Just a few years ago, Myanmar was a good news story. The country’s prolonged transition to democracy seemed to have crested in 2015 with parliamentary elections that brought the Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident Aung San Suu Kyi to power.
But in the past year, the dream of a free and open Myanmar has curdled into a nightmare. In the province of Rakhine, the military has led a vicious campaign of murder, rape and forced displacement against the local Rohingya people, a largely Muslim minority group. The attacks have forced more than 700,000 people to flee.
Last week, the House of Commons voted unanimously to declare the unresolved crisis a genocide. It was right to do so. The bloodletting is part of a longstanding effort by segments of the Myanmar government and population to deny the existence of the Rohingya.
The House is also right to call on the International Criminal Court to prosecute senior military officers for leading the carnage. Targeting them is justified and prudent; it satisfies the need for accountability while providing the country with a path back toward the promising trajectory it was on.
However, while blunt-force sanctions that maim the country’s economy and attempts to make pariahs of Myanmar’s political leaders might provide some emotional satisfaction, they would do more harm than good.
It is wrong to see the current horror as an indictment of Myanmar’s progress. The military has persecuted ethnic groups for decades, including two previous campaigns of brutal violence against the Rohingya in the late 1970s and early 1990s.
Myanmar’s democratic transition is incomplete, after all: The military still controls the ministries responsible for security and has a quarter of the seats in parliament. It’s true that politicians such as Ms. Suu Kyi have been shamefully quiet about the genocide happening under their noses – but they did not initiate it and have little power to rein it in.
As the international community reflects on how to stop the violence in Myanmar and usher the country onto a more peaceful path, it should keep in mind who bears the responsibility for the Rohingya genocide. Hint: They wear epaulets.