The rest of the world can learn a lot from the recent actions of one of the tiniest countries on the globe - Gambia, with a population of 2 million.
It took a country that has been traumatised from decades of violent oppression to say “enough is enough”. Myanmar is a country more than 11000km away, and there is no other interest in Gambia pursuing a case of genocide other than justice for the victims of slaughter and persecution. It is one of those cases that makes us believe there is good in the world.
An act of genocide, under Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention of Genocide, is the systematic destruction of all or part of a racial, ethnic, religious or national group through killing, causing bodily or mental harm and trauma, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of the group, measures to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Gambia’s application is backed by the Independent International Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar which issued its report in 2018. The mission reported that acts committed against the Rohingya threaten their existence as a group, which have included mass killings, rape, beatings destruction of homes and villages and denial of access to food and shelter.