The mass killings of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar amount to genocide, a law firm hired by the US State department to investigate the crisis said in its report released on Monday (Dec 3).
Based on interviews with more than 1,000 Rohingya refugees, the Public International Law and Policy Group’s report has called for the establishment of a criminal tribunal to bring those responsible to justice.
Analysts say the report raises pressure on the Trump administration to impose harsher sanctions against Myanmar. The US has so far declared the violence as “ethnic cleansing” and not as genocide.
The Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Ed Royce, said the Trump administration should classify the killings as genocide.
“The deliberate campaign of murder, intimidation and displacement against the Rohingya by Burma’s security forces clearly meets legal standards for genocide,” said Mr Royce in a statement released to the media.
“It’s long past time the US call these atrocities what they are,” he added.
The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Public International Law and Policy Group too released statements saying the evidence indicates that Myanmar committed genocide.
The PILPG’s report was commissioned by the State Department and parts of it were released in September. However, the conclusion reached by the group based on the interviews is independent of the State Department.
“A common theme across nearly all interviews were public, brutal, and symbolic attacks against Rohingya leaders and Islamic symbols,” the report said. “Such evidence has been used by international courts to determine genocidal intent.”
The report called for the urgent establishment of an accountability mechanism or it should be referred to the International Criminal Court.
US media reports suggest the Congress could vote as soon as next week on a resolution stating that the Rohingya were victims of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Democratic Senator Ed Markey noted that the report's analysis was based on data the State Department also had, "yet we don’t have any policy announcement from Secretary Pompeo on a genocide determination. What is the reason for this silence?"
Since August 2017, thousands of Rohingyas have been killed and more than 700,000 were forced to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh as the result of, what many investigations have called, “a highly organised and systematic campaign against the ethnic minority carried out by Burmese military and security forces”.
Myanmar authorities have all along denied the allegations of ethnic cleansing or genocide and repeatedly said: “Accusations are very easy to make, but we are not involved in anything at all.”