AI, with its most
recent report, pours fuel on violent anti-Rohingya racism in genocidal Myanmar
and anti-Muslim India
By Dr. Maung Zarni
CAMBRIDGE, UK
With the 22 May
release of its report “Attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army on Hindus
in northern Rakhine State”, Amnesty International has poured fuel on the
anti-Muslim fear and loathing in Burma as well as in Modi's violent anti-Muslim
India.
To be sure, no human
rights activist must object to human rights watchdogs carrying out their own
mission.
However, it is
deeply disturbing that Amnesty International, a Nobel-prize winner, released
its latest report with a callous disregard as to the predictable international
consequences for Rohingyas as well as other faith-based communities in Myanmar
and beyond. Within 24 hours of the report’s release, Myanmar’s extremists are
having a field day -- citing AI in order to further whip up anti-Rohingya
racism. This incites the exact type of violence that Amnesty purports to try to
prevent.
There are an
estimated 40,000 – 60,000 Rohingya refugees concentrated in several pockets in
India, living with very real threats of being burned-out or deported en mass.
Violent Hindu extremism against Muslims of India has taken hold in Modi’s
India, where innocent Rohingyas attempt to survive and sustain their families
in precarious circumstances. By such Hindu groups they are wrongly associated
with terrorism. In the midst of the genocidal violence by the security forces
in Myanmar, the Modi government threatened to deport all Rohingya refugees in
India in the interests of “national security”. Amnesty’s report, far from
purveying hard but necessary facts in the interests of human rights, is likely
to have a further detrimental impact on those living in Myanmar, India and
beyond.
Further; Amnesty’s
report calls into question the real motive or unstated objective of the
organization, beyond uncovering and reporting on a massacre allegedly committed
by a Rohingya militant group.
While calling for an
independent investigation into crimes against humanity committed by the Myanmar
government and Rohingya militants, Amnesty proceeded to repeat verbatim Myanmar
military’s official but never independently verified narrative -- that Myanmar’s
“ethnic cleansing” of Rohingyas was triggered by ARSA insurgents: Amnesty
copied, cut and pasted “ARSA launched coordinated attacks on 30 different
police outposts”.
This talk of
“Rohingya insurgency” in N. Rakhine has been rejected by senior UN officials,
Special Envoys and former U.S. Government officials with years of expertise on
Burmese affairs, including UN Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee, UN Human Rights
Chief Zeid and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Refugees and
Migration Eric Schwatz. It beggars belief that Amnesty with its standard
independent verification would -- without problematizing it -- echo Myanmar’s
invented pretext of “ARSA insurgency”. In compiling this report, Amnesty
International was assisted by none other than the Ministry of Defence, which
centrally coordinates with Myanmar Ministries of Information, Foreign Affairs,
Home Affairs and Rakhine State administration without whose approval no foreign
researcher could travel to Rakhine state. The Hindu witnesses and survivors
from the reported massacre were brought to Sittwe by Myanmar authorities where
they were in turn interviewed by Amnesty researchers.
Amidst the mounting
pressure against Myanmar government for the mass killings and mass deportation
of the Rohingya population from N. Rakhine region -- Myanmar’s “psych-war
chief” Major General Aung Ye Win of “People’s Relations and the Armed Forces”
Department was seen leading a group of domestic journalists on the
military-organized tour examining the bodies of victims alleged to be Hindu. A
Burmese journalist asked the propaganda General for concrete evidence that
these killings were perpetrated by ARSA. He could not come up with a single
shred of evidence other than saying that “it is clear that no Hindus would kill
other Hindus”.
Apparently, Myanmar
military facilitated Amnesty to generate that evidence.
Importantly, Amnesty
used the word 'apartheid' in 2017 to refer to a situation which is widely
recognized as killing fields and open prisons where people are slaughtered and
mass raped, and being starved slowly, if they are not subject to direct
slaughter. The apartheid was noticed decades before. In the article entitled
“Burma’s Brand of Apartheid”, Far Eastern Economic Review (14 July 1978)
described the Rohingyas' conditions as apartheid 39 years before Amnesty opted
to characterize the conditions inside Myanmar under which Rohingyas have been
forced to live. By now, less than half of the Rohingya population remains in
their places of birth, where, according to UN Assistant Secretary General on
Human Rights Andrew Gilmour, they are being starved into fleeing.
With this report,
Amnesty has falsely put the two groups on a moral parity: ARSA, on the one
hand, which is made up of desperate, hopeless and angry Rohingyas who are
extremely primitively armed, and Myanmar's genocide-perpetrating government
backed by world's major powers such as China, Russia, and India, one the other.
Tragically, those of
us who are former card-carrying AI members have long known the organization to
be pursuing its organizational agendas and interests while masquerading itself
as a “uncompromising” and “principled” defender of human rights. In the world
where everything is commoditized and marketed, human rights becomes just
another tradable item -- not a principle or ideal. Indeed, through this report,
we can see that Amnesty has morphed into human rights merchant, rather than
acting as a genuine defender of human rights.
[The writer is
Coordinator for Strategic Affairs, Free Rohingya Coalition (https://freerohingyacoalition.org)
& adviser to the European Center for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge, UK.
]
* Opinions expressed
in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the
editorial policy of Anadolu Agency.