The UN mechanism accuses Myanmar of destroying Rohingya communities through construction

United Nations investigators report that Myanmar’s military destroyed Rohingya villages, employing private companies to clear the land and construct security infrastructure.

Myanmar companies were awarded state contracts to build police posts and other infrastructure on land taken from Rohingya Muslims, who fled their homes due to violent “clearance operations” by security forces, as stated by United Nations investigators in a report today.

More than 700,000 Rohingya escaped to Bangladesh in 2017 from western Myanmar — where they are an ethnic and religious minority in the predominantly Buddhist country — when security forces responded to insurgent attacks by targeting civilians.

Following the mass exodus, the military-dominated government awarded contracts to at least nine companies to clear and develop land in Rohingya communities, according to a report by the U.N.’s Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM).

Among these firms was Asia World Company, one of Myanmar’s largest conglomerates, which operates the country’s main port in the commercial capital of Yangon.

“Rohingya villages were destroyed by the Myanmar military during the 2017 clearance operations, demolished and razed, and replaced with Border Guard Police Battalion bases,” the IIMM stated.

“Asia World Company executed the physical construction of bases, roads, and security outposts that solidified this territorial control,” according to the report.

Asia World did not respond to requests for comment, nor did the military authorities who have taken over the Myanmar government.

Run by Tun Myint Naing — also known as Steven Law — Asia World has an extensive history of collaborating with Myanmar’s military, which became notorious over decades for imprisoning political activists and committing atrocities against civilians in conflict zones.

“There needs to be an international criminal investigation into Asia World and all other crony companies that have supported the Myanmar military’s international crimes,” Yadanar Maung, a spokesperson for activist group Justice For Myanmar, told OCCRP.

In 2010, the U.S. sanctioned Tun Myint Naing and Asia World, along with numerous other individuals and firms, for supporting the military junta.

The junta had granted Asia World “numerous lucrative government concessions, including the construction of ports, highways, and government facilities,” the U.S. Treasury Department said at the time. Treasury also accused Tun Myint Naing’s father, who founded Asia World in 1992, of being “one of the world’s key heroin traffickers dating back to the early 1970s.”

In 2016, the U.S. government issued a comprehensive order to lift most sanctions on Myanmar in response to democratic reforms that began in 2011, including the holding of parliamentary elections. Rights groups criticized the decision, however, with dozens signing an open letter in late 2017 urging the U.S. to reimpose sanctions amid “accounts of unfathomable brutality” against the Rohingya.

The attacks on Rohingya civilians “likely constitute crimes against humanity and genocide,” the U.N. rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar has stated.

In its new report, the IIMM indicated that the redevelopment of Rohingya “farms, homes, businesses, and land” by state security forces and private companies might serve as evidence that authorities “intended to destroy the group.”

“By paving over sacred and communal spaces, the authorities eradicated material evidence of Rohingya history, complicating future claims of belonging or return,” the report stated.

Myanmar’s decade-long experiment with democracy concluded on February 1, 2021, when the military seized full control of the government and jailed elected leaders. Since then, at least 6,092 civilians have been killed, 28,051 have been arrested, and more than 3.5 million people have been displaced amid armed resistance to the military, according to a 2024 U.N. report.

Justice For Myanmar’s spokesperson stated that governments worldwide need to “step up and impose targeted sanctions on the military junta and its businesses.”

“The Myanmar military continues to perpetrate war crimes and crimes against humanity, and this campaign of terror is sustained by a network of businesses that supply it with the resources necessary to conduct daily indiscriminate airstrikes and shelling, arbitrary arrests, and torture,” said Yadanar Maung.