By Maung Zarni & Natalie Brinham
On the same day, before the Security Council briefing,
Darusman, former Attorney General of Indonesia who headed his country’s
National Human Rights Commission and served as UN Special Rapporteur on human
rights in North Korea, had held a press conference in New York where he was
joined by Professor Yanghee Lee of South Korea, UN Special Rapporteur on human
rights situation in Myanmar.[3] Echoing the UN Fact-Finding Mission Chief’s
concerns for Rohingyas’ safety arising out of the continuing existence of
structures, institutions, practices and executioners of Myanmar’s genocidal
policies, Professor Lee officially opposed the scheme of repatriation of one
million Rohingyas who have taken refuge across the borders on Bangladeshi
soil.[4]
This essay series explores the human costs and policy
challenges associated with the displacement crises in the Middle East and Asia.
The essays explore the myths or misconceptions that have pervaded discussions
about these crises, as well as the constraints or capacity deficiencies that
have hampered the responses to them. See more: http://www.mei.edu/publications/refugees-adrift-responses-crises-mena-and-asia-1
“It is an ongoing genocide (in Myanmar),” said Mr.
Marzuki Darusman, the head of the UN Human Rights Council-mandated Independent
International Fact-Finding Mission at the official briefing at the full
Security Council on October 24, 2018.[1] This official briefing was officially
requested by 9 out of the 15 Council members over the objection of China,
Russia, Equatorial Guinea and Bolivia).[2]
Amid calls for international accountability —
international because Myanmar lacks an independent and competent judiciary, as
well as the political will to bring to justice the main military perpetrators
of the genocide[5] — the government of Bangladesh has prioritized the
repatriation of Rohingyas.[6] To be sure, the massive influx of Rohingyas into
Bangladesh has placed a heavy economic, social and political burden on the
country.
The flurry of activities by Bangladesh authorities —
including organizing and attending international conferences and hosting
countless visits by foreign heads of state and delegations, and celebrities
that are focused on addressing the root cause of the recurring waves of refugee
inflows from Myanmar — indicate that the continuing presence of Rohingya
refugees in the country is an all-consuming concern for both its government and
society at large.[7]
Because third-country resettlement of one million
Rohingyas is not a viable solution, Dhaka’s focus on repatriation — as opposed
to holding Myanmar perpetrators of genocidal crimes accountable — is not only
understandable but also warranted. However, the most crucial question is how to
address the justifiable, widespread and profound fear of further waves of
attacks and being sent back to live under genocidal conditions among the deeply
traumatized Rohingyas in the camps in Cox’s Bazar district in Bangladesh.[8]
For two consecutive years, Prime Minister Sheik Hasina
has gone to the UN General Assembly and presented her proposal to the
international community in order to mobilize support for Bangladesh’s efforts
to unload the burden placed on her country.[9] The large-scale impact of
neighboring Myanmar’s genocide is all too visible for any visitor to the
sprawling camp “city” in Cox’s Bazar. It
is also a subject of criminal investigation by the pre-trial Chamber of the
International Criminal Court after the ICC issued an unprecedented and fully
justified ruling that the cross-border nature of Myanmar’s crimes — deportation
and “other (international) crimes” — are within the Court’s jurisdiction and
hence the preliminary investigations of
allegations and facts must proceed,[10] despite non-signatory Myanmar’s
official dismissal of the ruling as “meritless.”[11]
To her credit, Prime Minister Sheik Hasina has
highlighted the essential need of the Rohingya, most specifically the group’s
safety, upon return to their places of origin inside Myanmar. In her proposals
to the UN in 2017 and 2018, the PM even raised, officially, the issue of
establishing “safe zone” for the Rohingyas inside Myanmar[12] — and rightly so.
Having had to deal with chronically large waves of
Rohingya exodus into the Bangladeshi territories since 1978,[13] Dhaka is best
positioned to comprehend and appear to fully appreciate, the absence of
physical group safety, which is the direct outcome of Myanmar’s genocidal
policies and practices, for this largely Muslim ethnic minority population as
the prime “push factor.”[14]
The predominantly Buddhist Myanmar has long singled out
the Rohingya population — which qualifies, according to the UN Fact-Finding
Mission report, as ‘protected group’ under international law[15] — for
extermination on Myanmar’s soil. The military-controlled
Myanmar state has perceived Rohingyas as a group with a distinct identity,
language and culture, and as a demographic proxy which Bangladesh is using to
ease its (Dhaka’s) population pressure[16]: although Bangladesh is 40% smaller
in area than Myanmar, it is home to over three times as many people.
Accordingly, the Myanmar military has instituted
systematic measures, both violent and non-violent, designed to change the
demographic character of the predominantly Rohingya region of Northern Rakhine,
having reversed radically the official recognition[17] granted to Rohingyas in
the 1950s and early 1960s as an ethnic nationality of the Union of Burma, who
are full and equal citizens, like the country’s other minority populations
(e.g., Shan, Kachin, Kayah, Chin, Mon, Rakhine, etc.) and that the 2.5
townships of Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathae Daung formed the main
administration region of Rohingya people.
When the Myanmar military realized that its peaceful
scheme of changing the Muslim character of Northern Rakhine State of Rohingya
homeland through the state-sponsored trans-migration of Buddhist and other
non-Muslim internal migrants from other parts of the country was not having any
appreciable impact on the region,[18] it decided to resort to waves of
state-directed violence against the target-population of Rohingyas.
Since February 1978, Myanmar’s military leaders have
attempted to reduce and eventually erase the Rohingyas’ presence from
Bangladesh-Myanmar border region, which stretches 270 miles, framing the region
next to the populous Muslim nation of Bangladesh as the “Western gate” of the
Union of Myanmar. These systematic attempts at the erasure of Rohingya identity
and presence are anchored in the military’s revisionist historical discourse —
that Rakhine was a “purely Buddhist” land “contaminated” by the unwelcome
intrusions and immigration of Muslims, as openly stated in The State’sWestern
Gate (Yangon, 2016),[19] by retired General Khin Nyunt, former chief of the
military intelligence services and one of the architects of what Amartya Sen
calls “the slow genocide.”[20]
This official and popular discourse of “Fortress Myanmar”
is not applied in the equally porous borderlands with the country’s two giant
neighbors, China and India.[21] Inside Myanmar, it is public knowledge that the
country has received hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants from the
bordering Chinese state of Yunnan — with some estimates putting the number at
roughly one million. The Burmese military and political class, including Aung
San Suu Kyi and her NLD party leadership were acutely aware of this illegal
Chinese immigration[22] into what is known as “Upper Myanmar,” but both have
kept quiet since Myanmar’s relations with China solidified after the post-Cold
War Western bloc took punitive measures against the formerly non-aligned State
on grounds of the well-documented egregious and pervasive human rights
abuses. As a matter of fact, under the
previous military-backed government of ex-General Thein Sein (2010-15), Myanmar
had even created a new ethnic name — Mong Yang Myanmar — exclusively for the
almost 90,000 ethnic Han which assisted the military’s operations against
restive Myanmar ethnic nationalities such as the Kokant.[23]
The fact that Myanmar continues to deny its own official
documentation supporting the Rohingyas’ claim of Western Myanmar as their
homeland and to categorically dismiss their irrefutable historical and official
group identity as Rohingyas[24] while imposing on the group a false identity of
“Bengali,” that is, citizens of Bangladesh can only be understood within the
framework of genocide.[25] It is not the lack of knowledge on the part of
Myanmar leadership that ethnic identities are not simply innate or DNA-based,
but are invented by political organizations and communities, states or
sub-state level entities.
The overwhelming majority of the UN member states — save
India, Japan, Russia and China — have been vocal in condemning Myanmar’s
“gravest crimes in international criminal and humanitarian law,” as the UN Fact
Finding Mission on Myanmar put it. But the public condemnations have not been
matched by an equal amount of tangible support for the one million Rohingya
genocide survivors in Bangladesh in terms of humanitarian funds, human
resources (e.g., trauma counsellors, social workers, etc.), or livelihoods
opportunities. Less than half of the
need for humanitarian aid has been met.[26] Consequently, Dhaka feels enormous
pressure to feed and house, however unsatisfactorily, such a large pool of
refugees.
Against this background, the idea and schemes of
repatriation, as well as Bangladesh’s anxiety over the need to begin the
repatriation, need to be understood. Beyond the calls for justice and
accountability in the form of ICC or ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal on
Myanmar (i.e., International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia or International
Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda), Rohingya repatriation is correctly seen as the
only viable, peaceful solution to one of the contemporary world’s greatest
humanitarian challenges.[27]
Importantly, repatriation is interpreted and pursued by
different key players for different strategic and policy ends.
Bangladesh advocates repatriation of Rohingyas, as they
put enormous strain on Bangladesh government resources, on society and on the
Environment.[28]
The guilty party of Myanmar agree, largely in principle,
to receive the returning Rohingyas back as Aung San Suu Kyi and her foreign
ministry strategists regard repatriation as a tactic to placate the outraged UN
and other state players calling for the establishment of the international
tribunal on Myanmar and supporting the ICC’s criminal investigation of
Myanmar’s crimes of deportation and other high crimes. This is an open secret
among the politically conscious Burmese. In fact, in a recent interview with
the Radio Free Asia Burmese Service, Tun Tin, a well-known member of the
Myanmar Chamber of Commerce and a Burmese crony, explicitly stated that
repatriation is a way of alleviating the pressure of the international campaign
for criminal accountability around Myanmar genocide.
China is pressuring both Bangladesh and Myanmar to start
large-scale repatriation because the Communist leadership do not welcome the
deepening of Western involvement in the resource-rich country which Beijing
considers an integral component of its long-term strategic scheme of power
projection into the Indian Ocean.
India is following suit out of a different logic: New
Delhi has recently begun de-nationalizing the several million Muslims in the
country’s restive northeast region of Assam, a first step towards Myanmar-style
expulsion and deportation. Additionally, India is vying with China for
influence over the ruling Burmese military since the early 1990s, which
necessitates Delhi’s unconditional support for Myanmar’s policies towards
Rohingyas.
Japan is pushing repatriation out of its own strategic
calculations, lending Aung San Suu Kyi’s government media and money
support,[29] in an effort to counteract China’s growing influence over Myanmar.
ASEAN is split between reformist Malaysia [30] which is
openly pushing for strong measures to end the genocide and the rest of the
Southeast Asian bloc, made up of largely authoritarian regimes.
Meanwhile, inside Myanmar, all the key pillars of Myanmar
society and politics remain deeply genocidal in their outlooks. Nationally
organized Buddhist monks continue to promote venomous anti-Rohingya view while
rallying behind the main perpetrator, namely Myanmar Armed Forces.
Anti-Rohingya public opinion has largely crystalized, as the direct result of
the Myanmar military’s psychological warfare or mass propaganda campaign, using
traditional media and, since 2012, Facebook, depicting Rohingyas, falsely as
“Islamicists” and “Illegal Bengali invaders” hell-bent on taking over “Buddhist
Myanmar.”
Aung San Suu Kyi herself and her ruling NLD party share
the public view that Rohingya identity is “fake” — a political invention dating
from the 1950s — and that Rohingyas really belong in Bangladesh. Even if Suu
Kyi and her civilian government have the political will — and there is no
indication they do — they have no control over the most powerful organ of the
State, the Security Sector, and the most culturally influential pillar of
Myanmar, the Buddhist Order. Locally in Rakhine, the shared homeland between
Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingyas, Rakhine nationalists continue to mobilize
openly against any large-scale repatriation.
Against this overwhelmingly hostile background — not to
mention Myanmar’s state’s policies of persecution, including laws and
regulations, which remain completely unchanged — no repatriation without
guaranteed safety for Rohingyas is conceivable. The majority of Rohingyas may
be illiterate, poorly educated or disorganized. This is in spite of Suu Kyi’s
disingenuous public statement that her government has implemented 81 of 88
recommendations by the Rakhine Commission chaired by the late Kofi
Annan.[31]
The 40 years of life under genocidal conditions have
taught a bitter lesson: the Rohingyas’ physical safety in Myanmar — whether
they be future returnees (1.2 millions) from Bangladesh, the estimated 400,000
trapped in Rohingya villages and Rakhine’s southern regional town of
Buthidaung, or those in IDP camps — cannot be assured without international protection.
It is inconceivable that without this requisite safety any repatriation will be
voluntary or sustainable.
Just one week before the planned bilateral repatriation,
Myanmar continues with its official — and non-credible — framing of the human
rights and humanitarian catastrophe as a direct result of (Muslim)
“terrorism.” UN Ambassador Hau Do Suan
told Fox News that “the root cause of this humanitarian issue is because of the
Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) — the Muslim terrorist group. They
attacked against the government in Rakhine State in October 2016 and again in
August 2017. This humanitarian problem was ignited by those terrorist
attacks.”[32]
It is therefore urgently necessary for the issue of the
guaranteed safety for Rohingyas in Myanmar to be placed at the center of all
international policy discussions on Myanmar’s ongoing genocide.
However, no meaningful discussion which rightly
prioritizes Rohingyas’ need for protection and guaranteed basic human and
citizenship rights can take place in the face of the repeated refusals by the
powerful Asian governments (such as Japan, China and India) and the Association
of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to accept the UN Fact-Finding Mission’s
dire warning that Myanmar genocide is “ongoing.”
To overcome this obstacle, the Rohingya people urgently
need an international coalition of UN member states prepared to pool their
respective diplomatic, commercial, political and even military influences in
order to bring an effective end to Myanmar’s slow genocide. In his October 4, 2018 talk at the Council on
Foreign Relations,Prime Minister of Malaysia Dr. Mahathir Mohammad stated
openly that military intervention (in Myanmar) may be needed.[33]
Such interventions may not be in the cards, but certainly
some form of coordinated and collective protection and guaranteed human rights
for the Rohingya is fully warranted. In the attempts to set up protection
mechanisms, churches and other non-Christian religious and civil society
institutions can play more proactive and strategic roles, particularly given
the fact that the religious and group identity of the Rohingya minority is a
major driver behind Myanmar’s genocide.
Read here: http://www.mei.edu/publications/ensuring-safety-rohingyas-national-minority-inside-myanmar-who-how