U.N. Sees ‘Human Rights Abyss’ in Myanmar as Military Kills Civilians

Thousands of civilians in Myanmar have been “killed at the hands of the military,” the United Nations said on Tuesday, including hundreds who have died from torture and neglect in the junta’s prisons.

“Myanmar is plumbing the depths of a human rights abyss,” James Rodehaver, the head of the U.N. human rights team monitoring the crisis, told journalists. He described a vacuum in the rule of law that was being filled by summary killings, torture and sexual violence.

The casualties attest to a chaotic civil war that escalated sharply after the military staged a coup in February 2021. Now, three years later, pro-democracy forces and ethnic militias are battling the junta’s soldiers in a conflict that has displaced more than three million people and left close to 19 million in need of humanitarian aid, according to the U.N.

But the military’s ferocious tactics, including an ongoing campaign of airstrikes and mass arrests, also reflect its shrinking hold. The military now controls less than 40 percent of the country and is constantly losing ground to armed opposition groups, Mr. Rodehaver said.

The military killed at least 2,414 civilians just between April 2023 and the end of this June, including 334 children, according to a report by the U.N. team monitoring Myanmar that it will present to the Human Rights Council next week. About half of those deaths occurred in military airstrikes or in artillery bombardments.

Another 759 people died in the junta’s custody in that same time period, the U.N. report will say. And they are only a portion of those who have died in detention since the coup, according to the report. Military authorities have arrested around 27,400 people since February 2021, including some 9,000 people in the 15 months that the U.N. report covered.

Former detainees interviewed by the U.N. described “truly some of the most depraved behavior utilized as methods of torture,” Mr. Rodehaver said. They reported being suspended from the ceiling without food or water; being beaten with batons, bamboo sticks, iron bars and electric cables; having fingernails pulled; suffering asphyxiation; and being burned with cigarette lighters and boiling water.

Men and women reported rape and sexual torture during interrogation, the U.N. said.

Gen. Zaw Min Tun, the spokesman for Myanmar’s junta, did not immediately answer phone calls seeking comment.

On average, four people have died in custody every day over the last three years, the U.N. said. “Many of these individuals have been verified as dying after being subjected to abusive interrogation, other ill-treatment in detention or denial of access to adequate health care,” Liz Throssel, a spokeswoman for the U.N. human rights office, said.

Conditions in detention were “horrific,” Mr. Rodehaver said, citing detainees’ accounts of being forced to kneel or crawl on hard or sharp objects and “the introduction of animals such as snakes or insects or other wild animals in order to provoke fear and terror.”

The country’s conflict is one of the most violent ones tracked by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project. At least 50,000 people have been killed since the coup, including at least 8,000 civilians, the group said earlier this year.

Myanmar’s military created the crisis by “criminalizing nearly all forms of dissent against its attempts to rule the country,” Mr. Rodehaver said, but the report also cited concerns over civilian deaths and other abuses carried out by opposition forces.

Armed opposition groups have carried out targeted killings of civilian administrators or people suspected of being military informants, the U.N. said, noting that it had received reports of 124 such killings in the central region of Myanmar in the first half of this year alone. Opposition groups’ increased use of drones has also contributed to rising civilian casualties, and attacks by the anti-junta Arakan Army in Rakhine State have resulted in deaths of Rohingya Muslims.

When Volker Türk, the U.N. human rights chief, presents his office’s findings to the Human Rights Council next week, he will recommend that the U.N. Security Council refer the crisis in Myanmar to the International Criminal Court.

Since 2019, the court has been investigating whether the organized killing and mass deportation of members of Myanmar’s ethnic Rohingya minority to Bangladesh in 2016 and 2017 constitutes crimes against humanity and other crimes.

Hannah Beech contributed reporting.