Lawmakers demand...

Lawmakers demand Pompeo take a stand on 'genocide' in Myanmar

By NAHAL TOOSI

U.S. lawmakers are demanding that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo take a stand on whether Myanmar’s military committed genocide against Rohingya Muslims, arguing that a new State Department report cataloguing the atrocities against the minority group is not enough.

House and Senate members from both political parties had repeatedly urged Pompeo to release the report. He quietly did so this week, with almost no public notice. But, to the surprise of many observers, the document failed to declare whether Myanmar was liable for genocide or even crimes against humanity, both terms with potential legal ramifications.

Sens. Todd Young (R-Indiana) and Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) wrote a letter to Pompeo on Tuesday requesting that he provide Congress with a “formal legal determination” about the actions of Myanmar’s military.

The military’s crackdown last year left thousands of Rohingya dead and forced some 700,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh, where they now live in crowded refugee camps.

“For the United States to continue to be [a] force for good … we must not hesitate to call atrocities like those committed by the Burmese military by name, identify the perpetrators and take the necessary steps to hold them accountable,” the senators wrote. Myanmar is also known as Burma.

Leaders of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which held a hearing about the Rohingya crisis on Wednesday, have also urged Pompeo to take a stand, with some making it clear they view what happened as a genocide.

“To all who have met with Rohingya refugees, who have heard these accounts, it is clear that these crimes amount to genocide,” said the committee’s chairman, Rep. Ed Royce (R-Calif.). “Defining these atrocities for what they are is critical to building international public awareness — and support — to stop them.”

Rep. Eliot Engel of New York, the ranking Democrat on the committee, warned that, so far, the “State Department is using language that lets perpetrators off the hook.”

“We should use our global stature to call this crime what it is — clearly a crime against humanity and likely also genocide — then rally a strong international commitment to fully fund the latest appeal for humanitarian assistance,” Engel said.

Rohingya Muslims have been persecuted for decades in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. The government in Myanmar claims the Rohingya are illegal migrants from what is now Bangladesh, even though the community has lived in Myanmar for generations.

The Rohingya have faced occasional violence; Myanmar also effectively stripped them of citizenship in 1982. But last year’s crackdown was the worst in memory.

The State Department investigation, which surveyed more than 1,000 survivors, describes a vicious mass slaughter of Rohingya by Myanmar’s security forces. Numerous women were raped and villages destroyed. Children were often thrown into fires or drowned.

It’s not clear why Pompeo has been so hesitant to use terms such as “genocide” or “crimes against humanity” when it comes to the Rohingya.

His predecessor as secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, declared that Myanmar’s leaders had committed “ethnic cleansing,” and a State Department spokesman earlier this week said the report’s findings support that label. But “ethnic cleansing” does not carry the weight in international law that “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” do.

There are factions within the State Department, notably the East Asian and Pacific Affairs bureau, that have argued against being too harsh on Myanmar. The U.S. has, after all, been trying to improve its relationship with the Asian country, hoping to coax it away from China’s sphere of influence.

There could also be legal concerns that using a term such as “genocide” or “crimes against humanity” could obligate the U.S. to intervene somehow to help Rohingya in Myanmar. But some scholars say that concern may be overblown because the U.S. can define intervention how it chooses.

While the U.S. traditionally has been careful about declaring a mass atrocity a genocide, it has done so on occasion. The Bush administration said the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region was a genocide. The Obama administration declared that the Islamic State committed genocide against Yazidis, Christians, Shiite Muslims and other groups — a declaration that the Trump administration publicly endorsed.

The Myanmar government was once completely controlled by the military, but in recent years it has incorporated an element of civilian oversight. The de facto civilian leader is Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate who spent years under house arrest for demanding democracy.

Suu Kyi has no control of the military even now, but she has also said little about the violence against the Rohingya. Still, there are some lawmakers, in particular Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who have warned against being too tough on Myanmar or Suu Kyi for fear it could hamper Myanmar’s democratic reforms.