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.
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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”.
A 2018 State Department report, cited by CNN, described violence against Rohingya in Rakhine State in western Burma as “extreme, large-scale, widespread, and apparently aimed at both to terrorize the population and to drive out the Rohingya residents”.
About 850,000 Rohingya are in camps in neighboring Bangladesh while another 600,000 members of the community remain in Rakhine State.
More penalties
If genocide is legally designated against Burma, the country could face additional sanctions and restrictions aimed at international aid, among other sanctions against the military junta, argued the New York Times.
The United States has imposed a series of sanctions on leaders of the February 1, 2021 military coup who, during the pre-coup democratic transition, were charged with crimes against humanity for the brutal campaign against the Rohingyas.
Burma’s case before the International Court of Justice in 2019 was complicated by the putsch that toppled Aung San Suu Kyi and her civilian government, triggering mass protests and bloody repression.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has been criticized by human rights groups for her involvement in the Rohingya crackdown, is now under house arrest and tried by the same generals she defended in The Hague .
On March 15, the UN denounced mass killings in Burma, accusing the army of possible crimes against humanity and war crimes since the military coup.
In a report covering the period following the putsch, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights called on the international community to take immediate measures to stem the spiral of violence in Burma.
Some of the “systematic and widespread violations and abuses of human rights” attributed to the Burmese army “could be assimilated to war crimes and crimes against humanity”, estimated the UN, which nevertheless for the habit of leaving it to the courts to decide.
Anti-junta militias took up arms against the generals who stifle the protest in blood, with more than 1,600 civilians killed and 11,000 arrested, according to a local human rights association.
The UN report for its part mentions 1,600 people killed and more than 12,500 arrested. In addition, at least 440,000 others have been displaced and 14 million need urgent humanitarian aid, but the delivery of this assistance remains largely blocked by the army, according to the UN.