On Nov 11, Gambia has filed a lawsuit against Myanmar -
for 1948 Genocide Convention violation complaint - to the International Court
of Justice (ICJ) on behalf of OIC’s 57 member states, is a decisive step toward
justice for the Rohingya. Read: https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/499902
The Gambia’s ground-breaking move also underscored the
failure of Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN) member states,
particularly Malaysia, in taking the lead in confronting Myanmar’s crimes
against the Rohingya.
Since over the past two years, Malaysian government
officials have decisively broken ranks with their ASEAN counterparts in their
outspoken demands for accountability for the atrocities that Myanmar’s security
forces inflicted on its Muslim Rohingya minority in late 2017 in northern
Rakhine state.
The scale and barbarity of those abuses are
unquestionable. In September 2018, the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission
(FFM) published a 444-page report about human rights abuses against the
Rohingya. Read: https://shar.es/a3WIrw
The mission’s report concluded that there was evidence of
atrocities – including mass killings, gang rapes, and mutilations – warranting
criminal prosecution for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. The
report names top military officials as targets for investigation and
prosecution and blame civilian authorities for “spreading false narratives,
denying the wrongdoing of the (security forces), blocking independent
investigations … and overseeing the destruction of evidence.”
Despite that evidence, the Myanmar government has
consistently stonewalled international efforts at accountability for
those atrocities. The government rejected the UN FFM report’s findings as
“false allegations.” It has also blocked UN Special Rapporteur on Myanmar
Yanghee Lee, who is tasked with assessing the human rights situation in that
country. Read: https://t.co/gVBJWxh4Od
International accountability
But there are promising signs that international
accountability efforts for the Rohingya are moving forward despite Myanmar’s
intransigence.
On Nov 13, Rohingya and Latin American human rights
organisations filed a case with an Argentine court against Myanmar
government and military officials under the concept of universal
jurisdiction, which allows that people implicated in the most serious
international crimes may be arrested, prosecuted and convicted in countries
other than their own. The Argentine court filing seeks “the criminal sanction
of the perpetrators, accomplices and cover-ups of the genocide” perpetrated by
Myanmar security forces against the Rohingya.
Read: https://t.co/yXqiYuCxVn
The very next day, the International Criminal Court (ICC)
announced that it had authorised a formal investigation into Myanmar
government abuses against the Rohingya in late 2017 based on an acceptance that
“widespread and/or systematic acts of violence may have been committed that
could qualify as the crimes against humanity of deportation across the
Myanmar-Bangladesh border and persecution on grounds of ethnicity and/or
religion against the Rohingya population.” Read: https://www.icc-cpi.int/Pages/item.aspx?name=pr1495
Prior efforts to initiate an ICC investigation of the
bloodshed have been complicated by the fact that Myanmar is not a
signatory to the Rome Statute that established the court. International efforts
to trigger an ICC probe via a resolution of the UN Security Council have been
stymied by the opposition of Russia and China. Meanwhile, the UN-created
Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar (IIMM) officially began
operations in September 2019 to probe whether Myanmar has committed crimes
against humanity against its ethnic minorities over the past eight years.
Rhetorical support
The Malaysian government has expressed strong rhetorical
support for accountability for the outrages inflicted on the Rohingya and has
criticised perceived inaction by other states and international organisations
in doing likewise. Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah took the lead in that
regard in June 2019 when he issued an unambiguous call for the
perpetrators of the 2017 campaign of widespread and systematic violence
by Myanmar security forces against Rohingya civilians “to be brought to
justice.” Read: https://t.co/TR80YVxr7U
Not to be outdone, a month later Prime Minister Dr
Mahathir Mohamad declared that the Rohingya were the victims of a
“genocide” and that, in the absence of safety and citizenship in Myanmar, they
should be granted their own sovereign “self-governing territory” insulated from
predation by Myanmar security forces. In September, Mahathir went one step
further by stating that the Rohingya had been targets of Myanmar
government “institutionalised terrorism,” that included “mass killings,
systematic rape and other gross violations of human rights [that] resulted in
Rohingya fleeing the country on masse.”
But despite that fiery rhetoric, there is no evidence
that either Mahathir or Saifuddin sought to follow through on it in any
meaningful way. Although the Malaysian government has had no shortage of time
or evidence to file a Genocide Convention complaint against Myanmar with the
ICJ, it passed on an opportunity that Gambia, located thousands of miles from
Myanmar on another continent, delivered on earlier this week.
Despite that missed opportunity, there’s still much the
Malaysian government can do to support justice and accountability efforts for
the Rohingya. It can start by using its position of moral clarity on the
Rohingya’s plight to push, pull, and prod its fellow ASEAN members into
rejecting the grouping’s “non-interference principle,” behind which ASEAN states have long hidden to avoid engaging on member states’ human rights
abuses.
ASEAN can then leverage its hefty diplomatic and economic
leverage to spur Myanmar to stop victimising the Rohingya and take substantive
moves toward accountability. Malaysia can also, in collaboration with ASEAN members or independently, impose individual sanctions, including travel bans
and asset freezes, against Myanmar government and military officials – and
their family members – implicated in the 2017 targeted violence against the
Rohingya.
Now in these days all Rohingyas are expecting towards
justice and praying for all those states, organizations and individuals who are
on move for Rohingya’s Justice and accountability.
By @mir_sidiquee (major sources are collected
from medias)