A Rohingya mother watches as her 12-year-old son is forced to lie facedown and soldiers stomp on his head and neck. In the village of Maung Nu in Myanmar, soldiers blocked people trying to escape before the military began its attack. Soldiers sank boats full of Rohingya men, women and children as they tried to flee to Bangladesh. In brutal campaigns conducted against the Rohingya Muslim population in Myanmar in 2016 and 2017, villages were burned, people were tortured and killed, women and children were raped.
“The attack against Rohingya was widespread and systematic,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said Monday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. He laid out the devastating details that were part of the fact-finding and analysis the State Department conducted before concluding officially that members of the Myanmar military are responsible for genocide against the Rohingya population, one of the most oppressed ethnic groups in the world.
The military’s attacks in 2016 forced nearly 100,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. In 2017, attacks killed more than 9,000 Rohingya, and forced more than 740,000 to seek refuge in Bangladesh, according to Blinken. And, as he pointed out, crimes against the Rohingya continue. The Rohingya are treated like undocumented immigrants even when they have been born and lived in Myanmar for decades or come from families who have been there a century or more. They are treated like second-class citizens — and have been the target of brutal violence for years. Blinken compared the 1982 law that effectively excluded the Rohingya from citizenship and denied them full political rights to “the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of their German citizenship.”
