Why a tiny African country is taking the Rohingya’s case to the world court

DAKAR, Senegal — Gambia, the smallest country in continental Africa, took an unprecedented step this week in the realm of international justice: It filed a lawsuit at the United Nations’ top court accusing Myanmar of genocide against Rohingya Muslims.

The case at the International Court of Justice, which typically addresses disputes between states, raised eyebrows because Myanmar sits roughly 7,000 miles from Gambia, which lacks any tangible connection to the protracted crisis in Southeast Asia.

But the story of why such a tiny player chose to tackle a distant conflict is personal.

Abubacarr M. Tambadou, Gambia’s attorney general and justice minister, read a U.N. report last year that detailed how an army crackdown in Buddhist-majority Myanmar had killed thousands of Rohingya in 2017 and driven more than 700,000 into neighboring Bangladesh.

Investigators described the violence as “crimes against humanity,” and the United States called it an ethnic-cleansing campaign. Myanmar has denied all the allegations, saying it was targeting terrorists.

Tambadou, who worked for years as a lawyer at the U.N. tribunal focused on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, visited a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh in May 2018.

Conversations with the refugees, and their pain, reminded him of Rwanda’s history of government-led atrocities, which wiped out about 800,000 lives over 100 days in the East African country. An estimated 250,000 women endured sexual assault.

“As I listened to the horrific stories — of killings, of rape, of torture, of burning people alive in their homes — it brought back memories of the Rwandan genocide,” Tambadou said in a phone interview. “The world failed to help in 1994, and the world is failing to protect vulnerable people 25 years later.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/why-a-tiny-african-country-is-taking-the-rohingyas-case-to-the-world-court/2019/11/12/f491d5a4-04cd-11ea-9118-25d6bd37dfb1_story.html?fbclid=IwAR3G66y_QXSbxo4GrpFCG3pvazmB2RExr_tyhw5MnCMclVKoSg1t-FpBqCk