A committee of Rohingya survivors claims that a Norwegian Foreign Ministry report improperly absolves Telenor Telecommunications of any responsibility for when the Myanmar Army fired on innocent villagers from a Telenor telecoms tower in Rakhine State.

The Committee Seeking Justice for Alethankyaw (CSJA), has been trying to get Telenor to admit responsibility for, in August 2017, failing to prevent the Myanmar army from using one of the company’s telecoms towers as a vantage point to kill Rohingya in Alethankyaw Village in Rakhine State’s Maungdaw Township, as part of the Myanmar military’s genocidal offensive against the Rohingya in 2017.

According to a 2019 complaint to Telenor by CSJA the Alethankyaw telecoms tower was “used to aid the military as it carried out crimes against humanity against the local unarmed civilian population during a campaign of genocide.”

The CSJA complaint said that eyewitnesses “recounted how in late August 2017 Myanmar military personnel used a telephone tower in the town of Alethankyaw that is part of Telenor’s Myanmar cellular network, as a “vantage point to kill fleeing Rohingya men, women and children” The high tower platform provided the Myanmar forces a unique strategic location to shoot at and terrorize Rohingya villagers in a wide radius in the sprawling village.

“Soldiers from Myanmar Army Light Infantry Division (LID) 993 were dispatched to Alethankyaw in the days leading to the first day of the violence on August 25. Starting August 26, soldiers were seen scaling both the Telenor tower and a nearby tower operated by the Myanmar state owned firm MPT, from where they shot at terrorized Rohingya villagers. “Each day we saw three or four soldiers climbing the towers,” a young fisherman who survived the incident told Kaladan Press. This testimony was backed up by other survivors who saw bodies dumped under the Telenor tower.”

A UN fact finding panel examining what took place in Rakhine State in August 2017 concluded that the military’s campaign against the Rohingya community, which included the attacks from the Alethankyaw Telecoms Tower, was genocide.

The 2019 CSJA complaint said that Telenor had not carried out an “appropriate level of due diligence” to make sure that the company or any of its equipment was not involved in human rights abuses.

Responding to the Norwegian report that absolved Telenor, that was issued by the Norwegian Foreign Office’s Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) National Contact Point (NCP), the CSJA said the following:

Even though the NCP admitted that Telenor is “directly linked” to what happened at the tower, the NCP went on to absolve Telenor from responsibility, stating: “the NCP finds that it was not reasonable to expect Telenor to foresee [in August 2017] the misuse of telecommunication towers by third parties for harmful purposes”. CSJA finds this NCP position indefensible, given that beforehand, in February 2017, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) had clearly exposed the Burma Army’s systematic atrocities against the Rohingya in their 2016 clearance operations.

In its complaint, CSJA noted “It should have been clear to a firm like Telenor that the Burma Army also has a long track record of seizing property during times of military offensives or clashes. Telenor was well aware of violent anti-Rohingya incidents that took place in 2016 in Rakhine and due to these incidents had in fact withdrawn staff from Rakhine State.”

Although Telenor claimed it would investigate when first publicly confronted with the facts of the case, it later admitted that it had conducted no such investigation and made no attempt to contact the survivors from Alethankyaw. According to the NCP, “Telenor said that it had no right to investigate what had happened in August 2017, e.g. by engaging with Rohingya refugees.”

The fact that Telenor chose not to investigate what took place is clearly inconsistent with the OECD guidelines Telenor claims to follow. It is clear that Telenor didn't want to investigate the matter further, because as a Norwegian state-owned company it would have then been obligated to share the findings with international bodies like the ICJ, which would undermine their business relations with Burma Army-connected individuals and companies.

Telenor also falsely claimed in its submission to the NCP that the tower owner with whom it had a long-term lease, Irrawaddy Green Towers (IGT), had “longstanding ties” to the local community in Alethankyaw, an impossibility for a recently established foreign company that was and continues to be close to the military. When called out for this falsehood, Telenor later changed its explanation and claimed that the firm in question hired local contractors and that IGT “was considered independent with a commitment to responsible business within the industry in Myanmar”. This is a strange way to describe a company that just weeks before the incident in question gave 5 million kyat to the commander of the Naypyidaw Regional Military Command, supposedly for charity purposes. The fact remains that IGT is a firm whose business model relies on maintaining close ties to the Tatmadaw.

Despite being majority-owned by the Norwegian government, Telenor ran its operations the same way as Burmese cronies, doing business with firms and individuals close to the military to advance their interests in a country where the military controls much of the economy.

It is telling also that Telenor in its annual reports and updates on the firm’s website summarizing the case before the NCP euphemistically referred to the complaint as being about the “misuse” of a cell tower and avoided any mention of the fact that the complainants were Rohingya and the complaint described an incident that took place during the army’s attack on a Rohingya village during a military offensive that violently expelled nearly the entire population of Alethankyaw. Telenor's failure to acknowledge the Rohingya identity of the complainants was a result of Telenor’s desperate attempt to maintain operations in a country where anti-Rohingya sentiments were widespread amongst the military and government.

CSJA concluded in its final letter to NCP that it was extremely disappointed with the way the case had been handled by the NCP and Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs who has oversight over the NCP and appoints the NCP members. “We hoped that the OECD review would be objective, even though Telenor is majority owned by Norway. By focussing only on documents and statements by their Norwegian company and not even bothering to directly meet with CSJA, who could easily have been visited by their embassy in Dhaka, these findings show that Norway has simply attempted to protect its reputation and hide its complicity in genocide against our Rohingya peoples. This brings shame not only on Norway and its people but also on the OECD.”