In its most damning report yet, a United Nations investigative team has
flatly accused the government of Myanmar (ex-Burma) of perpetrating gross genocidal
crimes against the ethnic minority known as the Rohingya people. The main focus
of genocidal incidents has taken place in Rakhine State, where the largest
Rohingya settlements have traditionally been located. But the UN study also drew
on testimonies regarding criminal abuse in Kachin and Shan States.
The Rohingya people claim that their roots in Myanmar go back at least a
thousand years. Their name—which is also the name of the Indo-European language
that they speak—means, literally, “the people of Rohing”. Rohing was the ancient
name of the kingdom that would later be known in British colonial times are
Arakan, and today is known as Rakhine State. The Rohingya, therefore, justly consider
themselves indigenous to the region.
The Myanmar government, for its part, brands the Rohingya as “foreigners”—refusing
to term them Rohingya and referring to them as “Bengalis”. As such, the
government has stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship and refused to
recognize them as an autonomous Burmese ethnicity.
This is, in large measure, a religious prejudice, since most of the
ethnicities recognized by Myanmar profess Buddhism, the faith of roughly 88
percent of the Burmese population. The vast majority of Rohingya people are
Muslims (though a minority are of the Hindu faith), and the push for autonomy
among Rohingya radicals has sparked
fears in the Burmese government and among the majority population of the
forming of a radical Muslim separatist enclave, much like those created elsewhere
by the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and ISIL.
The persecution and ostracism that the Rohingya have suffered at the
hands of the Burmese government over the last several years—an intensification
of segregationist policies dating back over at least three and a half
decades—has tended to galvanize the search for a united Rohingya identity. In other
words, these extremist policies have had the exact opposite effect to the one
sought by Myanmar’s government and military, whose purpose has been to rob the
Rohingya of their identity and disband them as an autonomous people. This
effect has been underscored by the fact that the Rohingya, due to the Burmese
government’s stripping them of their citizenship, have been rendered a
stateless people, who are being systematically persecuted in their native land.
Despite the latest UN report on the situation, what should be known by
now as the Rohingya genocide is still being referred to as “a crisis”, the
diluted term used to describe the horrific incidents that have taken place over
the course of the last three years. The plight of the Rohingya people is
reminiscent of what happened during the Rwandan Genocide. Then as now, the
world failed to take decisive action to bring a government to heel that was
perpetrating the mass murder of a tribal ethnicity. The result in the case of
Rwanda was the brutal government-backed murders of at least 500,000 (some
estimates claim as many as 2 million) members of the Tutsi people.
The UN report has already drawn fire from the powerful Myanmar military.
Min Aung Hlaing, commander of the Burmese Army, recently claimed that the
United Nations had no right to interfere in the sovereignty of his country, in
response to a call from UN investigators for him and other top military leaders
to be prosecuted for genocide by the International Criminal Court (ICC). He was
also critical of demands from the UN that the Myanmar military get out of
political life in that country, where the armed forces still wield
all-pervading power, even after a surface transition to civilian rule seven
years ago.
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| General Min Aung Hlaing |
General Min is, of course, wrong in terms of both the concept of the
report and the purpose of the UN. Genocide is a crime against humanity, and as
such, it falls under the jurisdiction of the world community and international
law. The UN report, therefore, isn’t “meddling in the internal affairs” or
sovereignty of Myanmar, but rather, recognizes and provides detailed
information on crimes against humanity, which are well within the province of
international law. Beyond the borders of their own country, General Min and his
ranking colleagues are not feared and respected military leaders, but rather,
suspected criminals who are alleged to have perpetrated the worst actions
imaginable against a segment of the population.
UN officials and international human rights organizations describe the most
recent persecution of the Rohingya as “ethnic cleansing”. But even prior to the
genocide now underway, Myanmar’s policy toward the Rohingya was being compared
by many to the cruel segregationist system known as “apartheid” that once prevailed
in South Africa. Not the least of those making this comparison is Nobel Peace
Prize-winner and Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, who lived under apartheid and
knows whereof he speaks. By way of example, not only have the Rohingya been
stripped of their Burmese citizenship, but they have also been denied freedom
of movement, state education for their children, and access to civil service
jobs.
But in recent times the Rohingya have been denied even the most basic of
human rights—the right to safety in their homes and to life itself. According
to the latest UN report, the Burmese joint security and military forces, known
as the Tatmadaw, have engaged in and/or actively promoted incitement of hatred
and religious intolerance by ultra-nationalist Buddhist groups against the Rohingya.
The Tatmadaw itself, the report indicates, has been conducting “summary executions,
forced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and detentions, torture and other
ill-treatment” against the Rohingya community.
The report says investigators had found conclusive evidence that the
actions of the country’s armed forces “undoubtedly amounted to the gravest
crimes under international law” in Rakhine as well as in Kachin and Shan States,
which are also rife with internal conflict.
Although the Myanmar government denied UN investigators access to the
country’s territory, the investigating team interviewed 875 witnesses who had
fled the country. From testimony received, the UN probe was able to confirm
that the Tatmadaw was “killing indiscriminately, gang-raping women, assaulting
children and burning entire villages,” adding that rape, sexual slavery and other
forms of sexual violence and enslavement—all of which constitute crimes against
humanity—were common practice.
Much of the current rancor between the Burmese majority and the Rohingya
dates back to the confusing aftermath of World War II when maps were being
redrawn around the globe. At the time, Muslim Rohingya leaders sought to get
Pakistan—which then included the neighboring territory that is today
Bangladesh—to annex their homeland, so as to remove it from the influence of
Burma. The Pakistani government refused, however, to take the bait and this led
to some Muslims taking up arms to fight a separatist rebellion that lasted
through the 1960s. Today there remains a Rohingya separatist group known as
ARSA (the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army). Indeed, the Myanmar government’s
excuse for the most recent general crackdown on the Rohingya population was
triggered by ARSA attacks carried out against Burmese military outposts.
But the vast majority of Rohingya are ordinary people who only want to
live in peace in their homeland. And while the Burmese military may have every
right to hunt down and bring to justice armed militants that form part of ARSA,
their systematic and bloody persecution of the Rohingya people as a whole
should be considered entirely unacceptable.
Until a few years ago when the genocidal Burmese military crackdowns
began, there were over a million Rohingya living in Myanmar, most in Rakhine
State. Today, nearly three-quarters of that population is living in precarious
refugee camps in Bangladesh. Most are afraid to return home until international
guarantees can be established for their safety. To say that many of those who
have remained in their homeland have not fared well is clearly an
understatement, as the latest UN report graphically shows.
There is no doubt that without a coordinated and serious international
effort, the violent situation in Myanmar cannot end well. It can only end as
the Rwandan genocide did, with thousands suffering inhuman and unspeakable
atrocities as an outgrowth of religious and ethnic intolerance, while the rest
of the world stands by and does nothing.
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