The charge that Myanmar committed genocide against the Rohingya Muslims went before the World Court on Monday for three weeks of argument and testimony, in the first case of its kind, with implications for other genocide cases including the one pending against Israel.
Gambia, a West African country thousands of miles from Myanmar, in Southeast Asia, filed the suit in 2019. The International Court of Justice, in The Hague, allowed the case to proceed on the premise that international law gives countries a mandate to act against genocide anywhere in the world, even if they are not affected.
On the same basis, the International Court of Justice, an arm of the United Nations, later allowed the 2023 genocide charge by South Africa against Israel, which is still at an early stage. Israel has rejected the charge.
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Myanmar launched a military campaign against the Rohingya minority, primarily in western Rakhine state, in 2016, after alleging insurgent attacks on border posts. UN officials and human rights groups have called it a coordinated, scorched-earth campaign to remove the Rohingya — killing, wounding and raping untold numbers of people, razing villages and forcing about 1 million people to flee the country.
Myanmar’s government denies committing genocide or “ethnic cleansing,” which legal experts say can be considered a form of genocide. It called the campaign “clearance operations.”
Dawda A. Jallow, the attorney general and justice minister of Gambia, said in his opening remarks to the 15-judge court that Myanmar’s military rulers had turned the lives of the Rohingya “into a nightmare subjecting them to the most horrific violence and destruction one could imagine.” He said his country was prompted to file its case, under an international treaty known as the Genocide Convention, because of its own experiences with a military regime.
“Myanmar merely asserts that the motive of its operations was counterterrorism,” Philippe Sands, a member of Gambia’s legal team, told the court, but the scale and systematic nature of the campaign went far beyond any military goal, he said. “The only reasonable conclusion is that Myanmar acted in this case with genocidal intent.”
The Rohingya are related to the people of Bangladesh, and have lived in what is now Myanmar for generations, even centuries. They are a small, mostly Muslim minority in a country that is overwhelmingly Buddhist.
Myanmar’s government has called them immigrants without legal status and denies them citizenship.
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