So what does rape constitute of? Here’s a (general) flowchart, it is subject to a variety of specific incidences and evidence though.
Basically, rape consists of two components: the act of inserting a penis into a vagina and the absence of consent.
“Statutory rape” refers to the ability of a girl to consent. If she is above 16, she can consent…but it is still an illegal act. If she is below 14, the laws deem her unable to consent at all, hence “statutory rape”.
Source: FiveStarsAndAMoon
YANGON: Human Rights Watch on Monday called for Myanmar to punish army and police commanders if they allowed troops to rape and sexually assault women and girls of the Rohingya Muslim minority.
The New York-based campaign group said it had documented rape, gang rape and other sexual violence against girls as young as 13 in interviews with some of the 69,000 Rohingya Muslims who have fled to Bangladesh since Myanmar security forces responded to attacks on border posts four months ago.
“The sexual violence did not appear to be random or opportunistic, but part of a coordinated and systematic attack against Rohingya, in part because of their ethnicity and religion,” a Human Rights Watch (HRW) news release said.
Reuters was unable to contact a Myanmar government spokesman to respond to the allegations.
An estimated 1.1 million Rohingya live in the western state of Rakhine, but have their movements and access to services restricted. Rohingyas are barred from citizenship in Myanmar, where many call them “Bengalis” to suggest they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
Independent journalists and observers have been barred from visiting the army’s operation zone in northern Rakhine since the Oct. 9 attacks that killed nine border police.
The government has so far dismissed most claims that soldiers raped, beat, killed and arbitrarily detained civilians while burning down villages, insisting instead that a lawful operation is underway against a group of armed Rohingya insurgents.
The HRW report comes just days after United Nations investigators said Myanmar’s security forces had “very likely” committed crimes against humanity, posing a dilemma for de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner took charge of most civilian affairs in April after a historic transition from full military rule, but soldiers retain a quarter of seats in parliament and control ministries related to security.
U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said on Friday that Suu Kyi had promised to investigate the U.N.’s allegations.
HRW said it had gathered evidence on 28 separate sexual assaults, including interviews with nine women who said they were raped or gang raped at gunpoint by security forces during the army’s so-called “clearance operations” in northern Rakhine.
The women and other witnesses said the perpetrators were Myanmar army troops or border police, who they identified by their uniforms, kerchiefs, arm bands and patches, HRW said.
“These horrific attacks on Rohingya women and girls by security forces add a new and brutal chapter to the Burmese military’s long and sickening history of sexual violence against women,” said HRW senior emergencies researcher Priyanka Motaparthy.
“Military and police commanders should be held responsible for these crimes if they did not do everything in their power to stop them or punish those involved.”
Source: www.channelnewsasia.com
Ketika tentera kerajaan Myanmar semakin menghampiri kampung Pwint Phyu Chaung, penduduk hanya mempunyai beberapa pilihan.
Noor Ankis, 25 yang membuat keputusan untuk tidak melarikan diri mengatakan beliau dipaksa melutut dan kemudian dipukul sebelum dibawa ke suatu tempat rahsia untuk dirogol tentera kerajaan.
Rashida Begum, 22 pula memilih untuk terjun ke dalam sebuah sungai bersama tiga anaknya. Seorang anak Rashidah yang masih bayi hanyut dan gagal dijumpai dalam kejadian tersebut.
Cerita-cerita dari pelarian Myanmar ini yang kini tinggal di Bangladesh memberikan gambaran jelas mengenai keganasan tentera kerajaan sejak beberapa bulan lepas.
Kisah mereka juga selari dengan laporan yang didedahkan oleh pertubuhan-pertubuhan hak asasi manusia.
Dalam laporan tersebut, tentera kerajaan memasuki kampung-kampung di utara Rakhine dan melepaskan tembakan secara rawak, menembak pelancar roket dan memusnahkan kediaman sementara kanak-kanak dan wanita dirogol secara sistematik.
Dari imej satelit yang didedahkan Humans Right Watch (HRW), kira-kira 1,500 kediaman telah dimusnahkan.
Kempen kekejaman kerajaan Myanmar pula kini beralih ke arah selatan dan didakwa tidak akan berhenti sehingga kumpulan etnik Muslim, Rohingya dihapuskan.
“Kami tak tahu langkah tentera kerajaan seterusnya, tapi kami tahu serangan ke atas orang awam sedang berterusan, kata Matthew Smith dari kumpulan Fortify Rights, dipetik laporan Irish Times.
Lawan pengganas konon
Sebuah suruhanjaya yang ditubuhkan kerajaan minggu lalu menafikan dakwaan pembunuhan beramai-ramai yang dilakukan tentera kerajaan di kampung-kampung yang telah dikepung.
Para wartawan dan para penyiasat dari kumpulan hak asasi manusia pula dilarang menjejakkan kaki ke kampung-kampung tersebut.
Myanmar menafikan melakukan sebarang pencabulan hak asasi, kecuali kejadian polis Myanmar yang dirakam membelasah penduduk Rohingya.
[ARTIKEL BERKAITAN: Video polis Myanmar pukul etnik Rohingya viral]
Penerima Hadiah Nobel, Aung San Suu Kyii pula dikecam kerana berdiam diri dan ketawa apabila soalan-soalan berkenaan penindasan etnik Rohingya ditujukan kepadanya.
Kempen kekejaman kerajaan dilaporkan bermula pada Oktober selepas sembilan anggota polis dibunuh dan dipercayai dilakukan kumpulan pemberontak bersenjata dari etnik Rohingya.
Sehingga kini, tiada sebarang suspek kejadian dikenal pasti.
Kerajaan Myanmar menyifatkan orang ramai ‘tersalah anggap’ mengenai kempennya yang menyasarkan penduduk etnik Rohingya.
Sehingga kini, dianggarkan 65,000 pelarian etnik Rohingya sudah melarikan diri ke Bangladesh, kata laporan Organisasi Migrasi Antarabangsa (IOM).
Semua dirogol, semua dibakar
Tentera kerajaan dilaporkan pergi dari rumah ke rumah untuk menangkap lelaki dewasa dan kemudian merogol wanita dan membakar rumah.
Kampung Kyet Yoepin yang mengandungi 245 kediaman musnah dalam operasi dua hari pertengahan Oktober lepas, kata HRW.
Muhammad Shafiq yang berusia 20-an mengatakan askar kerajaan akan membariskan lelaki berasingan dari wanita.
Ketika seorang askar memegang tangan kakaknya, Shafiq melawan dan beliau dibelasah dengan teruk oleh tentera kerajaan dan ditinggalkan untuk mati.
Shafiq kemudian melarikan diri bersama anaknya sambil dihujani peluru yang dilepaskan tentera kerajaan.
Beliau kemudian bersembunyi di sebuah jelapang padi dan melihat dari jauh kampung Kyet Yoepin dibakar oleh kerajaan.
“Dah tak ada rumah lagi. Semua sudah dibakar,” kata Shafiq.
Tentera kerajaan suka wanita muda
Noor Ankis mengatakan tentera kerajaan membongkar semua rumah pada waktu pagi untuk mencari wanita muda.
“Mereka kumpulkan kesemua wanita beramai-ramai dan membawa mereka ke satu tempat.
“Yang mana mereka suka, mereka rogol. Di tempat itu, hanya ada tentera kerajaan dan wanita, tiada orang lain,” jelas Noor Ankis.
Sufayat Ullah, 20 terjaga dari lena tidur selepas dikejutkan dengan bunyi tembakan.
“Tentera menggunakan parang apabila mereka sudah dekat dengan penduduk.
“Kalau jauh, mereka tembak,” kata Sufayat mengingati kejadian ngeri berkenaan.
Sufayat melepaskan diri selepas terjun ke dalam sungai dan berenang sejauh yang boleh.
Beliau tinggal di dalam air selama dua hari sebelum mendapat tahu tentera kerajaan telah membakar kediaman keluarga. Ibu, ayah dan dua adik beradiknya ditinggalkan di dalam rumah yang sedang dibakar dan maut.
“Saya rasa tidak tenteram. Mereka sudah bunuh ibu dan ayah saya. Apa lagi yang tinggal untuk saya di dunia ini?” katanya sambil mengelap air mata.
Source: SinarHarian
When the Myanmar military closed in on the village of Pwint Phyu Chaung, everyone had a few seconds to make a choice.
Noor Ankis, 25, chose to remain in her house, where she was told to kneel to be beaten, she said, until soldiers led her to the place where women were raped. Rashida Begum, 22, chose to plunge with her three children into a deep, swift-running creek, only to watch as her baby daughter slipped from her grasp.
Sufayat Ullah, 20, also chose the creek. He stayed in the water for two days and finally emerged to find that soldiers had set his family home on fire, leaving his mother, father and two brothers to asphyxiate inside.
These accounts and others, given over the last few days by refugees who fled Myanmar and are now living in Bangladesh, shed light on the violence that has unfolded in Myanmar in recent months as security forces there carry out a brutal counterinsurgency campaign.
Their stories, though impossible to confirm independently, generally align with reports by human rights organizations that the military entered villages in northern Rakhine State shooting at random, set houses on fire with rocket launchers, and systematically raped girls and women. At least 1,500 homes were razed, according to an analysis of satellite images by Human Rights Watch.
The campaign, which has moved south in recent weeks, seems likely to continue until Myanmar’s government is satisfied that it has fully disarmed the militancy that has arisen among the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic group that has been persecuted for decades in majority-Buddhist Myanmar.
“There is a risk that we haven’t seen the worst of this yet,” said Matthew Smith of Fortify Rights, a nongovernmental organization focusing on human rights in Southeast Asia. “We’re not sure what the state security forces will do next, but we do know attacks on civilians are continuing.”
A commission appointed by Myanmar’s government last week denied allegations that its military was committing genocide in the villages, which have been closed to Western journalists and human rights investigators. Officials have said Rohingya forces are setting fire to their own houses and have denied most charges of human rights abuses, with the exception of a beating that was captured on video. Myanmar’s leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize, has been criticized for failing to respond more forcefully to the violence.
The crackdown began after an attack on three border posts in Rakhine State in October, in which nine police officers were killed. The attack is believed to have been carried out by an until-then-unknown armed Rohingya insurgent group.
The military campaign, which the government describes as a “clearing” operation, has largely targeted civilians, human rights groups say. It has sent an estimated 65,000 Rohingya fleeing across the border to Bangladesh, according to the International Organization for Migration.
“They started coming in like the tide,” said Dudu Miah, a Rohingya refugee who is chairman of the management committee at the Leda refugee camp, near the border with Myanmar. “They were acting crazy. They were a mess. They were saying, ‘They’ve killed my father, they’ve killed my mother, they’ve beaten me up.’ They were in disarray.”
Soldiers were attacking villages just across the Naf River, which separates Myanmar from Bangladesh, so close that Bangladeshis could see columns of smoke rise from burning villages on the other side, said Nazir Ahmed, the imam of a mosque that caters to Rohingyas.
He said it was true that some Rohingya, enraged by years of mistreatment by Myanmar forces, had organized themselves into a crude militant force, but that Myanmar had dramatically exaggerated its proportions and seriousness.
Rohingyas are “frustrated, and they are picking up sticks and making a call to defend themselves,” he said. “Now, if they find a farmer who has a machete at home, they say, ‘You are engaged in terrorism.’”
An analysis released last month by the International Crisis Group took a serious view of the new militant group, which it says is financed and organized by Rohingya émigrés in Saudi Arabia. Further violence, it warned, could accelerate radicalization among the Rohingya, who could become willing instruments of transnational jihadist groups.
In interviews in and around the Kutupalong and Leda refugee camps here, Rohingya who fled Myanmar in recent weeks said that military personnel initially went house to house seeking adult men, and then proceeded to rape women and burn homes. Many new arrivals are from Kyet Yoepin, a village where 245 buildings were destroyed during a two-day sweep in mid-October, according to Human Rights Watch.
Muhammad Shafiq, who is in his mid-20s, said he was at home with his family when he heard gunfire. Soldiers in camouflage banged on the door, then shot at it, he said. When he let them in, he said, “they took the women away, and lined up the men.”
Mr. Shafiq said that when a soldier grabbed his sister’s hand, he lunged at him, fearful the soldier intended to rape her, and was beaten so severely that the soldiers left him for dead. Later, he bolted with one of his children and was grazed by a soldier’s bullet on his elbow. He crawled for an hour on his hands and knees through a rice field, then watched, from a safe vantage point, as troops set fire to what remained of Kyet Yoepin.
“There are no homes left,” he said. “Everything is burned.”
Jannatul Mawa, 25, who is from the same village, said she crawled toward the next village overnight, passing the shadowy forms of dead and wounded neighbors.
“Some were shot, some were killed with a blade,” she said. “Wherever they could find people, they were killing them.”
Dozens more families are from Pwint Phyu Chaung, which was near the site of a clash between militants and soldiers on Nov. 12.
According to Amnesty International, the militants scattered into neighboring villages. When army troops followed them, several hundred men from Pwint Phyu Chaung resisted, using crude weapons like farm implements and knives, the report said. A Myanmar army lieutenant colonel was shot dead, and the troops called in air support from two attack helicopters.
Mumtaz Begum, 40, said she was awakened at dawn when security forces approached the village from both sides and began searching for adult men in each house.
She said she and her daughter were told to kneel down outside their home with their hands over their heads and were beaten with bamboo clubs.
She said her 10-year-old son was shot through the leg, her daughter’s husband was arrested, and her own husband was one of dozens of men and boys in the village who were killed by soldiers armed with guns or machetes that night. Villagers, she said, “laid the bodies down in a line in the mosque and counted them.”
Ms. Begum’s daughter, Noor Ankis, 25, said the next morning soldiers went from house to house looking for young women.
“They grouped the women together and brought them to one place,” she said. “The ones they liked they raped. It was just the girls and the military, no one else was there.”
She said the idea of trying to escape flickered through her head, but she was overcome by fatalism. “I felt there was no point in being alive,” she said.
Ms. Ankis pulled her head scarf low, for a moment, removing a tear. She said she had been thinking about her husband.
“I think about how he took care of me after we got married,” she said. “How will I see him again?”
Sufayat Ullah, 20, a madrasa student, said that he was home with his family on the morning of the attack and that the first thing he registered was the sound of gunfire. He realized quickly, he said, that he could only survive by escaping. “When they found people close by, they attacked them with machetes,” he said. “If they were far away, they shot them.”
Mr. Ullah ran from the house and bolted for the creek at the edge of town, and he dived in, swimming as far as he could. He said he spent much of the next two days underwater, finally scrambling onto the bank near a neighboring village. Only then did he learn that his mother, father and two brothers had burned to death inside the family house.
“I feel no peace,” he said, covering his face with his hands and weeping. “They killed my father and mother. What is left for me in this world?”
Source: nytimes
A group of Rohingya Muslims that attacked Myanmar border guards in October is headed by people with links to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the International Crisis Group (ICG) said on Thursday, citing members of the group.
The coordinated attacks on Oct. 9 killed nine policemen and sparked a crackdown by security forces in the Muslim-majority northern sector of Rakhine State in the country’s northwest.
At least 86 people have been killed, according to state media, and the United Nations has estimated 27,000 members of the largely stateless Rohingya minority have fled across the border to Bangladesh.
Predominantly Buddhist Myanmar’s government, led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, blamed Rohingyas supported by foreign militants for the Oct. 9 attacks, but has issued scant additional information about the assailants it called “terrorists.”
A group calling itself Harakah al-Yakin claimed responsibility for the attacks in video statements and the Brussels-based ICG said it had interviewed four members of the group in Rakhine State and two outside Myanmar, as well as individuals in contact with members via messaging apps.
The Harakah al-Yakin, or Faith Movement, was formed after communal violence in 2012 in which more than 100 people were killed and about 140,000 displaced in Rakhine State, most of them Rohingya, the group said.
Rohingya who have fought in other conflicts, as well as Pakistanis or Afghans, gave clandestine training to villagers in northern Rakhine over two years ahead of the attacks, it said.
“It included weapons use, guerrilla tactics and, HaY members and trainees report, a particular focus on explosives and IEDs,” the group said, referring to improvised explosive devices.
It identified Harakah al-Yakin’s leader, who has appeared prominently in a series of nine videos posted online, as Ata Ullah, born in Karachi, Pakistan, to a Rohingya migrant father before moving as a child to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
“Though not confirmed, there are indications he went to Pakistan and possibly elsewhere, and that he received practical training in modern guerrilla warfare,” the group said. It noted that Ata Ullah was one of 20 Rohingya from Saudi Arabia leading the group’s operations in Rakhine State.
Separately, a committee of 20 senior Rohingya emigres oversees the group, which has headquarters in Mecca, the ICG said.
U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a news briefing on Thursday that the United States was aware of the report and reviewing it, but declined to comment further.
Groups like Islamic State and al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent have referred to the plight of the Rohingya in their material, and the battlefield experience of at least some of the Rohingya fighters implied links to international militants, the ICG said.
However, ICG said the group has notably not engaged in attacks on the civilian Buddhist population in Rakhine. Harakah al-Yakin’s statements to date indicate its main goals are to end the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar and secure the minority’s citizenship status.
“It is possible, however, that its objectives could evolve, given its appeals to religious legitimacy and links to international jihadist groups, so it is essential that government efforts do not focus only or primarily on military approaches, but also address underlying community grievances and suffering,” the ICG said.
Source: www.reuters.com