US stops short of calling Rohingya massacres ‘genocide’

US investigators found that Myanmar’s military waged a co-ordinated campaign of mass killings, gang rapes and other atrocities against the country’s Rohingya minority.

The State Department report, published on Monday, stopped short of using the word “genocide” but could justify further US sanctions against the Myanmar authorities.

But not describing the crackdown as genocide or crimes against humanity became the subject of fierce internal debate that delayed the report’s publication by nearly a month.

Its findings were based on more than 1,000 interviews of Rohingya men and women in refugee camps in neighbouring Bangladesh. Almost 700,000 Rohingya fled a military campaign last year in Myanmar’s Rakhine state.

“The survey reveals that the recent violence in northern Rakhine state was extreme, large-scale, widespread and seemingly geared towards both terrorising the population and driving out the Rohingya residents,” according to the 20page report. “The scope and scale of the military’s operations indicate they were wellplanned and co-ordinated.”

Survivors described in distressing detail what they witnessed, including soldiers killing infants and small children, the shooting of unarmed men and victims being buried alive or thrown into mass graves.

They also spoke of widespread sexual assault and rape by Myanmar’s military of Rohingya women, often carried out in public.

The US report was published a month after UN investigators issued their own findings, accusing Myanmar’s military of acting with “genocidal intent”. A senior State Department official said the US investigation was not to determine genocide but to document the atrocities. This could be used to help identify those responsible in the future.

The official said it would be up to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo whether to make such a designation.

A declaration of genocide by the US government, which already labelled the Rakhine crackdown as “ethnic cleansing”, could have legal implications, committing Washington to stronger measures against the South-East Asian nation.

Any action could be tempered, however, by US concerns about complicating relations between Myanmar’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and the country’s powerful military.

Meanwhile, the British and French foreign ministers co-hosted a meeting at the United Nations General Assembly in New York about the Rohingya crisis and called for urgent action to be taken by the international community.