On Monday, the United States will officially declare the Burmese army's campaign against the Rohingya as genocide, a measure received positively but prudently by that Muslim minority.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled Burma, a predominantly Buddhist population, following a military repression in 2017 that is the subject of a trial for genocide before the International Court of Justice in The Hague (ICJ), the highest jurisdiction of the United Nations.
The head of US diplomacy, Antony Blinken, will announce the decision to consider this violent campaign to be genocide during a Monday visit to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, where an exhibition entitled “Burma's Road to Genocide” opens.
Blinken said in December during a visit to Malaysia that Washington was “very actively” seeking to determine whether treatment of the Rohingya community could “constitute genocide.”
A report published by the State Department in 2018, quoted by CNN, described violence against Rohingya in southwestern Burma's Rakhine State as “extreme, large-scale, widespread and apparently aimed both at terrorizing the population and expelling Rohingya residents.”
Around 850,000 Rohingya languish in camps in neighbouring Bangladesh, while another 600,000 members of the community remain in Rakhine.
“It should have been done a long time ago, but I think that the US decision will help the Rohingya in the process before the ICJ,” said a refugee from that minority in one of the camps where the people displaced by the crisis live, near Sittwe, capital of Rakhine state.
Thin Thin Hlaing, a Rohingya rights activist, also welcomed Washington's decision. “I am sorry to live in the midst of a blackout, but today we see a light because they recognize our suffering,” he told AFP.
“I will never forget the painful stories I heard in 2017 from members of the Rohingya community in Burma and Bangladesh: stories of violence and crimes against humanity,” U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley said Sunday night on Twitter.
“It's good to see the government take this long-awaited step to hold this brutal regime accountable, something I've been working for years,” he added of Washington's decision.
- More sanctions -
If legally qualified as genocide, Burma could face additional sanctions and restrictions on international aid, including penalties against the military junta that governs the country, the New York Times said.
The United States has already imposed a series of sanctions against Burmese leaders and, like other Western countries, has long restricted arms exports to the Asian nation's military.
Military forces were already accused even before the military coup of February 1, 2021, of crimes against humanity for abuses against the Rohingya.
The case opened by the Gambia against Burma at the International Court of Justice in 2019 was complicated by the coup in February last year in which the military overthrew the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi, prompting massive protests and bloody repression.
Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who faced criticism from human rights organizations for her role in the Rohingya case, remains under house arrest and is tried by the same generals she defended in The Hague.
On March 15, a report by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the post-coup period accused the Burmese military of possible war crimes and crimes against humanity since the coup action and called on the international community to take immediate action.
fff-sw/caw/cn/ybl/lch/pz/llu/rsr