January 30, 2018
By Ramzy Baroud
Although the genocide of the Rohingya minority in Myanmar
has gathered greater media attention in recent months, there is no indication
that the international community is prepared to act in any meaningful way, thus
leaving hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees stranded in border camps
between Myanmar and Bangladesh.
While top United Nations officials are now using the term
“genocide” to
describe the massive abuses experienced by the Rohingya at the hands of the
Myanmar army, security forces and Buddhist militias, no plan of action has been
put in place. https://towardfreedom.com/archives/asia-archives/u-n-human-rights-council-points-to-anti-rohingya-genocide-in-myanmar/
In less than six months, beginning August 2017, an estimated 655,000
Rohingya have fled or were pushed across the border between Myanmar and
Bangladesh. Most of the “clearance operations” — a term used by the Myanmar
military to describe the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya — took place in
Rakhine state. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/16/578330574/myanmar-and-bangladesh-agree-to-2-year-timeframe-for-rohingya-return
In a recent report, Medecins Sans Frontieres relayed the harrowing
death toll of Rohingya during the first month of the genocidal campaign. At
least 9,000 Rohingya were killed between August 25 and September 24 last year,
according to MSF. This includes 730 children under the age of five. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-42348214
Eric Schwartz, of Refugee International, described these
events in an interview
with American National Public Radio (NPR) as “one of the greatest crimes in
recent memory — massive abuses, forced relocations of hundreds of thousands of
people in a matter of weeks.” https://www.npr.org/2018/01/21/579500332/the-future-of-myanmars-rohingya-refugees
Coupled with numerous reports of gang rape, outright
murder, and the mass burning of villages, the Rohingya have been left
defenseless in the face of unspeakable atrocities. Worse still, a recent agreement between Myanmar
and Bangladesh will see many of these refugees repatriated, but with absolutely
no guarantees for their safety. With no safeguards in place, and with the
Rohingya having been stripped of their legal status in Myanmar, going back is
as risky an endeavor as fleeing. http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/briefing/2018/1/5a5dc8584/unhcr-notes-bangladesh-myanmar-talks-stresses-importance-returns-meeting.html
The plan to repatriate Rohingya refugees without any
protection or the guaranteeing of their basic rights is part of a larger campaign
to “whitewash” the crimes of the Myanmar government and to, once more, defer
the protracted crisis of the Rohingya.
Although the cruelty experienced by the Rohingya goes
back decades, a new ethnic cleansing campaign began in 2012, when 100,000 Rohingya
were forced out of their villages and towns to live in prison-like makeshift
refugee camps. In 2013, more than 140,000 were displaced, and that trend
continued until last August, when the bouts of ethnic cleansing culminated in
all-out genocide involving all security branches of the government.
These actions have been defended by Myanmar officials,
including Aung San Suu Kyi. The latter was celebrated for decades by Western
media and governments as a democracy icon and human rights heroine. However, as
soon as Suu Kyi was freed from her house arrest and became the leader of
Myanmar in 2015, she served as an apologist for her former military foes. Not
only did she refuse to condemn the violence against the Rohingya, she even
refuses to use the term “Rohingya” in reference to the historically persecuted
minority.
Suu Kyi’s support for the military’s relentless violence
has earned her much contempt and criticism, and rightly so. But too much
emphasis has been placed on appealing to her moral sense of justice, to the
point that no strategy has been formed to confront the crimes of the Myanmar
military and government, neither by Asian leaders nor the international
community. Instead, an unimpressive “international advisory board” was set up
to carry out the recommendations of another advisory council led by Kofi Annan,
the former UN Secretary General.
Expectedly, the advisory board is proving to be nothing
but an instrument used by the Myanmar government to whitewash the crimes of the
military. In fact, this is the very assessment of former US cabinet member and top diplomat Bill
Richardson, who recently resigned from the board. “The main reason I am
resigning is that the advisory board is a whitewash,” he told Reuters,
asserting that he did not want to be part of “a cheerleading squad for the
government.” https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/aung-san-suu-kyi-lacks-moral-leadership-us-diplomat-bill-richardson-quits-rohingya-panel
Richardson, too, accused Suu Kyi of lacking “moral
leadership.” But that designation no longer suffices. Suu Kyi should be held
accountable for more than her moral failings. Considering her leadership
position, she should be held directly responsible for crimes against humanity,
together with her top security and army brass.
Phil Robertson, of Human Rights Watch, is one of the
leading voices among rights groups who are calling for the UN Security Council to refer
Myanmar to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Because Myanmar is
not a signatory to the Rome Statute, such a referral is the only way to take
the state to the ICC. http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestory/2018/01/myanmar-whitewashing-rohingya-crisis-180126190014218.html
This step is both legally defensible and urgent, as the
Myanmar government has showed no remorse whatsoever for the horrible violence
it has meted out to the Rohingya. Robertson also called for “targeted
sanctions,” which would most certainly get the attention of the country’s rich
and powerful elite that rules over the military and government.
In recent years, Myanmar, with the help of the US and
other Western powers, has been allowed to open up its economy to foreign investors. Billions
of US dollars of foreign direct investments have already been channeled into
Myanmar, and $6 billion more are expected to enter the country in 2018. http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-09/12/c_136603963.htm
That, too, is a great act of moral failing on the part of
many countries in Asia, the West and the rest of the world. Myanmar should not
be rewarded with massive foreign largesse while whole communities are being
killed, maimed or made into refugees.
Without sanctions that target the government and military
— not the ordinary people — coupled with legal action to prosecute Myanmar’s
leaders, including Suu Kyi, before the ICC, the genocide of the Rohingya will
continue unabated.