ICC ramps up investigation for Rohingya atrocities

The people responsible for the atrocities that forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims to flee Burma’s Arakan (Rakhine) State will be held to account, an International Criminal Court (ICC) official said on Monday.

Following a visit to Bangladesh refugee camps, the ICC’s Phakiso Mochochoko said the fact that Burma is not a signatory to the Hague-based international court “will not in any way be a hindrance” to an investigation.

“It may present a little bit of challenge for us in terms of investigation, but we have faced situations like this in the past, and we’ve been able to deal with them,” the court’s director of jurisdiction told reporters in the capital Dhaka.

Mochochoko made the comments after leading a delegation to Bangladesh’s southeastern Cox’s Bazar district, home to around 1 million Rohingya refugees. The delegation, however, clarified that its visit to the camps was not a part of any investigation but to collect insights for an ongoing assessment by the office of prosecutor Fatou Bensouda on whether to warrant a full investigation.

The Burmese government has long been blamed for genocide against the minority Muslim Rohingya community in western Arakan State. The huge exodus of Rohingya began in August last year after Burmese security forces launched a brutal crackdown. The scale, organization and ferocity of the operation led to accusations from the international community, including the U.N., of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Read more from Source: Daily Sabah