Noting Mrs Aung San Suu Kyi’s possible guilt, Mr Ba added: “We should, however, be careful not to attribute these crimes solely to Myanmar’s military junta.”
Mr Blinken said the Biden administration would continue to provide humanitarian aid to Rohingya refugees, the majority of whom have fled to neighboring Bangladesh, and would send $ 1 million to a UN fact-finding mission to gather evidence on Myanmar the worst cases of burial since Myanmar. 2011.
U.S. investigators conducted their own investigation into the violence, interviewing more than 1,000 refugees who reported widespread and systematic attacks. More than half of Rohingya respondents were witnesses to sexual assaults, and three-quarters said they had seen murders in the hands of the military. One in five Rohingya interviewed witnessed a mass casualty event in which more than 100 people were killed or injured, Mr Blinken was quoted as saying.
“The evidence also points to a clear intent behind these mass atrocities – the intent to destroy Rohingya,” Mr Blinken said.
The State Department stopped declaring Myanmar cruelty as a genocide, as it released the results in 2018, in part to maintain an alliance with the government and keep neighboring China out of balance in the region. More than two years later, at the end of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared systemic abuse and detention of Muslim Uyghurs. in the Xinjiang region of China for being an act of genocide.
The Biden administration has also resisted declaring the rubble in the northern Tigray province of Ethiopia a genocide, although Mr Blinken has warned of cases of ethnic cleansing against civilians there. And just last week, Mr Blinken said he believed war crimes had been committed by Russian forces during their invasion of Ukraine, but said investigators had not yet officially concluded.
Nevertheless, Mr Blinken mentioned the two conflicts on Monday. Shortly after his speech, the State Department also announced that it had designated Sudan’s Central Reserve Police as human rights violators after allegations of rape, torture and other abuses against pro-democracy protesters began late last year, even as recently as the last week.
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