The US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced on Monday that the Myanmar military committed genocide and crimes against humanity against the country’s minority Rohingya community. The formal declaration was made at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum by Antony Blinken who called the attacks against the Rohingya by the military ‘widespread and systematic’. He said that the evidence pointed out a clear intent to destroy the mainly Muslim minority, reports Reuters.
Antony Blinken said that the designation of the acts of Myanmar military against Rohingya as genocide was based on a review by the US state department that included documents gathered by human rights organizations and independent research by the US.
The US recognition has come after earlier two efforts by the US state department over the last four years about the atrocities which was earlier referred to as ‘ethnic cleansing’.
It is the eighth time US has issued a formal designation of ‘genocide’ anywhere in the world. Earlier, massacres in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Iraq, and Darfur, Islamic State’s attacks on Yazidis and other minorities, and China’s treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority has been declared as genocide by the US.
More than 7.30 lakh Rohingya people fled Myanmar to Bangladesh after the military crackdown started in the Rakhine state in 2017. Currently, over a million Rohingya people live in refugee camps of Bangladesh waiting for repatriation to their homeland in the Rakhine province of Myanmar.
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