The United States must act to prevent further ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority group in Myanmar and hold perpetrators accountable by international sanction, lawmakers said Tuesday.
“Make no mistake, atrocities are taking place in Burma. We have perpetrators who expect impunity and there’s no reason to doubt that that may in fact occur. This is in fact ethnic cleansing,” said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Trump administration response to the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar.
The U.N. says the Myanmarese army has forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from their homes through a campaign of village burnings and mass killings. Many of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in a Buddhist majority country, have sought shelter in camps in neighboring Bangladesh. The continuing plight of the Rohingya may be helping to boost extremist messages worldwide.
Top members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, including Senators Bob Corker (R-TN), expressed uniform outrage to the slaughter during the hearing with officials from the State Department and USAID.
The U.S. is attempting to provide for the safe repatriation of Rohingya, said W. Patrick Murphy, deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs. The State Department is also exploring ways to hold accountable military officials accused of atrocities. That could include possibly using sanctions under the Magnitsky Act, a law passed by Congress to punish Russians believed to be responsible for the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who died in a Moscow prison.
The Myanmarese military says it is pursuing Rohingya separatist groups that struck a government police outpost in August, triggering the latest waves of violence against civilians.
Corker also condemned Myanmarese leader Aung Sang Suu Kyi for inaction over the killings.
“The titular head of the country is very dismissive on this whole group of people,” Corker said.
Suu Kyi has condemned violence on both sides and claimed that accounts of atrocities are fabricated.
Wilson Dizard is a national security editor at The Cipher Brief. Follow him on Twitter @willdizard.
