Although it came
quite late in the series of events, the UN Security Council statement Wednesday
just reminded the world how terrible is the nature of persecution and massacre
of the Rohingya. So grave is the matter now that even China and Russia which in
the past had blocked several UN resolutions since 2007 including the one mooted
in March this year did not object to Wednesday's censure.
After the statement,
British UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said it was the first time in nine years
the council had agreed to a statement on Myanmar.
This is probably
because the world has this time been totally convinced of what the
International State Crime Initiative (ISCI), had concluded in its 2015 report
that “the Rohingya faces the final stages of genocide”.
The ISCI, a highly
respected community of scholars working to expose, document, explain and resist
state crimes, is based at Queen Mary University of London. Its other partners
are University of Hull, University of Ulster and Harvard Humanitarian
Initiative. Eminent linguist, historian and philosopher Noam Chomsky is one of
its honorary fellows.
Nevertheless, its
report said to be the most systematic study on the treatment of the Rohingya
had gone largely unnoticed or been ignored by the international community.
Otherwise the world would not have waited for 2017. And the ongoing murders and
rapes of the Rohingya could perhaps be avoided.
While doing the
study, ISCI had found that of the six stages of genocide -- stigmatization;
harassment, violence and terror; isolation and segregation; and systematic
weakening of the Rohingya -- had been completed in Myanmar by 2015. The final
two -- mass annihilation and finally symbolic enactment involving the removal
of the victim group from the collective history -- is now being staged in the
Rakhine State.
The ISCI also
documented how these genocide processes have been orchestrated at the highest
levels of state and local Rakhine government. The actions were led by state
officials, Rakhine politicians, Buddhist monks and Rakhine civil society activists.
“The State's
persistent and intensified 'othering' of the Rohingya as outsiders, illegal
Bengali immigrants and potential terrorists has given a green light to Rakhine
nationalists and Islamophobic monks to orchestrate invidious campaigns of race
and religious hatred reminiscent of those witnessed in Germany in the 1930s and
Rwanda in the early 1990s,” the report said.
ISCI discovered a
leaked document apparently adopted by the Myanmar regime in 1988 which reveals
the country's State Peace and Development Council's commitment to eliminating
the Rohingya from Myanmar.
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These include
reducing the population growth of the Rohingyas by gradual imposition of
restrictions on their marriages and by application of all possible methods of
oppression and suppression against them, denying them higher studies,
government jobs, ownership of lands, shops and buildings.
The council's plan
is literally to stop all their economic activities and secretly convert the
Muslims into Buddhists.
ISCI also showed how
the Arakan National Party (ANP), the majority Buddhist political party in
Rakhine, has adopted Nazi ideology in its documents. ANP mouthpiece magazine
The Progress in its November 2012 editorial after the June violence on the
Rohingya wrote: “Hitler and Eichmann were the enemy of the Jews, but were
probably heroes to the Germans…In order for a country's survival, the survival
of a race, or in defense of national sovereignty, crimes against humanity or
in-human acts may justifiably be committed as Hitler and the Holocaust... If
that survival principle or justification is applied or permitted equally [in our Myanmar case] our
endeavors to protect our Rakhine race and defend the sovereignty and longevity
of the Union of Myanmar cannot be labelled as "crimes against
humanity", or "inhuman" or "in-humane". ... We no
longer wish to hold permanent concerns about the Bengali in our midst. We just
want to get it over and done with, once and for all."
This policy
continued in bits and pieces until the actions escalated in October last year
and again this time in 2017 that has successfully reduced the Rohingya
population by half in Myanmar.
Wednesday's UN move,
although too late for the genocide to be avoided, is still a flicker of hope
for a people left without a land. A people who “are not alive or dead”.
If the world treats
this ISCI report more seriously, the UN should move more determinedly with robust actions, including investigations into
crimes against humanity and sanctions.
It is after all the
UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, Tomas Ojea Quintana, himself
agreed with the observations of the report and said “the International State
Crime Initiative arrives at a convincing
conclusion” that a process of genocide against the Rohingya population is
underway in Myanmar.”
Now that the UN
human rights chief has termed the situation “a textbook case of ethnic
cleansing” the demand for more actions can be heard louder.