US declares Myanmar army committed genocide against Rohingya
The United States has formally determined that violence committed against the Rohingya minority by Myanmar’s military amounts to genocide and crimes against humanity. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the decision on Monday 21st at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Myanmar’s armed forces launched a military operation in 2017 that forced at least 730,000 of the mainly Muslim Rohingya from their homes and into neighbouring Bangladesh, where they recounted killings, mass rape and arson. In 2021, Myanmar’s military seized power in a coup. 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. A United Nations fact-finding mission concluded in 2018 that the military’s campaign included “genocidal acts”, but Washington referred at the time to the atrocities as “ethnic cleansing”, a term that has no legal definition under international criminal law.
“It’s really signalling to the world and especially to victims and survivors within the Rohingya community and more broadly that the United States recognises the gravity of what’s happening,” a senior State Department official said of Blinken’s announcement on Monday.
A genocide determination does not automatically unleash punitive US action. Since the Cold War, the State Department has formally used the term six times to describe massacres in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Iraq and Darfur, the ISIS attacks on Yazidis and other minorities, and most recently, last year, over China’s treatment of Uighurs and other Muslims. China denies the genocide claims.
US Senator Jeff Merkley, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who led a congressional delegation to Myanmar and Bangladesh in 2017, welcomed the move. “While this determination is long overdue, it is nevertheless a powerful and critically important step in holding this brutal regime to account,” Merkley said in a statement.
Days after US President Joe Biden took office, the military led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing seized power on February 1, 2021, complaining of fraud in a November 2020 general election won by democracy champion Aung San Suu Kyi’s party. Election monitoring groups found no evidence of mass fraud. The armed forces crushed an uprising against their coup, killing more than 1,600 people and detaining nearly 10,000, including civilian leaders such as Aung San Suu Kyi, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), a campaign group, and setting off an armed rebellion.
In response to the coup, the US and Western allies sanctioned the military and its business interests, but have been unable to convince the generals to restore civilian rule after they received military and diplomatic support from Russia and China.
John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said Myanmar’s military has faced “few real consequences for its atrocities, whether against Rohingya or other ethnic minority groups in Myanmar”. As well as imposing more economic sanctions on the military government, the US should press for a UN Security Council resolution that would refer the military’s all alleged crimes to the International Criminal Court, Sifton said.
When they seized power, the generals put Aung San Suu Kyi on trial in nearly a dozen cases that could see her sentenced to more than 100 years in prison. She remains in detention.