US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will publicly announce the determination, which human rights groups have been advocating for years, at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, on Monday.
Reuters first reported on the administration’s recognition of genocide.
Until now, the US had stopped short of declaring the atrocities — including mass killings and rape — committed in 2017 against the Muslim minority Rohingya population a genocide. The violence forced nearly a million people to flee, and the United Nations recommended that top military officials face genocide charges.
A US State Department report released quietly in 2018 found that violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State was “extreme, large-scale, widespread, and seemingly geared toward both terrorizing the population and driving out the Rohingya residents.”
The State Department has sanctioned a number of Myanmar military officials, including commander-in-chief Min Aung Hlaing, for their role in committing those human rights abuses.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.