The UN investigates. The Holocaust museum has even
rescinded a prize it once gave to Aung San Suu Kyi. Yet, we still risk letting
this unfathomable repeat of history go unchecked.
By QANTA AHMED
Last week, the Pulitzer committee shone its spotlight on The Reuters photography staff
for images of violence against the Rohingya as they fled Myanmar. Perhaps this
will now ignite more vigorous response.
Perhaps the pleading in the past week by the Rohingya
Muslim minority lawyer Razia Sultana for the United Nations Security Council to
refer Myanmar to the International Criminal Court for “horrific crimes” against
the Rohingya may finally spark some outrage.
Perhaps the refutation by both the U.N. and Bangladesh of Myanmar's claim of
safely repatriating Rohingya refugees may arouse new awareness.
Perhaps the imprisonment for the past four months of
Reuters journalists for reporting on the killings of Rohingya Muslim men can
instigate action.
Perhaps the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s recent rescinding of its 2012
Elie Wiesel Award to Myanmar’s Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, once a human-rights hero
in the West with few equals, for her failure to speak out against the ongoing
Rohingya genocide may spur some wider response.
https://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/museum-rescinds-award-to-daw-aung-san-suu-kyi
Or perhaps we will stay silent and unmoved by all of
these recent reminders of the urgency to witness the inhumanity today being
visited upon the Rohingya people. Perhaps we have learned nothing from
history’s enduring lessons of violence connecting all peoples.
We may be doomed to forget these atrocities as well as
those of the past. A recent study shows that 22 percent of American millennials
surveyed had not heard of the Holocaust, and 66 percent could not identify what
Auschwitz is.
This legacy of Jewish memory - long and filled with pain
culminating in the worst genocide in history - concerns Muslims today as
Muslims find themselves facing genocide in Myanmar.
Relief web, a leading humanitarian information resource began gathering testimony of
Rohingya refugees between September and October of 2017. A total of
1,360 published testimonies from Rohingya people displaced in Cox Bazaar,
Bangladesh confirm an almost universal experience (92 percent) of systemized
state-sanctioned violence against them, augmented by civilian vigilante groups.
“Events without witnesses – as the Myanmar authorities
wish the Rohingya persecution to be—are sinister in their evocation of the
ultimate event without witness, the Holocaust.”
The stories are of a systemic campaign of sexual violence
against women and girls and multiple reports of the murder of infants and
children by burning or drowning, indicating intent to eradicate future
generations of the Rohingya.
The United Nations
concerned that genocide is underway, formally launched efforts to document
Myanmar’s human rights violations in May of last year.
The Rohingya people are long recognized to be among the most persecuted
minorities in the world today. Under Myanmar’s Citizenship Law enacted in 1982,
Rohingya people are denied all three tiers of citizenship because they are
deemed “non-indigenous” and not of the 135 national races that Myanmar recognizes.
Naturalization, while technically available to them, is
in effect inaccessible because they are required to prove ancestral heritage in
the Rakhine state prior to 1948. That is simply unattainable for most Rohingya
people.
Defining them therefore as illegal Bangladeshi
immigrants, Myanmar by law renders these people, native born to Myanmar, as
stateless. Even when they do have citizenship, they continue to be denied basic
rights.
Following her investigative visit last summer to assess
the situation in Bangladeshi refugee camps, U.N. Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee announced the
Rohingya people had been subject to
state-sanctioned arbitrary arrests, torture, murder of men, women, children and
infants, sexual violence and rape, enforced property seizures, torching of villages, enforced disappearances. forcible
displacement and relocation and land grabbing. All of this is at the hands of
the Myanmar security forces and authorities.
The U.N. also added that Myanmar’s decision to deny the
U.N. all access to the country “can only be viewed as a strong indication that there must be
something terribly awful happening in Rakhine, as well as in the rest of the
country.”
Lee underlined that these treatments bear the “hallmarks
of genocide,” and “amount to a crime against humanity.”
It is an unfathomable repeat of history.
Some in the Muslim world have taken leadership on this
issue by providing shelter to over 1 million fleeing Rohingya people in
Bangladesh as Indonesia attempts to raise international awareness.
For every Muslim around the world, bearing witness to
their suffering is a matter not only of participating in lifesaving
intervention, but also an opportunity to finally come to grips of their denial
of the history of Jewish genocide during the Holocaust.
As inconceivable as it seems, millions of Muslims remain
woefully ignorant of the Holocaust. A 2006 Pew study confirms anti-Jewish
sentiment remains overwhelmingly centered in predominantly Muslim majority
countries.
Holocaust denial has a marked presence in the Muslim
majority world, where more than 51 percent of Muslims surveyed said they
believe the scale of Jews murdered in the Holocaust is greatly exaggerated. In
the Middle East North African region, this rises to 63 percent.
The persecution of Jews has filled collective memory over
millennia. This is the same peril the Rohingya people are finding themselves in
today and efforts to bear witness are finally underway.
More than seven decades after the end of the Holocaust,
The University of Southern California Shoah Foundation’s Executive Director
Stephen Smith recently traveled in a skeleton team to record and lend voice to
Rohingya Muslim survivors of genocide.
In the 25 years since its inception, the Shoah
Foundation’s Institute of Visual History has become the keeper of the world’s
largest archive of audiovisual testimonies of 55,000 survivors and witnesses to
genocide.
There is great power in bearing witness, which is why
perpetrators, whether German Nazis or Myanmar authorities, seek to conceal their
acts at all costs. Truth moves humanity and effects change. Bearing witness
halts genocide. It is this power of witnessing that holds value for all
Muslims, Jews and all peoples around the world.
Events without witnesses – as the Myanmar authorities wish
the Rohingya persecution to be—are sinister in their evocation of the ultimate
event without witness, the Holocaust. Central to the savagery of mankind’s
worst genocide was contemporary humanity’s refusal to witness.
As history repeats, silence is not an acceptable
response.
Dr. Qanta A. Ahmed is a British American
Muslim physician, Member of The University of Southern California's Shoah
Foundation’s Committee on Countering Contemporary Anti-Semitism Through
Testimony, and Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. @MissDiagnosis