The United States has formally determined that violence committed against the Rohingya minority by Myanmar’s military amounts to genocide and crimes against humanity, an official told news agencies.
As per the reports, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is due to officially announce the decision to designate that crackdown a genocide in remarks at the Holocaust Museum in Washington on Monday. In the museum, an exhibit on “Burma’s Path to Genocide” is on display. Burma is the former name for the country.
As per the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Rohingya are one of Myanmar’s many ethnic minorities. He had described the community as “one of, if not the, most discriminated people in the world”.
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Last year in December, during a visit to Malaysia, Blinken had said that the United States was looking “very actively” at whether the treatment of the Rohingya might “constitute genocide.”
In 2018, the State Department had released a report that detailed violence against the Rohingya in western Rakhine state as “extreme, large-scale, widespread, and seemingly geared toward both terrorizing the population and driving out the Rohingya residents.”
In 2017, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims started fleeing across the border into Bangladesh after a deadly crackdown by Myanmar’s army.
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The Rohingya Muslims attempted to escape by sea or on foot after the crackdown, which was described by the United Nations as a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing”.
Around 850,000 Rohingya are languishing in camps in neighbouring Bangladesh, recounting mass killings and rape, while another 600,000 members of the community remain in Rakhine where they report widespread oppression.
A legal designation of genocide – defined by the UN as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” – could be followed by further sanctions and limits on aid, among other penalties against the already-isolated military junta, the New York Times reported.
(With inputs from agencies)
