Nearly three years after unconscionable atrocities were unleashed upon the Rohingya of Myanmar by their country’s military and security forces, the United States still has not called the crimes perpetrated against this ethnoreligious minority group by their rightful name: Genocide. Jewish World Watch, in coalition with 57 other human rights organizations, sent a petition on July 16 to U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, calling upon the U.S. government to urgently issue a genocide determination in the case of the Rohingya.
The United States has tiptoed around this issue for far too long, failing to exhibit the kind of moral leadership such egregious and ongoing violations demand. The United Nations has warned repeatedly that the Rohingya remain under serious risk of genocide at the hands of a government that “continues to harbor genocidal intent.” Rohingya inside Myanmar — who face not only full-fledged apartheid, but also ongoing armed conflict — continue to flee for their lives. The Trump Administration must not stand idly by in the face of such a threat to human dignity and life. The global pandemic has rendered the Rohingya inside Myanmar, as well as the more than 1 million Rohingya refugees in camps in neighboring Bangladesh, even more vulnerable. We must step up as a nation to ensure that these survivors and what happened to them are not forgotten.
This week’s State Department petition, organized by Refugees International and signed by many international as well as Rohingya-led organizations, urges the U.S. Department of State to “publicly determine that the state of Myanmar has committed genocide and crimes against humanity against the Rohingya people” given that the “evidence of genocide and crimes against humanity is clear and convincing and has been amply documented.”
While the Rohingya have been persecuted for decades, the “clearance operations” unleashed by the Myanmar military (or Tatmadaw) on August 25, 2017 left tens of thousands of Rohingya raped and murdered, and entire villages pillaged and burned to the ground. The crackdown — the culmination of a carefully calculated and long-developing genocidal plan against the Rohingya — also triggered a mass exodus of over 750,000 people to neighboring Bangladesh. Today, nearly 1 million Rohingya remain in Bangladesh, living in sprawling, squalid camps — 60 percent of them children.
The majority of Rohingya survivors are women and children.
Jewish World Watch was one of the first organizations to provide an analysis as to why the atrocities perpetrated against the Rohingya qualify as genocide, and we have called upon the U.S. government many times to make the same determination. In August 2018, a UN panel issued a report presenting credible evidence that genocide took place in Rakhine State. Multiple reputable institutions have corroborated the finding of genocide, including Fortify Rights and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. This finding was also echoed by the Public International Law and Policy Group — the entity commissioned by the State Department to conduct its analysis on what transpired in Myanmar beginning in August of 2017. On December 13, 2018, the House of Representatives even declared the Rohingya crisis a genocide with the near-unanimous passage of H.Res. 1091. Still, the Trump Administration has refrained from using the “g” word, instead opting to use the term “ethnic cleansing.” Ethnic cleansing does not exist as a crime under international law and does not include the “intent to destroy” a group of people simply because of who they are or what they believe — the key ingredient that sets genocide apart from all other crimes.
Why it matters
COVID-19 is preoccupying the world, and international attention for other critical issues has begun to wane. Now is the time to properly recognize the scale and severity of the atrocities committed against the Rohingya. We must trigger a global response proportionate to such a designation. Other processes are currently underway to get at the heart of what the Rohingya have endured — including a dispute before the International Court of Justice on whether Myanmar violated the Genocide Convention. The United States, as a global leader on these issues, must take a stand to show the world that it will not tolerate impunity in the face of such atrocities. Calling the calamitous acts perpetrated against the Rohingya genocide is essential to preventing Myanmar and like-minded regimes from committing further atrocities against civilian populations with gross impunity.
Jewish World Watch is responding to the COVID-19 crisis in the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh – delivering food, medical supplies and vital health information
At a time when many governments are restricting rights in the name of fighting COVID-19, the United States must remind the world that even during a global crisis, justice for certain crimes will prevail. We owe it to the Rohingya women whose babies were snatched from their arms, the Rohingya men and boys who were lined up for massacre, the mothers and daughters who were dragged off and raped, and the hundreds of thousands of children deprived of a future living in the crowded camps in Bangladesh to label what happened to them and their people as the crime of crimes.
What you can do to help the Rohingya
Please lend your voice by signing the petition we have brought to the State Department with our partners. There are no more excuses. The U.S. must step up to join the growing global movement for securing accountability for the Rohingya.
Marketplace for Good
Want to help the Rohingya in a more direct and targeted way? Jewish World Watch has just launched our Marketplace for Good, where you can purchase life-saving products and services that will directly benefit Rohingya inside the camps in Bangladesh, as well as other genocide and mass-atrocity survivor communities around the world.
While living in the camps in Bangladesh has always been challenging for the hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who fled genocide three years ago next month, COVID-19 has made their lives exponentially more difficult. Many refugees have been battling food insecurity since most aid groups pulled out of the camps following a campwide lockdown instituted by the Bangladeshi government to prevent spread. An Internet and cellular blackout has made it very difficult for Rohingya to access reliable information on how to protect themselves from COVID-19, leading to widespread misinformation and panic. The disease has touched down in the camps, placing thousands of lives at grave risk. Jewish World Watch has been ramping up our programs inside the camps to counter the immense threat of hunger and the information vacuum.
With a click of a button, you can now help deliver food to the most vulnerable Rohingya refugee families inside the camps — those who suffered actual physical or sexual abuse by the Myanmar military. You can help pay for speaker-mounted rickshaws to blast COVID-19 preparedness information to all corners of the camps, to inform and empower the Rohingya amidst this enormous threat.
You can now be part of the solution. Please take a moment to explore our Marketplace and connect to our causes in this new and meaningful way. Stay tuned for new additions as we continue to adapt to the needs of our survivor communities during this challenging time, when we — and they — need people like you more than ever.