Written By John Mutiso 📝
The United States has formally determined that Myanmar’s treatment of its Rohingya Muslim population amounts to genocide and crimes against humanity.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is set to formally announce the decision at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington on Monday.
Blinken said in December last year during a visit to Malaysia that the United States was looking “very actively” at whether the treatment of the Rohingya might “constitute genocide.”
This comes nearly 14 months after he took office and pledged to conduct a new review of the violence.
In 2017, Myanmar’s armed forces launched a military operation that forced at least 730,000 of the mainly Muslim Rohingya from their homes and into neighboring Bangladesh, where they recounted killings, mass rape and arson. In 2021, Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup.
US officials and an outside law firm gathered evidence in an effort to acknowledge quickly the seriousness of the atrocities, but then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declined to make a determination.
Us also believes it will bolster international efforts to hold the junta accountable.
“It’s going to make it harder for them to commit further abuses,” one senior State Department official was quoted as saying by the Reuters news agency.
However, Myanmar’s military has denied committing genocide against the Rohingya, who are denied citizenship in Myanmar, and said it was conducting an “operation against terrorists” in 2017.
The United States slapped a series of sanctions on the country’s leaders and like other Western nations has long restricted weapons to its armed forces, which even before the junta took power faced allegations of crimes against humanity for the brutal campaign against the Rohingya.
Gambia brought the case against Myanmar at the International Court of Justice in 2019.
However, the case has been complicated since the military ousted the country’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi, and her government in February 2021.
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.
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