By Raphael G. Bouchnik-Chen
The report is a harsh indictment of Myanmar’s
authorities. It describes indiscriminate killing, villages burned to the
ground, children assaulted, and women gang-raped, which collectively caused an
exodus of at least 700,000 people from Rakhine State since August 2017, many of
them to neighboring Bangladesh. These atrocities were categorized as “the
gravest crimes under international law.” Such was their extremity, the report
said, that the army should be investigated for genocide against the Rohingya.
In her book Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced
Displacement, Coercion and Foreign Policy, Kelly M. Greenhill, a former US
foreign policy consultant, argues that engineered migration is a strategy that
has been used by governments and organizations as an instrument of persuasion
in the international arena. In other words, manipulation of mass migration can
be used as a weapon to exert pressure on governments for political ends.
The latest refugee case to have attracted international
attention was the 700,000 Rohingya who recently fled Myanmar and crossed into
Bangladesh. A special UN fact-finding mission assigned by the UN Human Rights
Council (UNHRC) delivered its final report on September 17, 2018. “It is hard
to fathom the level of brutality of Tatmadaw operations, its total disregard
for civilian life,” Marzuki Darusman, the head of the Mission, told the UNHRC,
referring to the nation’s military. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-rohingya-hunger-myanmar-20180207-story.html
The report called for six senior military figures of the
Myanmar military forces (the Tatmadaw), including Commander-in-Chief Min Aung
Hlaing, to be prosecuted for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.
Based on the UNHRC report, on September 18, 2018, the
International Criminal Court (ICC) launched a preliminary investigation into
Myanmar’s crackdown on the Rohingya Muslims.
The newly nominated UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
Michelle Bachelet
welcomed the ICC’s decision. “This is an immensely important step towards
ending impunity, and addressing the enormous suffering of the Rohingya people,”
she said. “I emphasize the imperative of justice for Myanmar.” Bachelet has
called for the establishment of an independent body to collect evidence of
international crimes committed in Myanmar, with a view to supporting national
and international trials. https://reut.rs/2wXT2D7
Notwithstanding the gravity of the accusations against
Myanmar, the decisive wording of the UNHRC report warrants attention. Furthermore,
it is relevant that Myanmar did not allow the UNHRC fact-finding mission into
Rakhine, and has denounced any claim of atrocities against the Rohingya
minority.
In its preamble, the UNHRC report states that “the
Mission deeply regrets the lack of cooperation from the Government of Myanmar,
despite repeated appeals from the Human Rights Council and the Mission. The
Mission requested in-country access through letters of 4 September 2017, 17
November 2017 and 29 January 2018. It sent a detailed list of questions on 27
March 2018. … No response was received.” The report is thus a strict verdict on
a culprit who was absent at trial.
The Committee says it took the following to be sources of
first-hand information:
·
Confidential
interviews conducted by the Mission or its staff with victims, witnesses,
victims’ close family members, perpetrators, or former Myanmar officials with
direct knowledge of the issues brought before the Mission, where it was
assessed that the source was credible and reliable.
·
Satellite imagery
from reliable sources, authenticated video and photo material, and documents
containing first-hand information from reliable sources.
·
Publicly available
admissions of relevant facts by Myanmar officials.
By relying mainly on accessible data, the committee had a
relatively easy task — that is, it didn’t have to verify victims’ testimony or
challenge graphic descriptions of atrocities attributed to the Tatmadaw. This
methodology should raise questions of objectivity, especially in light of the
Mission’s verdict accusing the Tatmadaw of genocidal intent. The Myanmar
authorities’ refusal to cooperate with the mission was an act of defiance, but
that fact should not have affected the conclusion of the inquiry.
The world’s attention had already been raised by the
Preliminary Report of the UNHRC Mission (A/HRC/39/64), released on August 28,
2018. This portion of the report is considered to be the executive summary of
the final document released on September 17. The 20-page Preliminary Report
(compared to the 444 pages of the final report) indicates the agenda of the
international arena vis-à-vis the Myanmar government.
The report adheres fully to the Rohingya Muslim story
while rejecting any contradicting evidence that could have balanced or at least
raised doubts about the events in Rakhine. The Mission devotes a short
paragraph to deploring “serious human rights abuses” by militant or criminal
groups, first and foremost by ARSA (the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army), known
also as Harakat al-Yaqueen (HaY). It elides any need to confront the issue by
contending simply that the matter “requires further investigation.”
In a separate chapter, the Mission admits that “it has
not been able to verify these assertions.” Even when hard evidence was
presented, the Mission concluded that it was unable to ascertain the
authenticity of the recording or its source.
Disturbingly, the Mission deliberately chose to ignore a
detailed special report prepared by Amnesty International entitled “Myanmar:
New evidence reveals Rohingya armed group massacred scores in Rakhine State”
(May 22, 2018). According to Amnesty,
Based on dozens of interviews conducted there
and across the border in Bangladesh, as well as photographic evidence analyzed
by forensic pathologists, the organization revealed how Arakan Rohingya
Salvation Army (ARSA) fighters sowed fear among Hindus and other ethnic
communities with these brutal attacks.
“Our latest investigation on the ground sheds
much-needed light on the largely under-reported human rights abuses by ARSA
during northern Rakhine State’s unspeakably dark recent history,” said Tirana
Hassan, Crisis Response Director at Amnesty International.
It’s hard to ignore the sheer brutality of
ARSA’s actions, which have left an indelible impression on the survivors we’ve
spoken to. Accountability for these atrocities is every bit as crucial as it is
for the crimes against humanity carried out by Myanmar’s security forces in
northern Rakhine State.
The Amnesty report concludes, “For the full extent of the
human rights abuses and crimes committed in northern Rakhine State to be
uncovered, including those committed by ARSA, the Myanmar authorities must
immediately allow independent investigators, including the UN Fact-Finding
Mission, full and unfettered access throughout the region. Victims, survivors,
and their families have the right to justice, truth, and reparation for the
harm they have suffered.”
The UN Mission appears to have been remarkably tolerant
of ARSA’s acts of violence. Its report states that the 2017 ARSA attacks
against Myanmar’s military and police outposts and ensuing “clearance
operations” did not occur in a vacuum. They were foreseeable and planned. ARSA
emerges as a Rohingya resistance organization that arose in response to the
2012 violence and increased state oppression over all aspects of life. The
Mission’s report downgrades the actual weight of ARSA by concluding that it
“meets the requisite threshold of organization.” In practice, “ARSA was able to
carry out multiple coordinated attacks in a highly controlled and militarized
environment, but with little military capability.”
The UN Mission’s apparent empathy towards ARSA is also
manifested in its repeating of ARSA statements such as, “Our sole objective is
to defend, salvage and protect the innocent Rohingya indigenous native ethnic
community of Arakan State with our best capacities as we have the legitimate
right under international law to defend ourselves in line with the principle of
self-defense. In doing so, our defensive attacks have been aimed only at the
Burmese terrorist government and its terrorist military regime in accordance
with international norms and principles until our demands are filled.” Further,
the report reiterates ARSA’s “main principle” that it “strictly does not allow
any of our members to attack civilians, their places of worship and properties
regardless of their religious and ethnic background.”
The Mission’s bias is highlighted in its conclusion,
which asserts: “It appears, therefore, that the objectives of the ARSA attacks
may not have been military, but aimed at eliciting a response by the Tatmadaw
(as in October 2016), with the broader goal of drawing renewed global attention
to the Rohingya situation.” The Mission based its judgment on a statement of a
senior ARSA member who said, “The main aim of the attacks was to get
international attention, as we knew the response [of the Tatmadaw] would be
brutal. We hoped that, if the world could see their response, they would
finally understand our suffering.”
This statement by ARSA echoes a motif common to most
terrorist organizations masquerading as “liberation movements,” which the UN
Mission accepts at face value in an attempt to shield ARSA from any kind of
terrorist labeling. Likewise, it accepts without question ARSA’s rejection of
links to al-Qaeda, ISIS, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and all other transnational terrorist
groups, noting that they “do not welcome the involvement of these groups in the
Arakan conflict.” The Mission concludes that “the ill-equipped nature of ARSA
lends credibility to those claims, and the Mission has seen no information that
would suggest such links.”
This approach is problematic, not to say naïve, in view
of solid intelligence deriving from Indian and Bangladeshi security sources
consolidating Myanmar’s claims of covert cooperation between ARSA and jihadist
groups. The “smoking gun” was interception of long-distance calls between Hafez
Tohar, the chief of ARSA’s military wing, on August 23 and 24, 2017, just prior
to the large-scale Rohingya militants’ multiple attacks on Myanmar’s military
outposts on August 25 — attacks that triggered the crackdown that led to the
mass exodus of Rohingyas from North Rakhine in Myanmar. The incriminating
testimony is (inter alia) a call from an Iraq number initiated by someone
introducing himself as “al-Amin of Daesh” in which ISIS wished ARSA the best in
its jihad against Burmese colonialists, Buddhists, and Hindu fanatics.
The above data were not denied by Indian or Bangladeshi
officials even though they were reported by a pro-Burmese news network
(Mizzima). Furthermore, it has been reported that the Indian intelligence
agencies have found tight links between ISIS and Rohingya refugees. A Delhi
police spokesman was quoted in February 2017 as saying that “arrested
operatives have revealed that at least 500 Rohingyas were sent to Saudi
Arabia.” In addition, it was confirmed that the Bangladesh-based terror
organization known as Jamaat al-Mujahideen (JMB) is deeply involved in the
radicalization of Rohingya refugees in India. As of the beginning of 2017,
there were around 36,000 Rohingya Muslims in India.
The UN Mission hardly mentions such a possible
connection. It essentially endorses ARSA’s press release, which explicitly
rejects any such links.
Its assessment is further challenged by a JSTOR research
document from May 2015 entitled “Myanmar at the Crossroads: The Shadow of
Jihadist Extremism,” which sounded an alert that the country was in the
crosshairs of religious extremist and terrorist activities while transitioning
from decades of army-led isolation into a democracy. The study mentioned the
harsh sectarian conflict in Myanmar along with threats posed by local insurgent
groups, including the probability that these groups might attempt to link up with
jihadist terrorist groups like ISIS. JSTOR highlighted the emerging dangers
deriving from the intensification of the use of social media networks by
jihadist extremists to expand their influence and spread their caliphate
ideology.
In that reality, the Rohingya crisis could in fact be a
harsh sectarian conflict in which the sovereign authority is acting with zero
tolerance to restore order in northern Rakhine State. The role of Muslim terror
groups, especially ARSA, as destabilizing players should not be ignored or
underestimated, bearing in mind that its militants harbor behind civilians and
use threats and intimidation to assure secrecy about their activities.
No doubt the Tatmadaw bear severe responsibility for
atrocities, discrimination, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya.
But the Rohingya leadership should not escape responsibility for the horrors
they have inflicted on the Buddhist population. Whether or not the latter
constitutes terrorism remains open to debate, but it is no doubt influenced by
jihadism, and operational involvement cannot be ignored in connection to the
growing activities of ARSA. Crimes under international law have been committed
by both sides.
It is therefore reasonable to wonder about the
categorical conclusions and recommendations of the UNHRC Mission, with its
emphasis on accusing Myanmar’s military commanders of genocidal intent. The
“ultimate proof” of criminality offered by the Mission is this: “[The] Tatmadaw
Commander-in-Chief’s statement reveal[s] that the ‘clearance operations’ were
not a response to a concrete threat from ARSA, but to the ‘unfinished job’ of
‘solv[ing]’ the long-standing Bengali problem.”
But this is not an accurate representation of what the
Commander-in-Chief, Senior-General Min Aung Hlaing, actually said. The exact
citation is taken from a Facebook post of September 2017 in which he says, “The
Bengali problem was a long-standing one which has become an unfinished job
despite the efforts of the previous governments to solve it. The government in
office is taking great care in solving the problem.”
The Mission twisted the general’s words. He never said
the “‘clearance operations’ were not a response to a concrete threat from ARSA,
but to the ‘unfinished job.’” This biased paraphrasing creates a false
impression that has already had consequences. Following the UNHRC report,
several commentators suggested that the general had used Nazi terminology,
hinting at a “final solution.”
Christopher Sidoti, one of the Mission’s members, has
acknowledged the limitations of its work. “Like almost all circumstances of
genocide, there is no smoking gun,” he said. “We do not have a copy of a direct
order that says, ‘Undertake genocide tomorrow, please.’” It should be noted
that neither the US nor the UN Secretary General, while condemning Myanmar for
crimes against humanity, used the terms genocide or genocidal intent.
The Myanmar-Rohingya conflict is marked by severe
psychological warfare on both sides, with the Rohingya — as the underdog —
being the winning party. The UNHRC Mission was a formidable platform that
helped that Muslim minority win public attention while condemning the Myanmar
authorities. Those authorities include Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s top civilian
politician and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who has now been accused of
“contributing to the commission of atrocity crimes.”
The message behind the UNHCR report’s full-throated
condemnation of the Myanmar authorities could simply be, “If you don’t
cooperate with the Mission you will end up as the culprit,” no matter what the
facts might be. This posture could serve the UN body in defying the US decision
to quit the UNHRC — namely, the UN has a major role in the international arena
no matter what the Americans do.
Such, after all, was the fate of Israel after Operation
Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. The UNHRC’s “Goldstone Committee” of January 2009,
which was boycotted by Israel, falsely charged the Jewish state with committing
serious war crimes and breaching humanitarian law. Goldstone’s later
renunciation of the report bearing his name passed virtually unnoticed by the
international community.
Dr. Raphael G. Bouchnik-Chen is a retired
colonel who served as a senior analyst in IDF Military Intelligence. BESA
Center Perspectives Papers, such as this one, are published through the
generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family.