Tuesday is Rohingya Genocide Remembrance Day, which marks the start of Myanmar’s brutal “clearance operations” in 2017 that forced 1.2 million Muslim Rohingya into Bangladesh and killed 30,000.
As part of this remembrance, Western countries have taken concrete action to condemn and bring to an end Myanmar’s atrocities. On March 21, 2022, the United States formally determined that the attacks constituted genocide. The U.S. State Department conducted hundreds of interviews of Rohingya refugees and analyzed whistleblower reports by soldiers in order to ascertain whether Myanmar displayed the “intent to destroy” required by the Genocide Convention of 1948.
The result of U.S. inquiries concluded that soldiers had received orders to “shoot at every sight of a person,” burn villages, and rape women. They also showed that soldiers repeatedly engaged in “racial slurs” against the Rohingya they attacked, particularly in mosques, and that they “bragged about their plans on social media.” The U.S. investigation also took issue with Myanmar targeting “women, children, and the elderly” and with the rhetoric by Myanmar authorities, which treated the Rohingya as an “unfinished job” that the government had to “solve.”