Pars Today

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has pledged to speed up efforts to launch a probe into the widely reported atrocities committed by Myanmar's military and radical Buddhist mobs against hundreds of thousands of the country's minority Rohingya Muslims.

ICC's Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan made the remarks on Friday after meeting survivors of the genocide in Bangladesh since arriving in capital Dhaka on Tuesday for a four-day visit aimed at hearing testimonies of those affected by the extreme violence -- including systemic murders, torture, gang rape, arson, forced deportation and ethnic cleansing, among other forms of mass persecution -- as part of the proceedings of a legal case against Myanmar's junta leaders.

He met the survivors in Cox’s Bazar, the world’s largest refugee settlement, which hosts nearly one million Rohingya, most of whom fled Myanmar’s Rakhine State during a military-led crackdown in 2017.

Local media cited one of the women interviewed by Khan as testifying that she and many other women she knew had been raped and their relatives killed in Myanmar.

“There is heartbreak in these camps,” he said after visiting refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, in what is known as the world’s largest refugee settlement.

Khan further told reporters in Dhaka that he hoped to be back in Bangladesh next year to speak to more victims.

“What I can promise is that we will have results,” he proclaimed despite taking months to return to the refugee camp for more interviews. “The team will be working hard, we’ll try to accelerate it and we will move forward.”

It has been nearly six years since hundreds of thousands of minority Rohingya Muslims fled Myanmar and have been living in squalid and overcrowded refugee camps in Bangladesh.

The Royingya Muslims fled from the brutal attacks by military forces joined by Buddhist extremists in Myanmar’s western Rakhine State that began in August 2017, which the then-UN human rights chief had described as a "textbook case of ethnic cleansing."

ME