WASHINGTON – Five years after Myanmar’s military launched a massacre against ethnic Rohingya, displacing nearly a million people from their lands, the United States has concluded that the widespread campaign of rape, crucifixion and drowning and burning of families and children amounted to genocide.
State Secretary Antony J. Blinken is set to announce adoption — a legal designation for crimes US investigators documented in 2018 — at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington on Monday. It will almost certainly lead to additional economic sanctions, restrictions on aid and other sanctions against Myanmar’s military junta, the Tatmadaw.
In February 2021, the Tatmadaw overthrew Myanmar’s civilian government and its nascent democratic efforts, led by Nobel laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. In one of its first official acts, the Biden administration declared that the military takeover was tantamount to a coup d’état.
But an internal debate that began during the Trump administration has so far postponed a decision on whether the State Department should formally accuse Myanmar of committing genocide against the Rohingya, a largely Muslim minority ethnic group.
A senior State Department official confirmed Sunday’s determination of the genocide, after it was reported by Reuters.
“This is an acknowledgment of the atrocities that have taken place and of the ways in which these atrocities are manifesting themselves even today,” said Anurima Bhargava, former chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan panel that makes policy recommendations to the United States. the federal government said on Sunday.
She said that “those who committed this genocide will remain in power”.
The decision also comes as the Biden administration grapples with whether Russia’s President Vladimir V. Putin committed war crimes for his military’s indiscriminate and deadly attacks in Ukraine, including against a maternity hospital and a theater hosting children in the southeastern region of Ukraine. city of Mariupol.
“Given what is happening in the world, where we see what can happen when there is power that is not controlled, it is a really critical time for this kind of determination,” Ms Bhargava said. “Certainly, we would have liked something earlier.”
In the year that Mr. Blinken and his team weigh up an explanation, Myanmar has found itself in a state of constant conflict and economic collapse.
Thousands of civilians from across the country have been killed by the Tatmadaw, sparking a widespread insurgency and a shadow government opposing military control. The fighting has reached every part of Myanmar and the junta has lost control of an area in the northern state of Rakhine, where the most intense atrocities against the Rohingya took place, culminating in August 2017.
At that time, Ms Aung San Suu Kyi was the de facto leader of Myanmar. Though defended for years by the United States and other democratic countries, she defended Myanmar against charges of genocide against the Rohingya during a 2019 appearance at the International Court of Justice, tarnishing her international reputation as a human rights activist.
US diplomats feared that a genocide declaration to protect the Rohingya would further undermine her government’s moves towards democracy. Officials also feared it would fuel hostility to the United States among other populations in Myanmar, as they appear to favor the situation of the Rohingya while thousands of other people suffer under the Tatmadaw.
The Trump administration opposed the statement, in part to maintain an alliance with Myanmar to keep neighboring China out of balance in the region. In 2018, the State Department quietly released a report detailing the planned and coordinated nature of the widespread violence against the Rohingya in Rakhine State, which resulted in massive casualties, including against elected religious leaders.
Understanding the coup in Myanmar
But it did not conspicuously conclude that the Myanmar military had committed genocide or crimes against humanity.
Ms. Aung San Suu Kyi is now one of more than 100 elected Myanmar officials arrested by the country’s military, and faces a staggering 173 years in prison on 17 charges her supporters say were fabricated.
With the statement, the Biden administration seems to have concluded that denouncing human rights violations is more important than supporting Ms Aung San Suu Kyi’s aspirations for democracy. President Biden has made both values pillars of his foreign policy, going so far as to label age-old atrocities committed against Armenians by the Ottoman Empire as genocide in April.
Some US allies — including Canada, France and Turkey — have already labeled the months-long rage against the Rohingya in 2017 as genocide. The Gambia, acting on behalf of the 57-country Organization of Islamic Cooperation, took legal action against Myanmar in 2019 at the International Court of Justice, accusing it of violating the UN Genocide Convention.
International charges of genocide would almost certainly be brought against the military leaders who ordered the atrocities against the Rohingya and who are believed to remain in power in Myanmar. Ms Aung San Suu Kyi’s personal guilt is less certain, Ms Bhargava said, although “we know that those who took over Burma were currently at the wheel of the many atrocities committed in 2017.”
In the shorter term, the Biden administration’s newfound determination would increase pressure on other nations and foreign companies that even indirectly helped the Tatmadaw stay in power.
Two energy giants — Chevron and France-based TotalEnergies — have already pledged to withdraw from an offshore natural gas field in Myanmar, which is a vital source of energy for both the host country and neighboring Thailand. Profits from the field are one of the biggest sources of revenue for Myanmar’s military, and last year Chevron had lobbied the Biden government against imposing economic sanctions on the country’s state oil and gas industry.