The move will bring greater scrutiny on the Myanmar military, says a Rohingya activist.

UPDATED at 4:30 P.M. EDT on 2022-03-21

The United States has declared as a genocide the Myanmar military’s 2017 deadly crackdown against the Rohingya Muslim minority that killed thousands and forced an exodus to neighboring Bangladesh, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced Monday.

Human rights activists welcomed the move as overdue and essential for stepping up pressure on the military, and making it accountable for crimes against humanity. According to American investigators, the military was responsible for atrocities including mass killings, gang rapes, mutilations, crucifixions, and the burning and drowning of children.

>> Myanmar army joins brutal list of US-recognized genocides

Blinken said that as of Monday, the United States had concluded that other than the Holocaust, genocide had occurred eight times – the eighth time against the Rohingya.

“I have determined that the members of the Burmese military committed genocide and crimes against humanity against Rohingya,” Blinken said in remarks at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington on Monday.

“The attack against Rohingya was widespread and systematic, which is crucial for reaching a determination of crimes against humanity.”

Blinken said that among the sources for the determination was a joint report published in November 2017 by the museum’s Simon Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide and the human rights group Fortify Rights. The report was based on a survey of more than a thousand Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh, all of whom were displaced by the violence in 2016 or 2017.

“Three quarters of those interviewed said that they personally witnessed members of the military kill someone. More than half witnessed acts of sexual violence. One in five witnessed a mass casualty event, that is, the killing or injuring of more than 100 people in a single incident,” Blinken said.

“These percentages matter. They demonstrate that these abuses were not isolated cases. … This demonstrates the military’s intent went beyond ethnic cleansing to the actual destruction of Rohingya.”

 

Following Blinken’s announcement, New York-based Human Rights Watch said that the U.S. needed to coordinate its “long overdue action” with other countries to pursue justice for the mass crimes committed against the Rohingya.

“The U.S. government should couple its condemnations of Myanmar’s military with action,” John Sifton, Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement. “For too long, the U.S. and other countries have allowed Myanmar’s generals to commit atrocities with few real consequences.”

The rights watchdog said that to deter future abuses, Washington should impose tougher sanctions on the foreign currency revenues the Myanmar military makes from oil and gas revenues, and increase the enforcement of existing sanctions.

“The military utilizes the bulk of these revenues to support its expenditures, which include extensive purchases of arms and attack aircraft from Russia, China, and other countries,” the group said in its statement.

Similarly, the U.K.-based Burma Human Rights Network said Washington’s recognition of the Rohingya genocide was overdue but greatly welcomed.

“By formally declaring a genocide took place against the Rohingya, the U.S. is firmly acknowledging the scope and horror of the junta’s violence,” the group’s Executive Director Kyaw Win said in a statement Monday.

“This declaration must be followed by further action. The junta must be completely cut off from the world, deprived of cash flow and weapons, and resisted until they fall from power.”

 

Years-long patterns

In 2018, U.N. investigators found that Myanmar’s military carried out mass killings and gang rapes of Muslim Rohingya with “genocidal intent.” The rights group Doctors Without Borders has estimated that at least 6,700 Rohingya died in the 2017 crackdown.

But to date, the U.S. government had described it as “ethnic cleansing” – not using the “genocide” designation, which carries more legal weight.

Under Article 2 of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide is defined as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

The atrocities were committed during the tenure of the civilian government of Aung San Suu Kyi who in December 2019 defended the military against allegations of genocide at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The Nobel Peace Prize winner and one-time democracy icon now languishes in prison – toppled by the same military in its Feb. 1, 2021 coup.

 

 

Myanmar, a country of 54 million people about the size of France, recognizes 135 official ethnic groups, with majority Burmans accounting for about 68 percent of the population. The Rohingya ethnicity is not recognized.

The Rohingya have faced decades of discrimination in Myanmar and are effectively stateless. They have been denied citizenship. Burmese administrations have refused to call them “Rohingya” and instead use the term “Bengali.”

The 2017 crackdown was triggered by a Rohingya insurgent group’s attack on police outposts in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, leading to a disproportionate military response that caused about 740,000 Rohingya civilians to flee to neighboring Bangladesh – what the military and Aung San Suu Kyi, then the civilian ruler of Myanmar, called a “clearance operation.”

But a State Department-commissioned investigation found that the Rohingya were in a highly precarious situation in the months and years leading up to the attacks on the police stations, and their situation was fast deteriorating, according to Daniel Fullerton of Public International Law & Policy Group, who managed the probe.

“The collected data revealed years-long patterns of gradually worsening violence and widespread human rights violations targeted against the Rohingya, which began to dramatically increase in severity and frequency in the year leading up to the major attacks of 2017,” Fullerton said in testimony at a U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom hearing last May.

The military’s retributory attacks for the Rohingya insurgents’ August 2017 assault on police posts was swift – and brutal.

“These attacks included brutal large-scale ground assaults, indiscriminate shootings, mass killings, executions, crucifixions, rapes and gang rapes, beatings, mutilations, the burning and drowning of children, the widespread destruction of Rohingya homes and villages, among many other brutal acts,” investigator Fullerton said.

“There were credible reports of Rohingya community leaders being gathered into buildings and burned alive, of imams being beaten and having their beards burned off, and of Rohingya religious or community leaders being shot or stabbed in front of the members of their village. Symbolic burnings of mosques, madrassas, and Korans were widely documented,” he said.

Blinken spoke of the planning that went into pre-attack preparations – such as military personnel “blocking exits to villages before they began their attacks, [and] sinking boats full of men, women and children as they tried to flee to Bangladesh.”

He said that the “immeasurable pain wrought by every heinous abuse” ripples outward from the individual victims to the survivors and to the wider community.

Therefore, he said, the U.S continues to provide significant support to help meet the humanitarian needs of Rohingya and all affected by their persecution. He said Washington had provided nearly $ 1.6 billion since 2017 for Rohingya refugees’ shelter and education, specialized mental health and for the psychosocial support for the victims of trauma.

‘Generosity of Bangladesh’

Blinken said he wanted to “recognize the exceptional generosity of Bangladesh” in hosting over 900,000 Rohingya refugees, and the South Asian country’s recent efforts to vaccinate this stateless community against COVID-19.

In Dhaka, Bangladesh’s Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan Kamal on Monday welcomed the Biden administration’s decision to declare the military’s 2017 oppression of the Rohingya a genocide.

“The U.S. announcement would help restore the civil rights of the Rohingya in Myanmar and speed up their repatriation,” he told BenarNews.

“The international community and all people should know about the genocide and other inhuman atrocities committed against the Rohingya in Myanmar.”

In no-man’s land on the Bangladesh-Myanmar border, Dil Mohammad, a Rohingya leader, said Washington’s declaration was a positive development.

“The massacre of the Rohingya in Myanmar is a classic example of genocide. The international community believes it but they did not officially recognize it,” the Rohingya leader in Bandarban district told BenarNews.

“If the international community speaks in one voice against the brutality of the military, the decades-old genocide and atrocities targeting the Rohingya would cease and our return to our homeland be ensured.”

 

The designation of the Rohingya expulsion campaign as genocide follows the January 2021 decision by Blinken’s predecessor, Mike Pompeo, who determined that China’s mass incarceration and coercive birth control policies toward the Uyghur minority in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region constituted genocide.

The State Department has since the Cold War recognized genocides in Bosnia (1993), Rwanda (1994), Iraq (1995), Darfur (2004), and areas under the control of ISIS (2016 and 2017), according to Holocaust Museum data.

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Residents say the monks are helping to form the groups and even receiving weapons training.

Ultranationalist Buddhist clergymen, including outspoken monk Wirathu, are throwing their support behind the pro-junta Pyu Saw Htee militia in its fight against prodemocracy paramilitaries in Myanmar’s Sagaing region, including by undergoing weapons training clad in saffron robes, residents said Monday.

Members of the prodemocracy People’s Defense Force (PDF) paramilitary group have demonstrated some of the fiercest resistance to junta troops and their militia-backed offensive in Sagaing since the military seized power in a Feb. 1, 2021, coup. The military is better equipped and has embarked on a scorched earth campaign in the region with the help of the Pyu Saw Htee, but residents say that a new tool has been added to its arsenal: hardline monks from the Ma Ba Tha group.

A video recently went viral on social media in Myanmar purportedly showing members of the Ma Ba Tha on a “tour” of several pro-junta villages in Sagaing in support of forming Pyu Saw Htee units. The video appears to show the monks helping to train people and delivering Buddhist sermons.

In one clip, Ma Ba Tha leaders known as “sayadaws” — including Wah Thawa, Wira Raza, and Pandita — appear to be holding guns in their hands and telling residents that the PDFs are killing people and setting fire to villages. One monk is heard to say, “Wirathu himself visited the villages yesterday and raised the morale of residents.”

Sources told RFA’s Myanmar Service that the footage was filmed on Feb. 27 at the Yadanar Kan Myint Htei Monastery during a Pyu Saw Htee training camp graduation ceremony in Taze township’s Kabe village. They confirmed that pro-junta monks have been “carrying guns” and “taking part in some of the fighting” in the region.

An eyewitness from Taze’s Kyunle village told RFA that the Pyu Saw Htee groups were “led by Ma Ba Tha monks” and that “Wirathu is involved.”

“There are Pyu Saw Htee and Ma Ba Tha monks,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“These monks are not local monks. All the local monks are gone. They have fled to safety. Some villagers said they saw Wirathu. [Such actions are] totally against the rules observed by the [Buddhist clergy] and we condemn it.”

According to the eyewitness, nearly half of the 350 houses in Kyunle are pro-military and mostly Pyu Saw Htee. Residents who do not support the Pyu Saw Htee have “fled their homes,” he added.

Another resident of the area who declined to be named said the armed monks had summoned Taze’s inhabitants to the Yadanar Kan Myint Htei Monastery and Kyunle’s Lay Thar Monastery and told them not to accept the PDF.

“Since the local monks fled the Yadanar Kan Myint Htei Monastery, they took over the place and tried to turn the villagers against the PDFs,” he said, adding that “all the monks” at the Lay Thar Monastery are junta supporters.

 

Pro-military ‘from the beginning’

 

Tayza Nanda, an abbot of the pro-democracy Spring Revolutionary Monk Network in Taze, told RFA that the Ma Ba Tha sayadaws are working in the region with the support of the military.

“These monks have been backed by the military from the beginning,” he said. “What they are saying and doing now is all in line with Wirathu’s preaching and now they are taking up arms. They are [junta chief Sen. Gen.] Min Aung Hlaing’s followers who support evil.

“Real monks can’t even preach to those who carry weapons, let alone carry arms themselves,” Tayza Nanda added.

RFA could not independently confirm allegations that Wirathu is involved with the Pyu Saw Htee. Attempts to contact Wirathu went unanswered Monday.

Junta Deputy Information Minister Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun confirmed to RFA that militia groups had been formed “to protect these villages from PDF attacks.”

“Since the PDFs are threatening villages that do not support them, we have formed militia groups there to provide security for these villages,” he said. “We have not provided monks with weapons. There is no reason to do that.”

Zaw Min Tun noted that he had never “said a word before about the PDF-supporting monks who reside there and are carrying arms,” without providing details about his claims.

A member of the Taze PDF told RFA that on March 6 his group attacked a Pyu Saw Htee unit led by sayadaw Wah Thawa in Kabe village, and that the unit “fled with many wounded.”

“Wah Thawa is no longer in the area. He has fled to Kanbalu. Wah Thawa, who was seen in the footage with a pistol and bullet-proof vest, was the leader,” he said. “Monks hold even more authority in rural areas than village administrators, so [the junta] tried to use the monks to do their organizing of Pyu Saw Htee units.”

The Taze PDF member said the Pyu Saw Htee and the Ma Ba Tha group attacked small villages in the area, including Kyunle and Kabe, and had “forced the locals to join them.”

 

Using religion for political gain

 

Rajadhamma, an abbot with the Buddhist Mandalay Sangha Union, said Wirathu had cultivated close ties in the past with the monk leaders of the Pyu Saw Htee group in Sagaing — Wah Thawa, Wira Raza and Pandita.

“All three of them used to live close to Wirathu in the past. We can even say that they are the actual leaders of this group,” he said. “Now they are taking weapons training for killing others. Holding guns and learning how to shoot is completely inappropriate for our religion.”

Ultranationalist Buddhist monk Wirathu was charged by the deposed National League for Democracy government with sedition in May 2019, but the charges were dropped by the junta in September 2021 and he was set free. He is currently touring towns in Mandalay and Bago regions, and witnesses say the military has provided him security.

Political analyst Than Soe Naing told RFA that reports of the Ma Ba Tha’s involvement with the Pyu Saw Htee suggest the militia is using religion for political gain in Myanmar, a Buddhist-majority country.

“The majority of people in our country are Buddhists and they all love and respect the monks, so [the military is trying] to use the monks for their benefit,” he said. “We have never heard about an entire group of monks taking up arms training.”

Myanmar’s military has killed at least 1,672 civilians since the coup and arrested nearly 9,625 others — mostly during peaceful anti-junta protests.

According to a report issued last week by Data for Myanmar, a research group that documents the impact of conflict on communities, pro-junta forces have burned more than 6,700 houses to the ground in 186 locations in nine regions and states since the military coup. Last month, the group said most of the junta-sponsored arson had occurred in Sagaing region.

Last month, a post went viral on social media that allegedly showed a leaked document from the junta’s Northwest Military Command ordering the delivery of more than 2,000 weapons to 77 pro-junta militia groups and calling for the formation of more militia units in remote villages in Sagaing. RFA was unable to independently confirm the authenticity of the document.

Reported by RFA’s Myanmar Service. Translated by Khin Maung Nyane. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.

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