2 key groups label Rohingya slaughter 'genocide' as Trump administration stays mum
By CONOR FINNEGAN Dec 4, 2018, 4:00 AM ET
Myanmar's violence against the Rohingya, a Muslim-majority ethnic group, constituted a genocide, according to two new reports released Monday -- a determination that the Trump administration still has not made, even after releasing an exhaustive fact-finding report in September that documented the atrocities in horrifying detail.
The administration's silence on genocide is particularly striking because the Public International Law and Policy Group, one of the two groups that made a genocide determination on Monday, worked with the U.S. State Department on the administration's fact-finding report. PILPG reviewed the same evidence that the State Department has and undertook its own legal analysis to reach its conclusion Monday.
But the U.S. has stopped short of using the term genocide, instead saying the slaughter of thousands of Rohingya and displacement of over 700,000 refugees across the border into Bangladesh, is ethnic cleansing.
The U.S. and other countries have agreed to never commit genocide and to take steps to prevent it under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which defines it as killing, harming or seeking measures to prevent the births or transfer children of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group with intent to destroy them entirely or in part. Ethnic cleansing, which is not defined by international law in the same way, is seen as a lesser charge and defined as expelling one of those groups from that area with violence.
The second report, by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, warned that the Rohingya that remain in Myanmar are still under threat of genocide, called on the international community to prevent future atrocities and hold those responsible accountable.
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