(Washington) The United States has deemed the violence committed by the military in Burma against the Rohingya minority to be genocide and crimes against humanity, a US official told AFP on Sunday.
Posted at 9:24 p.m.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled Buddhist-majority Myanmar since 2017 after a military crackdown that now faces genocide proceedings at the UN’s highest court in The Hague.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is due to deliver a speech during a visit Monday to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, where an exhibit titled “Burma’s Path to Genocide” and using a old name for the country is presented.
Mr Blinken said in December during a visit to Malaysia that the United States was “very actively” investigating whether the treatment of the Rohingya community could “constitute genocide”.
About 850,000 Rohingya are in camps in neighboring Bangladesh while another 600,000 members of the community remain in Rakhine State in southwestern Burma.
Myanmar’s case at the International Court of Justice in 2019 was complicated by a military coup last year that toppled Aung San Suu Kyi and her civilian government, sparking mass protests and a bloody crackdown.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has been criticized by human rights groups for her involvement in the Rohingya affair, is now under house arrest and tried by the same generals she defended near The Hague.