THE ROHINGYA GENOCIDE AND MYANMAR’S PSEUDO-DEMOCRACY

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”.  

More than 400,000 Rohingya have been forced to flee

to Bangladesh. 

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.

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.

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.

Rohingya refugees begging for food in a makeshift Bangladesh

camp.

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.

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 18^th 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.