The US government has decided to formally rule that Myanmar’s military committed genocide and crimes against humanity against the country’s minority Rohingya population.
The announcement will be made by secretary of state Anthony Blinken at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC on Monday, reported Reuters.
The museum currently includes an exhibit that showcases the plight of the Rohingyas.
The formal decision comes after Mr Blinken reportedly ordered his own “legal and factual analysis” which concluded that the Myanmar army is committing genocide.
Mr Blinken will also announce $1m of additional funding for the Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM), a UN body based in Geneva gathering evidence for potential future prosecutions.
More than 700,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled from the Buddhist-majority country, mostly to refugee camps in Bangladesh, since August 2017.
Myanmar’s defence and security personnel have been accused of excesses against the community, including mass rapes, arson and killings, forcing them to flee the country.
Days after president Joe Biden took oath last year, Myanmar’s military had seized power from the democratically elected government in February, and detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi along with several of her allies.
The coup came after allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 elections as the ruling NLD secured a landslide victory.
Myanmar has denied any allegations of committing genocide against the Rohingyas.
Prior to this, the US government had stopped short of declaring the atrocities against the Rohingyas as genocide.
A state department report released in 2018 found widespread violence against them in the Rakhine state, reported CNN.
The report highlighted the violence as “extreme, large-scale, widespread, and seemingly geared toward both terrorising the population and driving out the Rohingya residents.”
A senior state department official said on Sunday that the move by the Biden administration is “really signaling to the world and especially to victims and survivors within the Rohingya community and more broadly that the United States recognises the gravity of what’s happening.”
Democrat senator Jeff Merkley, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement: “I applaud the Biden administration for finally recognising the atrocities committed against the Rohingya as genocide.”
“While this determination is long overdue, it is nevertheless a powerful and critically important step in holding this brutal regime to account.”
The US has earlier used the term “genocide” six times since the Cold War to describe massacres in Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, Darfur, ISIS attacks on Yazidis and other minorities, and China’s treatment of Uyghurs and other minority communities in the country’s Xinjiang region.
