It has triggered the fastest growing
humanitarian crisis in recent years
Efforts
to deprive the Rohingya -- the ethnic Muslim community living in the Rakhine
State of Myanmar for time-immemorial -- from citizenship began shortly after
Myanmar’s independence.
The 1948 Union Citizenship Act defined
Myanmar citizenship and identified specific ethnicities that were allowed to
gain citizenship -- and did not include
the Rohingya. After the military coup in 1962, the government began giving
documentation to fewer and fewer Rohingya children, refusing to recognize new
generations. Violence against the Rohingya continues, with continued military
involvement and the government’s denial to protect them.
What ethnic cleansing is?
In 1990, the term “ethnic cleansing” came
into wider usage, to explicate and describe the situation suffered by
particular ethnic groups during conflicts that erupted after the disintegration
of the former Yugoslavia. Ethnic cleansing has been defined as the attempt to
get rid of (through deportation, displacement or even mass killing) members of
an unwanted ethnic group in order to establish an ethnically homogeneous
geographic area.
The term ethnic cleansing has been reserved
for some of the worst atrocities in history. The UN defines it as a purposeful
policy, designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove, by violent and
terror-inspiring means, the civilian population of another ethnic or religious
group from certain geographic areas.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has
linked ethnic cleansing more specifically to genocide, crimes against humanity
and war crimes, stating that ethnic cleansing could constitute all three of
those other offenses. In this way, despite controversy over its exact
definition, ethnic cleansing is now clearly covered under international law,
though efforts to prevent and punish acts of ethnic cleansing are still in
development.
The Rohingya crisis
Since August 2017, over a million refugees
have entered Bangladesh, crossing the border of Myanmar where the state
military launched a cleansing operation against the Rohingya.
The situation cannot yet be assessed fully
and independently, as Myanmar has refused access to human rights investigators.
Satellite imagery showing burned villages confirm the situation as a textbook
example of ethnic cleansing -- the military of a Buddhist majority country
attacking a Muslim minority.
The recent wave of violence is the latest in
a pattern of discrimination that started over 50 years ago in 1962. Myanmar,
then called Burma, was taken over by the military in a coup led by General Ne
Win.
They promoted fierce nationalism based on the
country's Buddhist identity and when they needed a common enemy to help unite
the population, the Rohingya were singled out as a threat. Tensions between the
Burmese Buddhist population and the Rohingya go back to WWII, when each group
supported opposing sides.
The Rohingya with a population of about one
million became a stateless people in 1991, and Myanmar's military launched a
campaign to rid them, resulting in 250,000 Rohingya fleing to Bangladesh.
Tensions continued to build in the 2000s. Violence broke out in 2012, when four
Muslim men were accused of raping and killing a Buddhist woman in Rakhine.
Buddhist nationalists, backed by security forces, attacked Muslim
neighbourhoods and burned homes, displacing tens of thousands.
The Rohingya were persecuted,
disenfranchised, and stateless in 2016. A Rohingya militant group called Arakan
Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) emerged and coordinated small-scale attacks on
border police stations. An attack on August 25th 2017 left 12 police officers
dead, and sparked the current crisis against Rohingya civilians. A brutal
retaliation by the state security forces has led to thousands of deaths, and
the mass exodus to Bangladesh.
Since the August attack, 210 villages have
been burned to the ground. The violent campaign has triggered the fastest
growing humanitarian crisis in recent years, but Myanmar's de facto leader and
Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi has barely acknowledged the attacks.
Recent reports claimed that the military has
planted land mines along the Bangladesh border to prevent the Rohingya from
returning. Myanmar's government has systematically stripped their citizenship,
terrorized them, and destroyed their homes, and now it wants to keep them from
ever coming back.
Role of the world community
In mid-October 2017, the European Union
Council of Foreign Ministers annulled ties and incorporated travel bans for the
Myanmar military, as did the United States. Both also began reviewing the
possibility of further formal sanctions. Meanwhile the Pope’s late-November
visit to Myanmar to denounce the violence must have hit home to the Rohingya
just how helpless the West had become.
Over the issue of Rohingya, the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been mostly silent and has not taken a
stand on the growing number of asylum seekers in member countries, largely
because of its members’ commitment to the principle of non-interference in each
other’s internal affairs.
ASEAN’s only response to the crisis so far
has been a bland statement -- almost a month after the atrocities in Rakhine --
expressing “concern” about the situation, and failing to even mention the word
Rohingya. Amnesty International has criticized the organization, alleging it
has “failed” the refugees.
India stated, “We stand by Myanmar, we
strongly condemn the terrorist attack and condole the death of policemen and
soldiers.” However, India has also sent 7,000 metric-tons of relief materials
to Bangladesh. China has been advocating resolution through bilateral efforts
between Bangladesh and Myanmar, and has offered to negotiate. Beijing and
Moscow questioned UNSC's jurisdiction to take any measure, and contended that
any interference would worsen the situation.
Hence, the world’s largest democracy, the
biggest communist state, and a powerful Eurasian country, all have lined up
with Myanmar, turning a blind eye to the “textbook case of ethnic cleansing” as
aptly stated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, while
Bangladesh is taking the burden of all the Rohingya refugees with its limited
capacity.
Farjana Afruj Khan Alin is a PhD candidate,
University of Malaya, Malaysia.
Source: Dhaka Tribune