War Crimes and Ethnic Cleansing Were Committed Against the Rohingya of Myanmar. They Deserve Justice. But How?

In August 2017, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar fled across the border to Bangladesh. The Rohingya are a minority population that have long faced discrimination by the Buddhist Burmese majority. In the summer of 2017, things got very bad, very quickly.

A Rohingya militant group attacked some police outposts in Myanmar. The government and military responded by attacking Rohingya towns and villages, unleashing massive violence against a civilian population. This drove over 600,000 Rohingya to refugee camps in a region of Bangladesh known as Cox’s Bazar.

Some 700,000 Rohingya refugees remain there, to this day.

The violence that drove these people from their home was certainly a crime against humanity — a UN official called it “a text book example of an ethnic cleansing.”  And maybe even a genocide.

That of course demands the question: who will pay for these crimes. What does accountability look like in a situation like this. And can perpetrators of these crimes…