Perhaps the two most egregious human rights crises currently unfolding in the world are the situations of the Uighurs in China and the Rohingya in Myanmar. The US has declared a genocide in the case of the Uighurs. It has so far resisted doing the same for the Rohingya. Why?

To be sure, the two crises are not identical. Both affect Muslim minorities in the western borderlands of their respective countries and both number about 2 million, but beyond that the approach of the two states to these peoples are very different. China wants to keep individual Uighurs within the country, but erase their Uighur identity and subsume them into the Han Chinese majority. It even detains individuals to prevent them from fleeing the country and the Communist Party’s re-education camps. In contrast, Myanmar has already forcefully evicted more than 1 million Rohingya individuals from the country altogether — the vast majority of the group’s numbers — and has no intention of absorbing any of those remaining in internal refugee camps into the wider Burmese population.

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One could argue that the Chinese approach is more subtle. And, given the resources the Chinese state is pouring into the project, perhaps it is more likely to succeed in the long run. But no one could argue that the approach taken by Myanmar is not far more violent. Uighurs have the option to comply, or to pretend to comply, with the crazy restrictions imposed on them by the Communist Party. Tens of thousands of Rohingya were never given such an option. They were brutally tortured, raped and murdered in order to scare the rest of their people into fleeing the country.

So why did the US declare the Uighur situation a genocide, but not the Rohingya situation as well? The discrepancy currently has nothing to do with the respective facts of the two cases and everything to do with politics.

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