Washington : The United States has determined that the violence committed by the military in Myanmar against the Rohingya minority amounts to genocide and crimes against humanity, a US official told.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled Buddhist-majority Myanmar since 2017 after a military crackdown that is now the subject of a genocide case at the United Nation’s highest court in The Hague.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is due to officially announce the determination in remarks during a visit on Monday to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, where an exhibit titled “Burma’s Path to Genocide” — using a former name for the country — is on display.
The case opened against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice in 2019 has been complicated by a military coup last year that ousted Aung San Suu Kyi and her civilian government, triggering mass protests and a bloody crackdown.
The Nobel peace laureate, who faced criticism from rights groups for her involvement in the Rohingya case, is now under house arrest and on trial by the same generals she defended at The Hague.
Until now, the US had stopped short of declaring the atrocities — including mass killings and rape — committed in 2017 against the Muslim minority Rohingya population a genocide. The violence forced nearly a million people to flee, and the United Nations recommended that top military officials face genocide charges.
“I applaud the Biden administration for finally recognizing the atrocities committed against the Rohingya as genocide. While this determination is long overdue, it is nevertheless a powerful and critically important step in holding this brutal regime to account,” Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement Sunday.
America, the Oregon Democrat said, “must lead the world to make it clear that atrocities like these will never be allowed to be buried unnoticed, no matter where they occur.”
