This morning, the International Court of Justice ordered Myanmar to take broad temporary measures to protect its Muslim Rohingya population and avoid actions that could constitute genocide.
In a victory for Gambia, which filed the case accusing Myanmar of genocide, the court unanimously supported the imposition of measures on Myanmar obliging it to protect any evidence that the court could use in subsequent hearings.
The court, which includes 17 judges, concluded that the Rohingya were still "at risk of genocide" and ordered Myanmar to report within four months on steps it had taken to comply with the decision.
On the other hand, Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi said yesterday that "war crimes" may have occurred against the Rohingya Muslim minority, but not genocide, considering that the refugees "exaggerated" the scale of the violations.
The Rohingya are an ethnic Muslim minority who practice a Sufi-inflected variation of Sunni Islam. There are an estimated 3.5 million Rohingya dispersed worldwide. Before August 2017, the majority of the estimated one million Rohingya in Myanmar resided in Rakhine State, where they accounted for nearly a third of the population. They differ from Myanmar’s dominant Buddhist groups ethnically, linguistically, and religiously.
Since late August 2017, more than 671000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar Rakhine State to escape the military's large-scale campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Discriminatory policies of Myanmar’s government since the late 1970s have reportedly forced hundreds of thousands of Muslims to flee their homes in the predominantly Buddhist country. Most have crossed by land into Bangladesh, while others have taken to the sea to reach Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.
Neither the central government nor Rakhine’s dominant ethnic Buddhist group, known as the Rakhine, recognize the label “Rohingya,” a self-identifying term that surfaced in the 1950s, which experts say provides the group with a collective political identity.
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