By Azeem Ibrahim
Mon October 23, 2017
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is
a senior fellow at the Center for Global Policy and author of "The
Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar's Hidden Genocide" (Hurst & Oxford
University Press). http://rohingyabook.com/
(CNN)The Rohingya
crisis in Myanmar is now widely described as ethnic cleansing. But the
situation has been evolving. And now, it seems, we can no longer avoid the
conclusion we have all been dreading. This is genocide. And we, in the
international community, must recognize it as such.
Article II of United
Nation's 1948 Genocide Convention describes genocide as "any of the
following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a
national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: Killing members of the
group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately
inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent
births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another
group."
Rohingya crisis: http://us.cnn.com/specials/asia/rohingya
Though the Rohingya
situation has met most of the above criteria for being described as a genocide
under international law for a number of years now, the label has been resisted
until now because we think of genocide as one huge act of frenzied violence,
like the machete insanity in Rwanda or the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.
Report of
CNN about Burmese Rohingya Muslims in refugees camps https://youtu.be/7wNCKAXsyGk
But the final peak
of violence is in all historical cases merely the visible tip of the iceberg.
And the final outburst only occurs once it has already been rendered
unavoidable by the political context.
Rohingya
Muslims flee violence in Myanmar. https://youtu.be/75WlQ7FNpzw
In Rwanda, Hutu
tribal propaganda ran for years on the radio and in magazines referring to the
Tutsis as cockroaches and a mortal threat to the Hutus that needed to be
eliminated lest the Hutus themselves would die. Kill or be killed. The frenzied
killing was not something that just occurred to the Hutus one day in April
1994. It was the logical conclusion of a campaign of dehumanization and
paranoia which lasted for years.
The same is true of
the Holocaust. The Nazi genocide began slowly and had few distinctive outbursts
of violence to delineate where one degree of crime against humanity ended and
where another began.
All in all, that
genocide developed and unfolded over a period of more than 10 years. Most of
that period was not taken up with the killing of Jews, Gypsies and all the
other "sub-humans." Rather, it was taken up with manufacturing of the
category of "sub-humans" by state propaganda. Only once the problem
was manufactured and sold to the wider population did the "final
solution" become viable.
Pattern of genocide
In Myanmar,
extremist Buddhist monks have been preaching that the Rohingya are reincarnated
from snakes and insects. Killing them would not be a crime against humanity,
they say -- it would be more like pest control.
And necessary
"pest control" too. Just like the Tutsi conspiracy to kill all the
Hutus, or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Rohingya are supposed to be
agents of a global Islamist conspiracy to take over the world and forcibly
instate a global caliphate. The duty of any good Buddhist who wants to maintain
the national and religious character of Myanmar is to prevent the Islamist
takeover, and thus to help remove the threat posed by the "vermin."
Every modern
genocide has followed this pattern. Years of concerted dehumanization campaigns
are the absolutely necessary pre-condition for the mass murder at the end.
Usually these campaigns are led by a repressive government, but other political
forces also come into play. Such was the case in Bosnia, Darfur and Rwanda. And
so it is with Myanmar.
The campaign of
dehumanization against the Rohingya has been going on for decades, and events
certainly took an unmistakeable turn towards genocide since at least the
outbursts of communal violence in 2012. Those clashes, and the ones in the
subsequent years, drove 200,000 to 300,000 Rohingya out of Myanmar.
But somehow, at that
rate of attrition, and against the backdrop of Myanmar's supposed move towards
democracy with the election of Aung San Suu Kyi to power in late 2015, world
leaders have allowed themselves to hope that the situation could still be turned
around.
Now, the reality of
an exodus of a further 600,000 people in the space of just six weeks; the
incontrovertible evidence of large scale burning of villages by the Myanmar
military -- which the military is calling clearance operations of terrorists --
and the reports of widespread extra-judicial killings against fleeing civilians
by the country's federal security forces have made it much more difficult to
avoid the conclusion: this is genocide. We no longer have just the slow-burning
genocidal environment which whittles down a people until their ultimate
extinction.
Now we are also
confronting the loud bang at the end. More than half of an entire population
has been removed from their ancestral lands in just eight weeks!
The tragedy is that the international community will abet
the situation. The UN Security Council will decline to respond to the situation
with the seriousness it deserves. If a situation is defined by the Council as a
"genocide," then the UN becomes legally bound to intervene, with
peace-keeping missions and so on.
That is why Western countries will be
reluctant initiate such a move, and China, who is building one branch of its
New Silk Road infrastructure right through Rakhine State to access the port of
Sittwe, will likely veto any such proposal.
Just like we did in Rwanda, just like we did in the
Balkans, we are once again seeing a genocide happen before our very eyes. And
we will do nothing about it. We will bury our heads in the sand, and when our
children will ask us why we let this happen we will plead ignorance. Once the
final act of killing starts, it is usually too late. For the Rohingya, the
final act is in full swing. And still we are in denial about what is happening.
Visit here to read breaking news of
persecuted Rohingyas: https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MirAhmedABSiddiquee