INTERNATIONAL: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has said on Wednesday the United States was looking at what additional steps to take against Myanmar's junta and also "actively" looking at whether treatment of the Rohingya Muslim minority might constitute genocide.
He made the comments during a trip to Malaysia, where Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah has shared U.S. President Joe Biden had invited members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to a summit meeting and the invitation would be discussed by the bloc's foreign ministers on January 19.
To recall, a deadly crackdown by Myanmar's army on Rohingya Muslims sent hundreds of thousands fleeing across the border into Bangladesh. An estimated 116,000 Rohingya were beaten, and 36,000 were thrown into fires. The military operations have displaced a large number of people, and created a refugee crisis. The largest wave of Rohingya to flee Myanmar happened in 2017, which resulted in the largest human exodus in Asia since the Vietnam War.
They risked everything to escape by sea or on foot a military offensive which the United Nations later described as a "textbook example of ethnic cleansing".
In January 2020, the UN's top court has ordered the Buddhist-majority country to take measures to protect members of its Rohingya community from genocide. But the army in Myanmar has said it was fighting Rohingya militants and denies targeting civilians. The country's leader Aung San Suu Kyi, once a human rights icon, has repeatedly denied allegations of genocide.
Myanmar has been in turmoil since the military overthrew a civilian government on February 1. ASEAN has been leading diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis but some of the bloc's members have expressed frustration about slow progress, leading to Myanmar's military leader being excluded from a recent meeting of the bloc.
PHOTO: U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE ANTONY BLINKEN HOLDING PRESS CONFERENCE WITH MALAYSIAN COUNTERPART SAIFUDDIN ABDULLAH / SOUNDBITES FROM BLINKEN AND SAIFUDDIN
