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Pompeo pressured to declare Rohingya Muslim killings in Myanmar a ‘genocide’

Myanmar local officials inspect the abandoned boat of Rohingya Muslims washed ashore in Kyauktan township south of Yangon on November 16, 2018. (AFP photo)

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is being pressured by lawmakers and activists to declare that Myanmar’s military is committing genocide against Rohingya Muslims.

Ohio House Representative Steve Chabot, a Republican, has sponsored a resolution over the matter that is expected to easily pass as early as next week.

It would declare that Rohingya are victims of genocide and crimes against humanity.

“The deliberate campaign of murder, intimidation and displacement against the Rohingya by Burma’s security forces clearly meets legal standards for genocide,” California Representative Ed Royce, the Republican chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Politico in a statement. “It’s long past time the U.S. call these atrocities what they are.”

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Public International Law & Policy Group have also called for dubbing Rohingya crackdown genocide.

The Trump administration has so far declined to take a stance on the matter.

“By not acting, the US government is making itself complicit in the genocide of the Rohingya,” said Simon Billenness, the executive director of the International Campaign for the Rohingya.

Since August 2017, Myanmar’s armed forces, backed by Buddhist extremist mobs, have launched an intensified crackdown against the Muslim community in Myanmar’s Rakhine State.

Thousands of Rohingya Muslims have been killed, and those who fled are now living in severely-overcrowded squalid camps in Bangladesh.

Myanmar, however, has blatantly denied the violence. However, massive evidence has been collected by international observers, medics, and journalists.

The United Nation has concluded that the atrocities amount to genocide.

US Vice President Mike Pence last month called the situation in Myanmar “a tragedy” that is “without excuse,” but avoided the term “genocide.”


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