Lydia Glenn

News Editor

lmg5921@psu.edu

In recent events, The Biden administration has declared that Myanmar’s military has committed genocide against the Rohingya minority. 

Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken, stated “The day will come when those who are responsible for these appalling acts will have to answer for them,” at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. 

The Holocaust Memorial Museum is exhibiting evidence of decades of discrimination and abuse against Rohingya Muslims by Myanmar’s military. 

The violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine State peaked in August of 2017 with a campaign of mass rapes, burnings and drownings against entire families. More than 9,000 people were killed and nearly one million were forced to flee the country. 

This is the eighth time in history that the United States has issued a formal genocide declaration. The declaration was put in motion in hopes that Myanmar’s military-led government will face sanctions and other penalties.

Messages left at the Myanmar Embassy in Washington on Monday were not immediately answered. 

Blinken stated that officials who “bear the greatest responsibility for atrocities” will continue to face severe sanctions. 

Although Blinken talked of sanctions of Myanmar’s military government, he did not mention any penalties against Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Laureate who was Myanmar’s de facto leader at the time of the 2017 massacres. Aung San Suu Kyi rejected any accusations of genocide. Since then, she has been arrested and has remained in detainment since February 2021. 

After her arrest, Myanmar’s military, known as Tatmadaw, has violently cracked down on civilians across the country, killing at least 1,670 people and detaining more than 12,000.

International charges of genocide have been brought against the leaders who ordered the atrocities against the Rohingya. Unfortunately, some of those leaders still remain in power in Myanmar, a fact Blinken pointed out. 

Canada, France, Turkey and other American allies have already declared the 2017 massacres to be genocide. 

Gambia, who is acting on behalf of the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation, filed legal action against Myanmar in 2019 at the International Court of Justice. They accused Myanmar of violating the United Nations’ Genocide Convention. 

The declaration of these acts as a genocide “adds another layer to the already quite damning accusations against Myanmar for atrocities committed against the Rohingya,” stated Oumar Ba. Ba is an Assistant Professor of government at Cornell University and he is an expert on the international crime system. 

Ba added to his statement to The New York Times that “We should, however, be careful not to attribute these crimes solely to the Myanmar’s military junta.” 

Blinken said that the Biden administration would continue to provide humanitarian aid to Rohingya refugees, the majority of whom have fled to Bangladesh. The administration plans to send $1 million to a U.N. fact-finding mission that is gathering evidence on Myanmar’s worst cases of atrocities since 2011. 

U.S. investigators conducted their own inquiry into the violence and interviewed more than 1,000 refugees. Said refugees reported widespread and systematic attacks. 

More than half of the Rohingya interviewed witnessed sexual assaults, and three-quarters said they saw killings at the hands of the military. 

Sadly, one out of every five Rohingya witnessed a mass casualty event where more than 100 people were killed or injured, which was stated in the report from U.S. investigators. 

“The evidence also points to a clear intent behind these mass atrocities – the intent to destroy Rohingya,” stated Blinken. 

The State Department stopped short of declaring the Myanmar atrocities to be genocide when findings were released in 2018. This was to maintain an alliance with the government and keep neighboring China off balance in the region. 

More than two years later, at the end of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared the systematic abuse and detention of Muslim Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region of China to be an act of genocide. 

The Biden administration has also resisted declaring atrocities in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray province to be a genocide. Blinken has warned of cases of ethnic cleansing against civilians there.

Just last week, Blinken believed that war crimes had been committed by Russian forces in their invasion of Ukraine, but said investigators still had not concluded that officially.

Still, Blinken mentioned both conflicts in his speech on Monday at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. 

Shortly after his speech, the State Department also announced that it had designated Sudan’s Central Reserve Police as a human rights violator after accusations of rape, torture and other abuses against pro-democracy protesters surfaced.

“Over the recent weeks, as I’ve spoken with diplomats from around the world about Ukraine, I’ve also heard a constant refrain. Many of them say: ‘Yes, we stand with the people of Ukraine. But we must also stand with the people suffering atrocities in other places.’” 

At one point in Blinken’s speech, he stopped reading from his notes and said, “It’s painful to even read these accounts. I ask each and every one of you listening: Put yourself in their place. Imagine this was your own child.” Blinken made these remarks after detailing gruesome accounts from refugees. 

Blinken’s speech came nearly 89 years to the day after the opening of the Nazis’ first concentration camp, in Dachau, Germany, where his stepfather, Samuel Pisar was held. Pisar was later liberated by American troops at the end of WWII, but Pisar’s experiences helped to shape Blinken’s ideals and pushed him into advocating for human rights and democracy in foreign policy. 

In one of Blinken’s closing statements, he remarked, “That pain ripples outward, from the individual victims and survivors to loved ones, friends, to entire communities. We also must remember to see these individuals as more than victims, but rather as whole human beings.”