In what has swiftly become the world’s latest tragic humanitarian
crisis, the truly hapless victims are the Rohingya people of Myanmar (formerly
known as Burma). Despite the Burmese government’s statements to the contrary, not
for an instant has there been any question among human rights activists about
what they were witnessing: vengeance, pure and simple, used as an excuse to
undertake full-blown ethnic cleansing and, hence, genocidal actions. But a top
UN human rights official this past week formalized that assessment, calling
Myanmar’s persecution of minority Rohingya Muslims a case of “textbook ethnic
cleansing”.
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| More than 400,000 Rohingya have been forced to flee
to Bangladesh.
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Addressing the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, the institution’s High
Commissioner for Human Rights, Prince Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, referred to the
Myanmar military’s attacks on the Rohingya community in Rakhine State as a “brutal
security operation” that represented a “clearly disproportionate” response to Islamist
insurgent attacks carried out last month.
Reduced to its simplest equation, the situation that the high
commissioner was formally classifying couldn’t be clearer: In response to
attacks by Islamist rebels, instead of going after the terrorists who
perpetrated these violent acts, the Burmese government has decided to use them
as an excuse to brutally attack the entire Muslim minority in Rakhine State and
to kill, rape, terrorize and drive out the entire community. And once again, as
in the case of the Rwanda genocide of the 1990s, in which the Hutu-led
government instigated the slaughter of between 500,000 and a million Tutsi
citizens, the world’s leaders again appear all too willing to do too little too
late to put a stop to this mass persecution.
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| Smoke rises from a burning Rohingya village. |
The latest violence perpetrated by the Burmese military—backed by ethnic
Rakhine mobs—against the Rohingya has left hundreds dead, many more wounded,
nearly half of all of their villages razed to the ground and some 400,000 (out
of a population of about a million), at least half of them children, displaced
and seeking refuge in nearby Bangladesh. The violent persecution has placed the
fleeing Rohingya in situations of extreme crisis in which many are starving or
dying of thirst as they seek to escape certain death at the hands of their
Burmese attackers.
Perhaps the saddest and most shameful reaction (or lack thereof) to this
genocidal outrage has been that of 72-year-old Burmese civilian leader and
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who has echoed the military’s
contention that they are dealing with Islamist terror activity in the Rakhine region,
rather than carrying out ethnic cleansing. Suu Kyi has often been held up as an
icon of democratic thinking and as a defender of human rights in Burmese
society. The political and humanitarian efforts that she has stood for
throughout her militant political career led to her spending 15 out a total of
21 years prior to 2010 under house arrest. Since then, when Myanmar, under a
new Constitution, held presidential elections from which she was banned, she
has regained her freedom, becoming the leader of Myanmar’s National League for
Democracy, her political party which won an overwhelming majority in recent
elections. She was also to become the country’s first woman foreign affairs
minister, and is currently serving as its first State Counsellor, a position
similar to prime minister.
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| Aung San Suu Kyi |
In that position Suu Kyi wields considerable ostensible power. But the
Rohingya crisis is exposing the vulnerability of nominal Burmese democracy and
the extent to which the civilian leader’s authority is free of repression. As State
Counsellor, she early on announced the creation of a commission on Rakhine
State, which already had a long and sinister record of persecuting Muslim minority
Rohingya. But while Human Rights activists worldwide—even many that once backed
Aung San Suu Kyi’s own cause—are scoring the Rohingya persecution as a
genocide, Suu Kyi herself has vigorously denied charges of ethnic cleansing.
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| Rohingya refugees begging for food in a makeshift Bangladesh
camp.
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In her first speech on the topic, given this week, Suu Kyi’s continuing
denial of any wrongdoing on the part her government was viewed as yet another
apologist stance in favor of the Burmese military’s actions and did nothing to
stem the tide of criticism that she is receiving. Her official stance to date has
sparked astonishment and widespread negative reactions, not the least of which
came this past week from her fellow Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus of
Bangladesh, who wrote: “Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s de facto head
of government, should undertake a visit to the refugee camps in Bangladesh to
address the terrified people living there. She should tell them that Myanmar is
as much their home as it is hers. This single act of leadership will wash away
all the suspicions and begin the process of healing. The new Myanmar that Aung
San Suu Kyi says she wants to build cannot have any form of discrimination on
any ground, be it ethnicity, religion, language or culture. The new
Myanmar must be based on human rights and the rule of law. This is a moment in
history when she has to choose a path for her nation and for herself—peace and
friendship, or hatred and confrontation.”
This is something that Suu Kyi has clearly not been willing (or perhaps
able) to do. She has, through acts of both commission and omission, upheld the
abominably inhuman treatment of the Rohingya Muslims. Few peoples in the world
have ever been as persecuted. The crimes against humanity being perpetrated
against the Rohingya today stem from an original crime that has long kept them
from seeking justice in their own land: the 1982 Citizenship Law. This law
actually expands on another de facto Burmese law imposed by the Buddhist-influenced
military rulers that seized power a couple of decades after the end of British
colonial rule. The so-called Emergency Immigration Act of 1974 effectively
stripped all Rohingya of their Burmese citizenship despite generations of
living in the country.
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| Buddhist nationalists claim Rohingya is a "fake ethnicity". |
After that, they were treated, under military law, as “illegal
immigrants”. The Citizenship Law of 1982 added a new twist, specifically
identifying Rohingya Muslims as foreigners from Bangladesh and ordering them to
“go back” to “their own country.” An entire false narrative has grown up around
these two laws including the idea that Rohingya is a false ethnicity and that
the name was “invented” in the 1940s to provide “illegal immigrants” living in
Burma with an ethnic identity that didn’t really exist. In fact, experts say,
the term Rohingya goes back to at least the 18th century in Burmese
history. Suu Kyi has defended and repeated these falsehoods and has even called
on the United Nations not to use the term Rohingya because no such ethnicity
exists.
That said, it is a crime under international law, and a gross violation
of human and civil rights, for any state to render “stateless” any segment of
the population it governs. And today, that is the sad reality of the Rohingya
people: a stateless nation of refugees, persecuted and cast out of their
country’s territory, thanks to the genocidal actions of their government and
the general apathy of the world community, where North Korea’s missile tests
have made this dramatic story an “also ran” heading on news schedules and
national agendas.
George Monbiot, a columnist with Britain’s daily, The Guardian, called in an editorial for Aung San Suu Kyi to be
stripped of her Nobel Peace Prize. In the column published earlier this month,
Monbiot said of Suu Kyi: “It is hard to think of any recent political leader by
whom such high hopes have been so cruelly betrayed.”
Monbiot made another point in his column that bears expanding on. There
are those who will argue that, in ignoring and even helping to generate the
horrible plight of the Rohingya Muslim people, Aung San Suu Kyi may be chopping
off a hand to save an arm, that if she stands up to the Burmese military to
protect the Rohingya, she will precipitate the end of a teetering, incipient
democracy and effectively trash her life’s work. But as many of us who have
lived through long periods of military rule in other parts of the world know
full well, democracies that live in the shadow of, and with the conditional
permission of former dictatorial regimes cannot long survive and will never
enjoy good health.
Furthermore, nominally democratic leaders who pragmatically accept
aberrant practices carried out in the name of their governments for the sake of
expediency and condescension to “a higher power” are tacitly relinquishing any
right to be considered truly democratic. Democracy and rule of law are absolute
terms. You can’t be “somewhat” pregnant or “somewhat” democratic.
Aung San Suu Kyi once wrote: “It is not
power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it
and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.” Perhaps she should ask
herself if this is, indeed, her dilemma, the fear of losing power, and perhaps
too she should try to empathize with the victims of de facto power by which she
herself was also long subjugated. Suu Kyi has a choice and it should be clear
to her: She can choose to stop lip-syncing the words of the Burmese military
and speak out or she can become ever more part of the problem in Myanmar, and
part of the autocracy that refuses to let the country move on to democracy,
freedom and the rule of law.
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