Newly-organized UN in Myanmar has shelved organization’s
own governing principles of transparency and inclusivity, as evidenced by
freshly-inked MOU with Myanmar
By Maung Zarni & Natalie Brinham
- Maung Zarni is Coordinator for Strategic
Affairs with the Free Rohingya Coalition (www.freerohingyacoalition.org).
- Natalie Brinham is an Economic and Social
Research Council PhD scholar at the Queen Mary University of London and
co-author of “The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya” (Pacific Rim Law
and Policy Journal, Spring 2014).
CAMBRIDGE, UK
One million Rohingya survivors of the Myanmar genocide,
who took refuge across the borders in the neighboring Bangladesh, remain
largely unpersuaded by the news of the latest repatriation deal the United
Nations agencies have signed with their perpetrators in Naypyidaw, and openly
call for “UN Security Forces” to guarantee safe return to their homelands in
the Western Myanmar state of Rakhine.
On 6 June, the two UN agencies with mandates for refugee
protection and “development” inked the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with
the Government of Myanmar, a hybrid military-Aung-San-Suu-Kyi regime. Knut
Osby, UN’s man in Yangon, took to the Twittersphere, putting the spin that
“Secretary General Antonio Guterres welcomes the agreement”, whose content is
treated as if it were Myanmar’s top national security secret. Additionally, Mr.
Osby, who holds the assistant secretary general position, tried to assure the
Rohingya refugees via the mass media that UN would be pressing for “group
identity” recognition by Myanmar and a “voluntary, safe, dignified and
sustainable” return.
Leading INGOs, including the Nobel Peace Prize winning
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the Washington-based Refugees
International, headed by Eric Schwartz, the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of
State for Refugees and Migration, issued statements, stressing the total
absence of necessary conditions and injecting a dose of reality as if to
pre-empt the typically phony reactions of ‘welcome’ that pervade diplomatic
quarters. Both organizations express varying degrees of valid skepticism about
the MOU. The conditions on the ground indicate no semblance of physical safety
for any returning Rohingyas. There is no indication that the official
acceptance of Rohingya by Myanmar as an integral ethnic minority of the Union
is forthcoming, especially when one remembers the national standing Rohingyas
had enjoyed as a group until the early years of the military rule in the
1960’s. And there is little prospect for their re-integration into the
predominantly Buddhist society where the most powerful Senior General Min Aung
Hlaing publicly declared his genocidal intent, that the presence of the
Rohingya in N. Rakhine was an “unfinished business” from the pogroms of the
Second World War.
In addition to the frightening prospects of being marched
back to Myanmar’s “killing fields”, what has truly unnerved the Rohingya
refugees in Bangladesh -- thousands have been in refugee camps in Bangladesh
since the early 1990’s as they fled the earlier waves of violent persecution --
about this latest UN-Myanmar refugee deal is this: UN agencies -- the UNDP, the
UNHCR, the World Food Program (WFP) -- have a dismal record when it comes to
standing up for the Rohingya in the last 40 years since the UNHCR first became
involved in the repatriation process in the summer of 1978.
The UNHCR operates in both countries at the pleasure of
the governments in Dhaka and Naypyidaw, neither of which is a signatory to the
Refugee Conventions. The UN’s rotating international staff in Myanmar may lack
the institutional memory about their uncomfortable role in the broken sacred
principle of non-refoulment, but those Rohingya who were forcibly repatriated
have not. The UN agency whose principal mandate is protection of the refugees
was in fact in no position to stand up for the most vulnerable Rohingyas
sandwiched between the perpetrating Myanmar and Bangladesh.
In the decades that followed the 1990’s repatriations,
the UN’s refugee watchdog had consistently put keeping good relations with host
governments in order to secure access -- or “pragmatic humanitarianism” --
above its own organizational mandate of protection. That is why the UNHCR, and
all other UN agencies operating in Myanmar, have had an open, if unwritten,
directive for all staff to comply with regarding Myanmar’s refusal to use the
term ‘Rohingya’. So the staffs of all UN agencies operating in Myanmar avoid
using the word ‘Rohingya’ in all their communications seen or heard by Myanmar
officials. On the eve of Myanmar’s “ethnic cleansing” of the N. Rakhine state,
the WFP reportedly recalled its July 2017 report about the semi-famine like
conditions in which 80,000 Rohingya children under the age of 5 were living at
the “request” of the Myanmar government.
Specifically, UN agencies in Myanmar lead an
organizational double-life, speaking in two different scripts: one, tailored to
placate the host regime by not calling Rohingyas by the group’s ethnic name in
meetings and interactions with Myanmar authorities, who have attempted to
systematically erase the group’s identity from Myanmar’s collective
consciousness, history and official records; the other one to please the ears
of global human rights organizations and Rohingya campaigners internationally
by calling the group by their proper name, Rohingyas.
At the level of individual management of the UN’s
in-country team, the last UN Resident Coordinator, Renata Lok-Dessallien, opted
to maintain cordial relations with Myanmar leaders and prioritizing
(business-friendly) development approach over human rights, an act which
undermined the then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s policy of
Human-Rights-First, which was adopted as a result of the widespread failures of
UN agencies during the last phase of the civil war in Sri Lanka, where Colombo
was accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and even genocide against a
Hindu Tamil minority group. Specifically, Lok-Dessallien commissioned an
internal report entitled “The Role of the United Nations in Rakhine state” but
subsequently “suppressed” the report. The report’s recommendations included the
call for frontloading human rights with respect to the oppressed Rohingya
group, pointing out the UN’s ill-preparedness in the face of (likely) mass
atrocities against the group and enjoining taking a firmer stance on the
state’s egregious rights abuses in the Rohingya area.
The UN had since replaced the disgraced Resident
Coordinator with Knut Osby, significantly increased its Myanmar budget and
elevated its office in Myanmar one-notch up the UN bureaucracy to the level of
Assistant Secretary General-ship.
The UN’s reputation -- and most specifically the
reputation of the UNHCR and the UNDP -- is on the line in Myanmar, and beyond.
Any part they play in facilitating returns from Bangladesh to Myanmar is risky,
when returns could potentially result in another round of mass killings,
further decades of containment in concentration camps or deliberate slow
starvation. The UN agencies simply must place protection and human rights first
this time around. The signs of a new secretive deal do not bode well for the
Rohingya survivors. The newly-organized UN in Myanmar has even shelved the
organization’s own governing principles of transparency and inclusivity, as
evidenced by the freshly-inked MOU with Myanmar. Myanmar is now a suspect in
the eyes of the International Criminal Court and international law circles. In
apparent compliance with the demands for secrecy typically made by Myanmar’s
military-controlled National League for Democracy (NLD) government, the UN has
not made public the MOU for scrutiny. Neither has the UN included Rohingyas in
any stage of the negotiations over the MOU, nor spelled out their future role.
There is then little wonder that the Free Rohingya Coalition, the emerging
global network of the widely recognized Rohingya representatives, with deep
roots in their communities, both inside Myanmar and in diaspora, including
Bangladesh, cry foul against the MOU, which remains shady.
The UNHCR have added a fourth adjective -- “sustainable”
-- to the mainstreamed mantra of “voluntary, safe and dignified”. To make the
fourth adjective viable, the UN must listen to Rohingya voices that call for a
“protected return to a protected homeland in Myanmar”.
* Opinions expressed in this article are the
author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Anadolu
Agency.