EU to penalize Myanmar officials over crimes against Rohingya Muslims

Seven Myanmarese military officials will later on Monday be hit by the sanctions, which include freezing their assets and banning them from traveling to the EU, said to EU diplomats and officials.

Earlier, Brussels had extended an arms embargo against Myanmar and prohibited any training of or cooperation with Myanmar’s armed forces.

In a similar move, last December, the United States imposed sanctions against Myanmar, and in February, Canada levied punitive measures against the Buddhist-majority country after media reported news of a massacre of Rohingya Muslims in the village of Inn Din.

The Inn Din massacre on September 2, 2017 was a token of large-scale crimes and systemic human rights abuses carried out during the army crackdown on the Rohingya Muslims mainly based in Myanmar’s Rakhine State.

The two Reuters journalists, who reported the Inn Din story, still remain in prison in Yangon till this day and could face up to 14 years behind bars for violating Myanmar’s Official Secrets Act.

Numerous reports over the past months by international right groups and government show that Myanmar’s armed forces -- supporting Buddhist mobs -- have been waging what the United Nations has described as a “textbook example of an ethnic cleansing” campaign against the minority Rohingya community.

Government troops have forced nearly 700,000 Rohingya to flee the affected areas and seek refuge in neighboring Bangladesh since last August.

Myanmarese officials deny any crime has taken place.

Many Rohingya Muslim refugees express fear of returning to their homeland, where they saw their relatives murdered by soldiers and Buddhist vigilantes.

The Rohingya have lived in Myanmar for generations but are denied citizenship and are branded illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, which likewise denies them citizenship.