Canada’s House of Commons unanimously adopted a motion yesterday that recognized Myanmar’s crimes against the Rohingya as genocide.
The motion, introduced by MP Andrew Leslie, also endorsed the findings of the UN fact-finding mission, which first accused Myanmar military leaders of genocide last month after 18 months of research and released its detailed findings earlier this week. Its report included accounts of gang rape, sexual slavery, and the razing of hundreds of villages by Myanmar troops.
Canadian foreign minister Chrystia Freeland commented on the decision from Washington, praising MPs for recognizing the “atrocity”.
“It is a very important step for Canada to recognize that crimes against the Rohingya constitute a genocide,” she said.
The motion also called on the UN Security Council to refer Myanmar’s crimes to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and demanded that senior military officials be investigated and prosecuted for the crime of genocide.
The move was praised by human rights activists. Ahmed Ramadan, executive director of Burma Task Force, which advocates specifically for the Rohingya, said the motion was “a major breakthrough for the Rohingya”.
The move comes despite expectations that efforts to produce a Security Council referral for Myanmar to the ICC will fail. “China and Russia will most likely block it with their veto, but it still is going to be another damaging PR move for both those countries. But that’s the game. You have to do it,” Kyle Matthews, executive director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University, told The Globe and Mail.
The motion made no mention of the honorary Canadian citizenship held by Aung San Suu Kyi, whom the UN fact-finding mission has accused of having “contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes”. Many Canadians have called for the honor to be revoked, but no major political party in Canada has backed such a move.
Yangontar says
Castro illegitimate son Justin Trudeau party government is going to be soon be gone because of its foreign policy of leftist Cuba communist regime and unable to develop free trade agreement and foreign policy with Trump’s US. The people of Canada understood the threat of Muslim terrorism here and elsewhere like Yakhine, Jihadi Bengali Muslim terrorist group had to be eliminated not by telling them politely but fought with overwhelming force which is the only language that terrorist understand.
The people of Burma, its political leaders, and military leader must be united to rejected any foreign interference in the internal affair of Burma.
If these foreign interlopers want to come and lecture our leaders then Burma must, in turn, lecture the history lesson of how colonial British armed the Jihadi Bengali Muslim who massacred 40,000 Yakhine in World War II. Lecture them about Bengali Muslim traitors declared Jihad and attempted to separate Yakhine and merge with Pakistan in the 1947 and fought against the government of Burma after Burma gained Independence from Britain in 1948. Lecture them about continuous waging Jihad and killed the people of Burma from 1948 to 2016. Then Bengali Muslim terror group ARSA attacked 30 police outposts, 1 army base and numerous Hindu and Buddhist villages that killed hundreds of villagers.
Lecture them the destruction of Yakhine Buddhist Pagodas and Monestries, Buddha Statutes and killed Buddhist monks by the Jihadi Bengali Muslim.