At 5am of 9 April 2021, in Bago, Myanmar, armed troops mounted an assault on demonstrators barricaded along Ma Ga Dit and San Taw Din roads, east of town Bago.

The shooting paused around 10pm, leaving at least 83 people dead. Troops reportedly dragged 57 bodies into the Zeyar Muni pagoda and a school, ignoring exhortations from monks to provide medical attention to the wounded.

Soldiers were filmed shooting randomly into houses. At least 46 children died, and more than 3,000 activists and civil society leaders have been detained.

That morning, a military tribunal in Yangon, Myanmar’s capital city until 2005, sentenced 19 people to death for killing one soldier—17 of them were condemned in absentia.

Not long before, on March 27, the Tatmadaw (Myanmar's military) celebrated Armed Forces Day, originally held to mark the start of Burmese resistance to Japanese occupation in World War II—they marched around Naypyitaw, the new capital, and shot down an estimated 114 citizens.

UN INDEPENDENT INTERNATIONAL FACT-FINDING MISSION ON MYANMAR REPORT

The Human Rights Council set up the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (IIFFMM) in 2017 after denunciations of alleged human rights violations by military and security forces in Myanmar. International claims included arbitrary detention; torture and inhuman treatment; sexual violence; extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary killings; enforced disappearances; forced displacement; and unlawful destruction of property. In its efforts to ensure full accountability for perpetrators and justice for victims, it looked in-depth at the situation in the Rakhine State, and interviewed 827 Rohingya in other countries.

In 2018, after collecting first-hand testimony from hundreds of victims and witnesses, the IIFFMM released the 2018 report, providing harrowing details of some of the most serious mass-killings that took place during the clearance operations led by Tatmadaw. These operations involved planned and mass killings in a total of at least 54 locations.

The report reveals a pattern of rape and other forms of sexual violence committed on a shocking scale. Hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Rohingya women and girls were brutally raped, including in public mass gang rapes, after which many victims were killed or mutilated.

The IIFFMM found that the extreme violence perpetrated against the Rohingya in 2017 and the mass expulsions have been due to decades of institutionalised oppression. The Tatmadaw have been persecuting the ethnic Rakhine communities through forced labour, forced evictions, sexual violence, and killings.

TRAFFICKING IN PERSONS

In Myanmar, internally displaced people face economic desperation from displacement. The economic desperation is exacerbated due to a number of different factors, including: an inability to pursue viable livelihoods by farming, very limited access to other forms of employment, and exposure to crime and violence. Women are often family providers, and the eldest daughters face cultural expectations that they will help sustain their families.

According to Human Rights Watch’s 2020 Report, young women and girls are being lured into China from internally displaced people (IDP) camps and villages near the border. Further, after promises of employment, they are sold to Chinese families for forced marriage.

On this matter, the US Department of State Report affirmed that traffickers also transport Rohingya girls within Bangladesh to Chittagong and Dhaka and transnationally to India, Malaysia, and Nepal for sex trafficking, sometimes using false promises of jobs or marriage. Some traffickers even trade these girls over the internet.

Moreover, local criminal networks take Rohingya women from refugee camps at night, exploit them in sex trafficking, and bring them back to the camps during the day. International organisations allege some Bangladeshi officials facilitate trafficking of Rohingya, accepting bribes from traffickers for enabling access.

Multiple NGOs and humanitarian officials consider the Rohingyas’ inability to receive formal schooling or work legally as a factor in their increased vulnerability to traffickers.

In 2020, Bangladesh hosted nearly one million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar since the first significant displacement of the Rohingya in August 2017. Conditions in the camps in Cox’s Bazar, the largest concentration of encamped refugees in the world, worsened as the government resisted infrastructure improvements, repeatedly threatened to relocate refugees to a potentially uninhabitable island, and took steps to restrict freedom of movement and internet access in the camps.

FORCED LABOUR

Rohingya and ethnic Rakhine individuals are at particularly high risk of labour trafficking and are reported to be victims of forced labour in the Rakhine State and beyond Myanmar, within the refugee camps.

Traffickers oblige members of Myanmar’s vulnerable populations to forced labour in seasonal strawberry and longan harvesting, orange farming, manufacturing in registered and unregistered factories, and construction of roads and city government facilities across the border in northwestern Thailand. Further, traffickers use deceitful recruitment tactics and immigration status-based coercion to subject migrant workers from Shan State, in the northeast of Myanmar, to forced labour in sugarcane plantations in Yunnan, in southwestern China.

Despite continued reports of traffickers exploiting hundreds of Rohingya in forced labour and sex trafficking within Bangladesh, the only Rohingya-related cases reported by law enforcement involved cases that might have been migrant smuggling without elements of human trafficking. Conversely, the Bangladeshi government did not establish effective legal reporting mechanisms within the camps, which hindered Rohingyas’ access to justice.

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

In 2020, the state of freedom of expression in Myanmar was already critical, as more than 250 people faced lawsuits under various rights-restricting laws, and prosecutions for criminal defamation continued under the 2013 Telecommunications Act. The Act was frequently used to limit freedom of expression through online platforms and retrench criticism of public figures in the government and in the military.

It was the case of Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi. A filmmaker, he was released in February of 2020 after being sentenced to one year in prison with hard labour for a series of posts criticising the military on Facebook. According to the Human Rights Watch Report, despite suffering from liver cancer, Min Htin Ko Ko Gyi was denied bail to seek medical care outside prison.

Since the coup of February 1 has worsened the state of human rights and fundamental freedoms, this April, the UN-appointed independent expert on human rights in Myanmar urged the Military government to guarantee the exercise of freedom of expression in Myanmar.

Similarly, on May 1, the United Nation Security Council demanded the restoration of democracy and the release of all detainees, including Myanmar’s elected president Aung San Suu Kyi. However, two days afterwards, at least another eight people were killed after security forces opened fire on individuals protesting against the military.

In the last three months, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, security forces have killed more than 765 protesters, while beyond 3,555 people have been arrested for opposing—of which 82 have been sentenced to serve prison time.

Gabriela was born in Havana, but has lived in Madrid for the last 10 years. She studied Law in Spain, undertook a master's in International Relations and Economic Analysis, and recently completed a master's in Law. Her research interests include Business & Human Rights, Economics, Human Development and Policy in Europe, Asia and Africa.

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