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 like 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.
Myanmar launched a military campaign against the Rohingya minority, primarily in western Rakhine state, in 2016, after alleging insurgent attacks on border posts. U.N. 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 a 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.’’
Another lawyer on that team, Paul Reichler, cited extensive witness testimony, primarily from 2017, including 54 instances of houses being locked and set ablaze with families inside. Witnesses recounted women and girls being gang raped and some times mutilated, he said, and children being wrenched from their mothers’ arms and thrown into fires. Satellite images showed dozens of villages burned to the ground.
The Rohingya are related to the people of Bangladesh, and many also claim descent from Arab traders; they 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 illegal immigrants and denies them citizenship. It long denied the existence of a distinct Rohingya ethnicity, calling them Bengali.
The language Myanmar used at the height of the campaign, Mr. Reichler said, supports the genocide charge. Citing a U.N.-backed investigation, he said the government called the Rohingya an “impure and subhuman race” from abroad whose population growth “threatened to supplant the pure-blooded local race.’’ He quoted one official as announcing that Myanmar “would soon solve the Bengali problem.’’
‘’It was the state itself that generated the atrocities,’’ he added.
In its 80-year history, the nearest the World Court has come to holding a nation responsible for genocide was in 2007, in a case brought against Serbia by Bosnia. In that case, the judges ruled that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia was an act of genocide, and that Serbia had failed in its duty to prevent the atrocity. But a divided court did not find Serbia guilty of the slaughter, itself, though it was committed by Bosnian Serb forces that worked closely with Serbia.
Though the court, which rules on disputes between nations, has no independent power to enforce its decisions, they carry legal and moral weight, and international lawyers say the Myanmar case will be closely watched for possible repercussions in other genocide claims.
Mr. Jallow made an unusual gesture on Monday, asking a group of Rohingya people in the courtroom to stand and be seen by the judges and the audience of diplomats and lawyers gathered in the great hall of the Peace Palace in The Hague. Some are expected to testify in the coming weeks, but those sessions will be closed to the public and the press.
More than a million Rohingya people now live in overcrowded camps in Bangladesh, in dire conditions. Relief workers say the refugees’ plight has worsened since Washington cut its substantial aid contributions last year.
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