"Never again," said the international community
-- until it happened again.
By D.Parvaz
Oct 19, 2017
When a national peace agreement in South Sudan fell apart
in 2016 after three years of civil war, U.S. and U.N. officials asked their
leadership for additional peacekeepers and resources to prevent the mass
civilian slaughter they saw coming. But according to the Associated Press,
their pleas “fell on deaf ears.” What unfolded was a wholesale campaign of
ethnic cleansing, according to the United Nations, resulting in tens of
thousands of deaths and over a million people fleeing to neighboring Uganda.
“The U.N. did not send peacekeeping troops to stay…and
the U.S. continued to support South Sudan’s military, possibly in violation of
U.S. law,” the AP reported on Wednesday in a chilling story juxtaposing
horrific violence against civilians with the U.S. policy equivalence of a
shrug. Meanwhile, cognitive dissonance seems to have ruled U.N. action, which
was documenting the rapes and murders across several states but doing little to
prevent or minimize these crimes.
A year later, the U.N. is still just considering sending
in additional permanent peacekeeping troops if they can find them. Meanwhile,
U.S. President Donald Trump has already announced his intention to cut support
for peacekeeping missions as well as cutting U.S. contributions to the U.N.
budget in general.
South Sudan Government Operated ‘Scorched Earth
Policy’ Allowing Soldiers to Rape Women. https://thinkprogress.org/south-sudan-government-operated-scorched-earth-policy-allowing-soldiers-to-rape-women-b145299d434d/
U.N. Peacekeeping Forces Did Nothing To Stop
Nearby Rapes And Killing. https://thinkprogress.org/south-sudan-un-peacekeepers-97df6435a744/
The head of United Nations peacekeeping operations on
Tuesday called on South Sudan’s government as well as the international
community, in general, to bring the country “back from the abyss.” Jean-Pierre
Lacroix, the Under-Secretary-General of the UN Department of Peacekeeping
Operations, also urged the Security Council to “leverage on all parties and
encourage them to engage in this process meaningfully and without any
preconditions.”
But the same mistakes are being made right now, in
Myanmar, where more than half of the 1 million Rohingya — an ethnic Muslim
minority in the Buddhist country — have been violently driven out of the
country since late August. Government troops have been cracking down on the
Rohingya, who have no citizenship rights in Myanmar, off an on since the 1990s,
with the most recent crackdown starting after a deadly attack by Rohingya
insurgents on border police posts.
Over the past two months, hundreds of villages have been
burned and an untold number of people have been killed (there’s little to no
access for the media and humanitarian groups to the country) as the situation,
which the United Nations has classified as “ethnic
cleansing” worsens to the fastest growing
refugee crisis in the world.
UN said “Ethnic cleansing.” https://thinkprogress.org/u-n-calls-myanmars-crackdown-on-rohingya-ethnic-cleansing-0cff2429ecc6/
UNHCR said fastest growing refugee’s crisis. http://www.unhcr.org/news/press/2017/10/59e4c17e5/joint-statement-rohingya-refugee-crisis.html
Although the U.N.’s refugee agency is responding to the
crisis, it’s really neighboring Bangladesh who is bearing the brunt of the
crisis, hosting over 500,000 Rohinyga in crowded camps while trying to keep a
lid on a potential spillover of violence within its own borders. There were
already some 300,000 Rohingya already in Bangladesh, fleeing the general
systematic discrimination and hardship imposed by the Myanmar government.
“The [U.N. Security] Council is a prisoner of its own
members,” said Akshaya Kumar, Human Rights Watch’s deputy director for the
United Nations. The U.S. government, she said, failed to put forth the idea of
an arms embargo against South Sudan until the end of President Barack Obama’s
second term, “And at that point, there just wasn’t the consensus that there had
been in the past.”
“But in Burma [previous name of Myanmar], there have been
efforts to have a more engaged council, but the specter of a Chinese veto is
what’s keeping everyone from pushing for something more transformative.”
“Despite all the pledges that the U.N. would never again
allow these kinds of crimes to occur, unfortunately, it hasn’t been able to
generate sustained action in the interest of prevention of these kinds of
abuses,” said Kumar. Enaged civil societies and concerned governments might be
able to hold the U.N. accountable for its inadequate responses, but, said
Kumar, ultimately, the U.N. will self-censor and bend to the will of a
government such as Myanmar’s “in pursuit of a broader development agenda at the
expense of this marginalized Rohinyga community in Rakhine state.”
She points to the recent example of the World Food
Program — the U.N.’s food aid agency — deciding to bury a report on Rohingya
children “wasting” (starving) in Myanmar at the behest of the government. This
is done in part to maintain access to places like Rakhine state, but the result
is to either keep information from the public or to present it in a “nuanced”
way that’s acceptable to the human rights violators.
The United States too doesn’t seem to be doing much. On
Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson yet again made another
non-committal response on what to do about the crisis. “Someone, if these
reports are true, is going to be held to account for that,” he said at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, D.C.
“And it’s up to the military leadership of Burma to decide, ‘What direction do
they want to play in the future of Burma?'”
What are the odds that the United States will push China
— which has lucrative trade deals with Myanmar — on the Rohingya issue,
especially given that Trump is already trying to pressure China to help isolate
North Korea in a bid to force them to end their nuclear and ballistic missile
programs?
“That’s what keeps me up at night, is wondering if this
administration — and not just the U.S., but other powerful countries around the
world — will think it’s worth it to put the Chinese in a difficult position to
stand up for the Rohingya people. This is a community that, let’s be frank,
doesn’t have many champions around the world,” said Kumar, who is not alone in
hoping the U.N. will step up.
Amnesty International researcher Matthew Wells said
what’s needed is a “loud, unified voice” from the international community
demanding humanitarian access to Myanmar and Rakhine state, where the Rohingya
live. Additionally, the international community should let it be known that
“These sorts of crimes by the military won’t be tolerated. We believe there
should be a comprehensive arms embargo imposed on Myanmar and there should be
targeted financial sanctions against senior military officials who are
reasonably suspected of crimes,” he said.
Wells, who recently returned from the Myanmar-Bangladesh border,
said the “targeted ruthless campaign by the Myanmar military through killings,
sexual violence and burning of villages to force the Rohinyga population out of
the country to make it as difficult as possible to ever return.”
As their villages are claimed as government
land, Rohingya to be repatriated in Myanmar: https://thinkprogress.org/bangladesh-and-myanmar-deal-to-repatriate-rohingya-8154f2d993c7/
Meanwhile, the U.N. worries that owing to
strict refugee camps — such as Trump's — the world is running out of spots to
resettle refugees.
Amnesty International published a brief on Tuesday
accusing the government of Myanmar of crimes against humanity.
“There have been good statements and condemnations,
including today by Secretary [of State Rex] Tillerson, but that has to be
followed by action that imposes consequences on those who are implicated in
these crimes,” said Wells. Given the evidence at hand, it seems almost
impossible that an increasingly stringent regime of sanctions and embargoes
have not already been put in place.
“This is a crisis, where, from my experience, we have the
some of the hardest evidence from any of the places that I’ve documented. In
particular we satellite images from across northern Rakhine state that shows
that shows this incredibly targeted burning of every last Rohinyga house,
mosque and other shelters,” said Wells.
“We can see these images where only meters apart, you
have areas that have been completely destroyed, every last structure burned,
and areas that have been completely untouched. And through consistent
differences in what those structures look like and through witness testimony
from these same villages, we know that it’s the Rohingya parts of these
villages that are completely torched and the non-Rohingya parts that are
untouched.”
“It shows the naked lie…that this has anything other than
a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing,” he said, adding, “The international
community can’t let that stand.”
As hard as it is to imagine, things might still get worse
for the Rohingya. Wells said that that unless the international community steps
in and turns things around, that the Rohingya — currently facing starvation due
to lack of access to their own livelihoods as well as being cut off from
humanitarian assistance — will either never be able to go back to their homes,
or, when repatriated, will be forced to live in what he describes as
“concentration camps,” where previously displaced Rohingya populations have
been forced to live.
Wells, who prior to working at Amnesty International was
as researcher for the Center for Civilians in Conflict in South Sudan, sighs
deeply when asked what he makes of the fact that despite international
hand-wringing, governments keep getting away with ethnic cleansing.
“More than anything it’s the never ending shock that this
continues to happen with no better response than before,” said Wells.
“It speaks to major problems right now in terms of the
concerting lack of respect for human rights and humanitarian norms and the lack
of determination among the international community at large to address them in
a timely manner.”
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