By Benjamin Zawacki
Originally Published by The Irrawaddy 2 Sept 2011

It is time the EU work to establish a UN-led Commission of Inquiry into crimes against humanity and other crimes under international law in Myanmar.

Four years ago this month, the people of Myanmar rose up in what became known as the “Saffron Revolution”, named after the Buddhist monks who eventually led the demonstrations.  While the world initially condemned the security forces’ violent crackdown that followed, several months later the Myanmar authorities managed to deflect international criticism by announcing it would hold national elections and form a civilian government.

The international community, including the European Union (EU), has been distracted ever since, despite an abundance of information that the Myanmar government has continued to violate human rights on a massive scale.  ‘Wait and see’—what the government will do before the elections, how the elections will be conducted, whether the new government will make any changes—has been the prevailing and irresponsible approach.

Meanwhile, the human rights situation in Myanmar has gone from bad to worse, with no justice for the victims.  By the time the elections announcement was made, the number of political prisoners in Myanmar had nearly doubled from its pre-Saffron Revolution number to over 2,100—where it remains today.  Several months afterwards, the government denied, obstructed, and/or confiscated international aid in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, turning the humanitarian disaster into a human rights crisis.  And a year later, authorities arrested, tried, and unlawfully extended the house arrest of opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Among the situations calling out loudest for justice and accountability is Myanmar’s ethnic minority regions.  Ten months before the November 2010 elections, Amnesty International released a report on the repression of ethnic minority political activists in Myanmar, which showed that optimism in relation to the polls was being contradicted in the ethnic minority areas.

It followed a mid-2008 publication, Crimes against humanity in eastern Myanmar, whose relevance has only increased since then.  The report focused on the Myanmar army’s human rights violations against ethnic minority Karen civilians on a widespread and systematic basis, which amounted to crimes against humanity.  Violations included extrajudicial executions, torture, arbitrary detention, forced labour, confiscation of land and food, and forced displacement of the civilian population on a large scale, starting in late 2005.

While this was the first time Amnesty had characterized such violations as crimes against humanity, the report’s findings were consistent with our research on the country for two decades.  The testimonies, collected in several countries since 1987, documented the very same crimes against civilians.  They were told to us not only by the Karen, but by many other ethnic minorities as well, including the Rohingya, the Karenni, the Shan, and the Mon.

Likewise, accounts since mid-2008, especially since the day of Myanmar’s national elections last November, when hostilities were accelerated or renewed between the Myanmar army and armed groups fighting on behalf of several ethnic minorities, recall our report’s findings: serious human rights violations—some of which may amount to crimes against humanity and/or war crimes—against ethnic minority Karen, Kachin, and Shan civilians.

These include recent accounts of the army using prison convicts as porters in the fighting in Kayin (Karen) State, forcing them to act as human shields and mine-sweepers, and of rape and other sexual violence, primarily in Shan State.  Reliable reports indicate that the number of displaced persons there has reached 30,000, while in or near Kachin State 20,000 internally displaced persons were reported at the end of July.

We have waited for years, even decades, and seen quite enough: these violations call for accountability.  However, Article 445 of Myanmar’s 2008 Constitution—which codifies immunity from prosecution for officials for past violations—indicates that without international action, this is most unlikely.

In October 2011 the UN Special Rapporteur will be presenting a report to the UN General Assembly, which will likely adopt a resolution on Myanmar.  The EU will again lead in the drafting of this resolution.  In each of his reports or statements to the UN Human Rights Council and the General Assembly, the Special Rapporteur has called for greater accountability for grave international crimes in Myanmar or expressly recommended that the UN establish a Commission of Inquiry into such crimes.

While the question remains as to whether such a Commission would have access to Myanmar, a similar 1997 Commission by the International Labour Organization compensated for its denial of access partly through expert testimony, which Amnesty among others provided.  Two years later, Myanmar passed a law prohibiting forced labour.  Accountability must begin somewhere.

Moreover, accountability need not exclude increased humanitarian assistance and efforts to engage the new government.

Amnesty International welcomes the fact that 12 of the 16 nations that have publicly stated their support for a Commission of Inquiry in Myanmar are EU members, but regrets that neither the EU as a bloc nor several of its influential members—including Germany, Italy, Spain, and Sweden—have not done so.

After more than three years of ‘wait and see’, it is time the EU and its member states translate their concern about Myanmar’s human rights situation into public support for the establishment of a UN-led Commission of Inquiry into crimes against humanity and other crimes under international law in Myanmar.

Benjamin Zawacki is Amnesty International’s Myanmar researcher and a member of the US Council on Foreign Relations.

By John Bradshaw and Charlie Clements
Originally Published by The Global Post 31 Aug 2011

WASHINGTON — The wall of impunity that has long protected war criminals is crumbling. And that process is now accelerating through the use of technology.

Atrocities committed during military actions or in campaigns of ethnic cleansing used to be routinely denied, disputed, and covered up for years. With the advent of the International Criminal Court a decade ago, investigations and charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide began to come more quickly and the accused perpetrators have been put under a harsh spotlight while the court’s process moved forward.

Now, through innovative use of satellite imagery and analysis, these crimes are being exposed in near real time.

The latest war criminal to be caught in the act is a serial offender: Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir. The attacks launched during the past three months by Bashir’s armed forces on Abyei, the contested border region between Sudan and the new Republic of South Sudan, and in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan state have the hallmarks of the tactics his regime used in Darfur. Similar attacks on civilians, forced displacements, and destruction of livelihoods in Darfur eventually led to charges of genocide against Bashir by the International Criminal Court.

Unlike in previous cases of attacks on civilians by Bashir’s regime, we don’t need to wait for fragmentary reports from the ground to be investigated to piece together what happened. This time, we have publicly available satellite imagery that shows what happened almost in real time. The Satellite Sentinel Project, initiated by George Clooney and the Enough Project, provided nearly immediate evidence of this new wave of crimes committed against the civilian population in and around Abyei town.

Now the project has provided satellite images of apparent mass graves in South Kordofan which corroborate eyewitness accounts from the ground of systematic killings and dumping of bodies into recently dug trenches.

The normal campaigns of disinformation by the Government of Sudan are easily refuted by the Sentinel Satellite Project’s reports. High-resolution DigitalGlobe satellite imagery, captured for the project, showed the presence of at least 10 Sudan Armed Forces main battle tanks, mobile artillery pieces, and infantry fighting vehicles in Abyei town.

Analysis of the images by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative also revealed that up to one-third of civilian structures in Abyei town had been burned and corroborated the reports of mass displacement of tens of thousands of civilians.

In a new report on evidence of mass killings and mass graves in South Kordofan, the stark and compelling satellite images are not easily dismissed the way anecdotal reports from the ground have been in the past. The satellite imagery can only be optimally effective when it is used in conjunction with multiple, verified sources who witness the alleged crimes. In the case of South Kordofan, a number of brave eyewitnesses have put their lives at risk to get information out of the region that can be used in coordination with the imagery.

When the Satellite Sentinel Project was launched on December 29, 2010, many observers were skeptical. The project was dismissed as a gimmick by some who did not believe it could produce any reliable information. As the project has come into full operation, it has demonstrated that through careful, objective analysis of imagery combined with on-the-ground reporting and policy expertise, the project can constitute an important means of compiling evidence of war crimes.

Of course, the use of satellite imagery to monitor crisis situations is not new.

Governments have long used this technology to supplement other forms of information-gathering. What is new is that this information is so quickly made available to the public and particularly to those activists who follow human rights situations and advocate for policies that address them. The public pressure that can be generated by projects like the satellite project has the potential to force governments to acknowledge what is happening on the ground.

“With the advance of modern technology, particularly those technologies that were once unavailable to nongovernmental organizations, and the proliferation of social media, these governments can no longer sweep such actions ‘under the rug’,” said David Crane, former Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

The evidence presented by Sentinel Satellite Project and other sources makes clear that the ongoing International Criminal Court investigation into the Khartoum regime’s actions in Darfur should be expanded to include Abyei. The U.S. government should push the United Nations Security Council to authorize such an expanded mandate.

“The Satellite Sentinel Project has provided irrefutable and nearly immediate evidence of the new wave of crimes committed against the civilian population in and around Abyei town,” said Michael Newton, former Senior Advisor to the U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes. “No government or international organization can plausibly plead ignorance or misinformation in the face of the photographic evidence available online and in the SSP report.”

An independent team of international experts should be dispatched to Abyei and South Kordofan to investigate the alleged crimes, preserve evidence and gather witness testimony. That traditional information gathering on the ground cannot be replaced by the use of satellite imagery, but with the complementary findings of the satellite project now in play, Bashir and other war criminals are going to have a much harder time getting away with their crimes.

John C. Bradshaw is Executive Director of the Enough Project, an anti-genocide group in Washington, D.C. Charlie Clements, MD, is Executive Director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.