US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will publicly announce the determination that human rights groups have advocated for years Monday at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Reuters was the first to report the government’s acknowledgment of the genocide.
So far, the US has not declared the atrocities – including mass killings and rapes – committed against the Muslim minority Rohingya population in 2017 to be genocide. The violence forced nearly a million people to flee, and the United Nations recommended that senior military officials press charges of genocide.
“I applaud the Biden administration for finally recognizing the atrocities against the Rohingya as genocide. While this determination is long overdue, it is nonetheless a powerful and critically important step in holding this brutal regime to account,” Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement Sunday .
America, said the Oregon Democrat, “must lead the world to make it clear that atrocities like this should never be allowed to go unnoticed, wherever they occur.”
A US State Department report, tacitly released in 2018, found that violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state was “extreme, large-scale, widespread, and apparently designed to terrorize both the populace and the to evict Rohingya residents”. sanctioned a number of Myanmar military officials, including Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing, for their role in perpetrating these human rights abuses.
This story has been updated with comments from Sen. Jeff Merkley.