persecution
US government to classify atrocities in Myanmar as genocide
Rohingya children displaced from Myanmar wait for food in a refugee camp in Bangladesh. Photo: Dar Yasin/AP/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
Members of the Rohingya Muslim minority are being brutally persecuted in Myanmar, and hundreds of thousands have already fled. Now the US government wants to call their fate a genocide.
The US government wants to formally classify the atrocities against the Muslim minority of the Rohingya in Myanmar as genocide.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will make the announcement during a speech at the Holocaust Museum in Washington this Monday, a US government official said, confirming media reports. Human rights groups have long urged the US government to call the atrocities genocide. The governments of US President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump have so far avoided this step. However, they have imposed a large number of sanctions on Myanmar.
700,000 displaced
The Rohingya are being brutally persecuted in their home country of Myanmar. Myanmar’s military is said to have murdered thousands of people, raped women and children, leveled villages and burned people alive in their homes. More than 700,000 people fled to neighboring Bangladesh in 2017, fearing attacks by the military in the predominantly Buddhist country. They now live there in overcrowded camps.
Almost two years ago, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ordered Myanmar (formerly Burma) to immediately protect the Rohingya in an interim ruling. At that time, the then head of government and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, firmly rejected all allegations before the highest UN court. She was imprisoned after a 2021 military coup. The internationally unrecognized military leadership in Myanmar has also vehemently denied the allegations. The main proceedings in The Hague will probably drag on for years.