about 700,000 across the border to Bangladesh.
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The report also contains satellite images, interviews with victims and photographs of wounds on survivors. One of the examples presented in the report described a coordinated attack carried out by Myanmar's navy and army on the seaside village of Koe Tan Kauk. It describes soldiers slaughtering villagers with knives and burning the community to the ground. The report claims there are reasonable grounds to believe that the violent actions in Myanmar were committed with the intention to destroy the stateless Rohingya nation, and it urged the UN General Assembly to levy charges of “genocide” against the perpetrators.
Marzuki Darusman, a former attorney general of Indonesia and head of the UN fact-finding mission on Myanmar, said that the country's military leadership should be removed. “I have never been confronted by crimes as horrendous and on such a scale as these,” he said in a statement.
The report came out hours before the International Criminal Court's prosecutor announced the preliminary probe into crimes against Rohingya Muslims, which could lead to a formal investigation and possible indictments.
"I have decided to proceed to the next phase of the process and to carry out a full-fledged preliminary examination of the situation at hand," ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said in a statement, noting that the probe would take into account “alleged coercive acts having resulted in the forced displacement of the Rohingya people.”
“That approach has demonstrably failed; the United Nations as a whole failed to adequately address human rights concerns,” the report said.