A report covering June 2025 to May 2026 documents systematic abuse of the Rohingya by both the military and the Arakan Army — and traces how a $1.4 billion mineral trade poisoning rivers as far as Thailand keeps the conflict running.
Aalimi Nation · International Affairs Desk | Geneva
The human rights situation in Myanmar has plummeted to a new low, the United Nations Human Rights Office said on Tuesday, in a report covering 1 June 2025 to 31 May 2026 that links unrelenting violence to a conflict economy now sustaining it.
"This report depicts a picture of suffering, misery, and cruelty on multiple levels and across the country that is heartbreaking," said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk.
The report itself is blunter still: "The military's persistent quest for control and legitimacy has only deepened the suffering and the multiple life-threatening protection and humanitarian concerns civilians face."
An estimated 8,075 civilians, including 1,074 children, have been killed since the February 2021 coup, at least 1,241 of them in the past year alone. Across all sides, more than 100,000 people are estimated to have died in five years of war.
The report's most serious findings concern the Rohingya, and they implicate not only the military but the Arakan Army — the ethnic armed group now serving as the de facto authority across most of Rakhine State.
Both forces have committed widespread and systematic violations against Rohingya communities, the UN found, including killings, torture, forced recruitment, forced labour, arbitrary detention and displacement. Neither responded to requests for comment from Reuters.
In northern Rakhine, the UN accused the Arakan Army of arbitrary arrests, torture, sexual violence, forced labour and land seizures targeting Rohingya — including preventing displaced Rohingya from returning while resettling non-Rohingya on their land. Satellite imagery showed roughly 2,000 acres seized.
The detail in the testimony is difficult to read and important to record. Witnesses described children as young as six used for labour. Former detainees reported beatings, the removal of fingernails and chilli applied to their genitals. One child was reportedly forced to clear the bones and skulls of fellow Rohingya after a massacre.
Nine years after the 2017 crackdown that drove more than 740,000 Rohingya across the border into Bangladesh, where most still live as refugees, the community remains subject to systematic discrimination.
Against civilians more broadly, the military has deployed airstrikes, arson attacks, forced displacement and the denial of humanitarian assistance as it fights ethnic armed groups and militias for control of a large, resource-rich country.
The second half of the report is where this becomes a story about more than Myanmar.
Since the coup, the collapse of the rule of law has allowed illegal rare-earth mining to expand dramatically in Kachin and Shan states. Satellite imagery confirmed Kachin as the primary mining area, with 302 new sites since 2021 — a 149 per cent increase. In Shan State, sites rose from 12 before the coup to 85 after it.
Trade flows peaked at an estimated $1.4 billion in 2023, feeding largely into China's market. Financial investigations described a complex web of relationships among multiple actors that produced illicit gains with impunity.
Rare earths matter because they sit inside almost everything modern: electric vehicles, wind turbines, advanced electronics, defence systems. What the report documents is the cost of extracting them without regulation.
Massive volumes of hazardous chemical leaching agents and toxic runoff flow directly into local waterways. The contamination has polluted rivers and farmland and, according to the report, contributed to miscarriages and chronic disease in surrounding communities. It has not stopped at the border: tests on rivers flowing into Thailand found elevated levels of arsenic, lead, mercury and manganese.
That is the mechanism the UN is describing. Minerals are extracted in areas where governance has collapsed, sold into international supply chains, and the revenue helps finance the armed actors whose control makes the extraction possible. The war produces the conditions for the trade; the trade pays for the war.
Rare earths are one strand of a larger illicit economy. Since the coup, Myanmar has become the world's largest producer of opium and synthetic drugs, alongside a multi-billion-dollar online scam industry, human trafficking and forced labour.
James Rodehaver, who heads the rights office's Myanmar team, described something that ought to worry policymakers more than it appears to. Local communities have become increasingly dependent on the scam compounds, he told a press conference, with operators "building roads, schools and freshwater wells as a way to endear themselves to the local community" and to build legitimacy.
Criminal enterprises are, in other words, beginning to function as local government. That is far harder to dislodge than a compound behind a fence.
Why this matters beyond Myanmar
Three implications follow, and each reaches well past the country's borders.
The first is for Bangladesh, hosting the Rohingya refugee population. Any prospect of large-scale voluntary return depends on conditions in Rakhine being safe. A report documenting the Arakan Army seizing Rohingya land, blocking returns and resettling others on it describes the opposite trajectory.
The second is for supply chains. Rare earths from unregulated Kachin sites enter global markets, which means the batteries, turbines and electronics sold worldwide may carry minerals extracted in a war economy and processed with chemicals now poisoning rivers in two countries. Companies with rare-earth exposure have a due-diligence problem they have largely declined to discuss.
The third is regional. Contamination crossing into Thailand makes this a transboundary environmental dispute, not merely an internal human rights matter — and gives Myanmar's neighbours a material interest in the conflict economy beyond humanitarian concern.
What the report argues
More than five years after the coup, Myanmar remains divided, at war and moving in the wrong direction. The UN's assessment is that military approaches alone cannot address a crisis in which human rights violations, mass displacement, food insecurity, environmental destruction and criminal economies now reinforce each other.
Protecting civilians, restoring humanitarian access, ending abuses and dismantling the economies that profit from the fighting would all be required.
None of that is likely soon. But the report has established something useful in the meantime: a documented, satellite-verified account of who benefits from Myanmar's war, and where the money goes. Accountability tends to begin with an accurate ledger.
