Two years later, U.S. says Rohingya persecutors being held accountable
Two years after Myanmar’s military began a deadly crackdown on minority Rohingya Muslims, U.S. officials said the Trump administration is holding the perpetrators accountable.
Through sanctions and other pressure, Myanmar’s powerful military leaders are feeling the sting of U.S. anger over the atrocities that began in 2017, the officials argue. But the U.S. has calibrated its reaction to avoid a serious rollback in democratic progress in the Southeast Asian country of Myanmar, also known as Burma, while maintaining political influence there in the face of competition from China.
“Justice and accountability are essential for Burma’s efforts to build a strong, peaceful, secure and prosperous democracy,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said in a statement released Saturday to mark the two-year anniversary.
“This is a long game,” added a State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity to explain the U.S. view.
The Trump administration’s claims of success in Myanmar are unlikely to appease human rights advocates. Many such activists want President Donald Trump and his aides to do more to bring Myanmar’s leaders to justice, including by labeling what happened a “genocide.”
The president himself has spoken only once about the Rohingya crisis in a public setting, asking a survivor visiting him in July “where” he was referring to.
And while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has greenlighted sanctions and other pressures on Myanmar, he has resisted designating the situation a “genocide.” Using the legally loaded term could mean losing access to Myanmar’s leaders and reduce America’s ability to influence events there — including the future treatment of the Rohingya, U.S. officials said.
The U.S. is calling what happened an “ethnic cleansing,” a term with little meaning in international law.
A second State Department official said Pompeo is juggling priorities when it comes to Myanmar, with the end goal being “to help the Rohingya, to help keep a civilian-led government in power and to keep the Chinese from taking over and making things even worse.”
The Rohingya are a Muslim minority in Buddhist-dominated Myanmar that has faced persecution for decades. In 1982, they were effectively stripped of their citizenship, rendering them stateless.
Over the past decade, Myanmar has transitioned from a military-led government to one with partial civilian control. The civilian leader is Aung San Suu Kyi, a longtime democracy activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner. But the democratic transition has done little for the Rohingya.
In late August 2017, the Myanmar military launched an operation that killed thousands of Rohingya Muslims and pushed more than 700,000 across the border into Bangladesh. Most of those refugees remain in camps in Bangladesh, too scared to return to Myanmar.
The Myanmar military said it was responding to a Rohingya attack that killed several security officers, but there are signs the operation was planned and, in any case, a vast overreaction.
The U.S. has spent around $542 million on aid for the Rohingya and affected populations in Myanmar and Bangladesh, making it the top international donor. The U.S. has also leveled economic sanctions on several Myanmar security officials.
Last month, the U.S. imposed visa sanctions on Myanmar’s top military commander, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, and three other top generals for their roles in the Rohingya crisis. Such sanctions mean the people targeted cannot visit the U.S., nor can their immediate relatives, including their children.
A pro-military protest against the visa sanctions in August was a sign that the U.S. move had upset the generals.
State Department officials said they’ve noticed some softening in tone against the Rohingya among Buddhists who lived alongside them in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. The two communities have had significant tensions, but the exodus of so many Rohingya has hurt the economy for the people left in Rakhine State, one reason the Buddhists may now regret seeing their neighbors flee.
The August 2017 launch of the crackdown on the Rohingya coincided with the release of a key report by a panel led by the late Kofi Annan, the former U.N. secretary-general. The report laid out ways to improve the lives of people in impoverished Rakhine State.
U.S. officials said one positive development over the past two years is that the Myanmar government appears to be following the report’s recommendation that it invest more in infrastructure, education and health care in Rakhine State.
In her statement, Ortagus encouraged Myanmar to keep implementing the commission’s ideas, saying they “offer the best path forward for Burma and all the people of Rakhine State, as well as all those who fled.”