By Maung Zarni | Published by Anadolu Agency on December 15, 2018

US will not intercede, and Myanmar's neighbors see it through economic lens, so international coalition for Rohingya needed

LONDON -- The U.S. House of Representatives Thursday overwhelmingly passed a resolution calling the crimes committed by Myanmar security forces against Rohingya Muslims a genocide. This was the right thing to do.

The U.S. lawmakers deserve to be applauded for trying to turn “Never again!” into a concrete U.S. governmental policy, following the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s declaration that Myanmar is indeed committing a genocide and crimes against humanity.

The House resolution states that “every government and multilateral body (in the world) should call such atrocities (against Rohingya people) by their rightful names of ‘crimes against humanity,’ ‘war crimes,’ and ‘genocide’.”

It contains a call that will resonate very well with many in the rank-and-file of the Armed Forces of Myanmar unhappy with the Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing: it adds the commander-in-chief to the list of military commanders deemed responsible for these crimes.

Despite the much-reported decline of U.S. power globally, the United States still retains unparalleled influence and reach, militarily, institutionally, economically, and ideologically, vis-à-vis Russia and China. Against this background, the unequivocal stance that U.S. lawmakers have taken against the Myanmar genocide has enormous potential to really end the unimaginable misery which 1.5 million Rohingya experience, both in refugee camps in Bangladesh and in their own places of origin within the western Myanmar state of Rakhine.

However, the calls for the UN Security Council to refer the matter to the International Criminal Court or an ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal on Myanmar, or even economic sanctions alone, will have no appreciable impact on either the Myanmar military, which has institutionalized the intentional destruction of Rohingya as a target population since the 1970s, nor on the majority of the Myanmar public, who have been brainwashed to believe UN or external allegations of atrocities as “fake news” concocted by the liberal West and a Muslim conspiracy financed and coordinated by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

That is, unless the United States is prepared to take forward the idea of military intervention in Myanmar – like the U.S. Pacific Fleet launching surgical missile-strikes from the international waters of the Bay of Bengal on the military headquarters and residences of the senior military commanders in Naypyidaw. The uses of military actions on grounds of humanitarian intervention are not unprecedented. The NATO bombing of Slobodan Milosevic’s palace and the “accidental” strike on the Embassy of China in Belgrade spring to mind.

In fact, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad openly suggested “going in” to end the atrocities, in a public talk at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York a few months ago.

Unrealistic option

However, this may not be a realistic option for a number of reasons: U.S. President Donald Trump has demonstrated absolutely no concern about the news of Myanmar troops burning Rohingya infants and elderly people alive. In fact, Trump has not even once tweeted the word “Rohingya,” let alone drawn attention to the hellish conditions they are living in. Additionally, sandwiched between India and China, which are vying for influence in Myanmar through strategic, military, and economic collaboration, Myanmar may not be an ideal place for U.S. drone or missile strikes, lest such acts draw these two Asian rivals into the military action.

With respect to the impact of full and biting economic sanctions, in the unlikely event that the United States eventually imposes such severe sanctions, the four largest investors in Myanmar are China, Thailand, Singapore, and Hong Kong, followed by the U.K. The targeted pinch on the generals and the national economy will be significantly mitigated by these countries.

None of these governments are likely to follow the U.S.’ lead in the current circumstances. China considers Myanmar, a country in its backyard, an integral piece of its One Belt, One Road grand project whereby it is striving to recreate the New World Order with Beijing as its imperial center. Any talk of persuading China, or Russia, with deep military-to-military ties with Myanmar, to support any punitive measures within the existing global justice and governance mechanisms, including the UN Security Council, is nothing short of delusional.

The rest of Myanmar’s neighbors, including even India, base their Myanmar policies on commercial interests. India is no match for China, how desperately it may try, to curb China’s sway over the Myanmar military and civilian leaderships.

Desperate to find bilateral trade deals outside the EU amid Brexit, Britain is single-mindedly pursuing British commercial interests while serving as the “penholder” on Myanmar resolutions in multilateral bodies by virtue of the historical fact that it was the country’s former colonial master.

In a lengthy Dec. 12 interview with the local Mizzima News Group, British Ambassador Daniel Chugg pussyfooted around the genocide and stressed his ambassadorial goal. In Chugg’s own words, “we are the fifth-largest investor ever in Myanmar, our total stock of investment here is more than $4 billion, and our trade last year was about $500 million, which was up 20 per cent from the year before. So, it's growing but it's still relatively small in global terms and so I hope those figures will improve while I am here.”

No matter how powerful it may still remain, U.S. measures will come short of what is needed to end the genocide in Myanmar.

Steps to follow

Whether the Trump administration makes the legal determination – as the U.S. House Resolution urges – that Myanmar is in fact committing crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes not only against Rohingya but also against other ethnic and religious communities such as the Kachin, Shan, and Ta’ang, is less consequential than what it will concretely do if the determination is made.

The painful truth typically overlooked is that no genocide has ever been committed by the perpetrating state alone, from the Nazi genocide to Bosnia to Rwanda. There are always collaborating and “bystanding” states. The real first-step towards ending the genocide in Myanmar will have to be an international conference of states which have expressed their official concerns about the nature of grave crimes that Myanmar is committing.

There are 47 member states which voted on the UN Human Rights Council Resolution this fall calling for accountability for the Myanmar perpetrators of international state crimes. Although the U.S. is no longer a member of the council, considering the overwhelming concern about the genocide in Myanmar as evidenced in yesterday’s vote at the House of Representatives, the U.S. government is best placed to host such a conference in Washington.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has done extraordinary work in genocide monitoring and research on the situation for Rohingya, would be an ideal civil society partner to facilitate such a conference.

One primary conference objective should be to forge a coalition of governments that are prepared to pool their resources, strategic influences, and even military assets to put sufficient pressure on both the Myanmar military and Aung San Suu Kyi’s impotent leadership. Without sufficient pressure, Myanmar -- that is, the civilian government and the military -- will not accept the Rohingya as full and equal citizens, nor will they provide any guarantee for the safety of the survivor communities.

As a matter of fact, the Myanmar genocide resolution rightly states that “Myanmar’s civilian government, led by State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and President Win Myint, has not yet taken the necessary steps to address the violence directed against the Rohingya and has failed to create the necessary conditions for returns, including by actively impeding access to northern Rakhine for UNHCR, UNDP, humanitarian organizations, and journalists.” Having aligned the government with Beijing, Aung San Suu Kyi has shown absolutely no sign that she will relent.

Against this scenario, only such a counter-alliance of states broadly supported by civil society and human rights movements consisting of Rohingya survivors can put enough concrete pressure on the perpetrating regime and the genocidally racist society to allow Rohingya to live in peace on their own ancestral land of Northern Rakhine.

[Maung Zarni is co-author of the “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya” (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal, 2014) and coordinator of the Free Rohingya Coalition.]

By TRT World

By Maung Zarni and Matthew Gindin | Published by Tricycle on November 28, 2018

A former ally of Aung San Suu Kyi responds to the Tibetan Buddhist teacher’s support for Myanmar’s controversial leader.

Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche, a well-known teacher of Vajrayana Buddhism, surprised some in the Buddhist world recently when he penned an open letter of support to Aung San Suu Kyi, the head of Myanmar’s civil government accused of complicity in the military’s persecution of the Rohingya Muslim minority. The letter praises her sacrifice, courage, and principled political actions in pursuit of the rights of her people, while attacking her critics as hypocrites and arrogant colonialists pushing Western interests and values.

Dzongsar Khyentse is a major figure in contemporary Buddhism. A tulku (reincarnated master) in the Khyentse lineage, he is the son of the revered Thinley Norbu Rinpoche and grandson of the influential Dudjom Rinpoche. An embodiment of the Rime (nonsectarian) movement, he is the guardian of the teachings of the Dzogchen master Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo, as well as an accomplished filmmaker and author of popular English language expositions of Buddhism. 

His support for Suu Kyi comes on the heels of a September report by the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar that said the violent campaign against the Rohingya amounts to genocide, a claim supported by several human rights research and documentation bodies around the world. The report, released at a UN Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, stated that Suu Kyi and her civilian government had “contributed to the commission of atrocity crimes” through their “acts and omissions.” As a result of mounting allegations of culpability, Suu Kyi, who was once lauded for her activism on behalf of democracy in Myanmar, has been stripped of multiple awards, including the US Holocaust Museum’s Elie Wiesel Award, her honorary Canadian citizenship, and Amnesty International’s human rights award.

In response to Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Rinpoche’s letter, Maung Zarni, a Burmese Buddhist, pro-democracy activist, and former ally of Suu Kyi, and I have co-authored an open letter challenging what we view as faulty narratives, misinformation, and questionable reasoning in Dzongsar Khyentse’s letter. 

—Matthew Gindin

Dear Rinpoche,

In a November 16 letter, you expressed your “deep respect and appreciation” for all Suu Kyi has done “to fight for your people’s freedoms.” You call her a “true heroine of this age, more than worthy of the Nobel Prize and other honours” and say you are “appalled by the removal of awards” she received. You argue that this is a “blatant double standard,” citing the reception of a Nobel Prize by former US President Barack Obama despite his use of drone warfare against Middle Eastern civilians.

You see this double standard as part of “insidious colonialism strangling Asia and the world,” which you say teaches Asians to “disparage our own noble traditions and instead to treasure Western values and music, to chew gum and wear faded jeans, to embrace Facebook and Amazon, and to ape Western manners and institutions.” 

I (Zarni) am a child of a Burmese Buddhist family with close ties to the military. I grew up with intense pride and deep reverence for the Buddhist tradition and spiritual culture of Burma. After coming to the US to study, I founded the Free Burma Coalition to support the struggle for democracy in Burma and became a hardworking supporter of Suu Kyi, inspired by her personal courage and the mixed discourse of Buddhist loving-kindness and human rights. But early on I began to suspect that she was an ethnic nationalist and a Buddhist chauvinist, more concerned for her own legacy and the interests of the Bamar majority than she was for human rights and a true democracy for all the peoples of Myanmar. In April 2016, Suu Kyi assumed the position of State Counselor. She quickly morphed into a key actor in the longstanding oppression of Myanmar’s Rohingya people. Since then I have been a fierce critic of my fellow Buddhist dissident, who now acts in a joint partnership with our former common oppressor, Myanmar’s murderous military, the Tatmadaw.

According to statistics from the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM) earlier this year, 898,000 Rohingya refugees who have fled violence in Myanmar currently live in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. Of them, 686,000 have arrived since August 2017, when the government launched a coordinated military-led campaign of arson, murder, and sexual violence against their communities in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. This assault, according to human rights organization Fortify Rights, was deliberately prepared for months in advance by the Tatmadaw. Many Rohingya, faced with proposals over the last year to repatriate them to the country where for decades they faced systemic discrimination and the deliberate deprivation of basic human rights, have said that they would sooner die in Bangladesh.

Genocide is not simply incidents of mass killings; it is a long process of systematic, intentional destruction of a target group. Suu Kyi, as the leader of the ruling NLD party, controls several government ministries involved in such efforts against the Rohingya, but she has done nothing to protest or attempt to stop her country’s abuse of them. Meanwhile, she has repeatedly and publicly dismissed well-documented reports of the genocidal violence of the Tatmadaw—in one instance referring to systemic sexual violence against Rohingya women and girls as “fake rape.”

Rinpoche, you cite atrocities committed by Western governments past and present and accuse the modern West of hypocrisy for criticizing Suu Kyi. First, the criticisms of Suu Kyi do not only come from the West but also from people all over the world who oppose the kind of brutal oppression the Myanmar state has subjected the Rohingya to. Second, you erase the distinction between Western non-governmental bodies and activists on the one hand and Western governments on the other. By your logic, the Swedish Nobel committee, local bodies like the Oxford City Council, or Suu Kyi’s own alma mater (St. Hugh’s College, Oxford) cannot criticize human rights abuses if the governments of Britain or Sweden have ever committed atrocities (which of course they have). You lump together governments, private bodies, and activists under the simplistic rubric of “the West.” These kinds of generalizations can become fodder for muddled thinking and racism. After all, many of the Western activists and human rights organizations who have criticized Suu Kyi have also spoken out against the violations of Western countries, and continue to do so. They have also confronted the Chinese state for its persecution of Buddhists and embraced efforts to preserve traditional Asian culture and values, such as the Gross National Happiness initiative in Bhutan. 

A more sober assessment of global politics would recognize that all cultures have committed atrocities and that many have fallen into the temptations of militarism, racism, and colonialism. You present the “noble tradition” of the East as opposed to the ignoble tradition of the West despite the fact that “our East” has as many murderous and colonizing legacies as “their West.” This way of framing the Rohingya crisis and criticism of Suu Kyi does more to obscure the matters at stake than to clarify them. In setting off West against East, your letter focuses on a clash of civilizations instead of the real problem: a clash of values. The true battle is between those who embrace values of nonviolence, compassion, and justice—which the best traditions of both West and East argue for—and those who put first their race, the defense of their traditions, the accumulation of capital, or other divisive values.

While we sympathize with your criticisms of the hypocrisy, arrogance, and colonial legacy of many Western countries and share your concern for the way that the “capitalist system” is swallowing diverse global cultures, we balk at your emphasis on the Western nature of what is destructive in the world today. The problems we face—growing fascism, violent racism, nationalism, tremendous gaps of wealth between the rich and the poor, the destruction of our shared ecosystem and the destruction of both ethnic and zoological diversity—are now global problems exacerbated by the worldwide embrace of misguided policies that are often championed by those who hold power and wish to cling to it. The current conflict in Myanmar embodies this adoption of destructive policies, in which the fires of ethnic disputes have been stoked in order to consolidate power for the military and business elite.

Toward the end of your letter you say that “nothing I write here denies the suffering of the Rohingya people,” but you argue that instead of blaming Suu Kyi, the British “should be taking responsibility for bringing the Rohingyas from Bengal in the 19th and 20th centuries as cheap labour” and suggest that the UK should take in the Rohingya refugees themselves. 

Here you are referencing a false narrative, popular in Myanmar, that claims that the Rohingya are not a native ethnicity but rather Muslim Bengali laborers who never went home and who now want to undermine the Burmese Buddhist state. This ahistorical propaganda is used to justify discrimination and violence against them. Suu Kyi has signaled that she accepts this narrative with her refusal to use the name “Rohingya,” a title by which they refer to themselves and that reflects their centuries-old history in the country.

In fact, the Rohingyas’ presence in the region long predates both the arrival of British colonial rule in 1824 and the emergence of Myanmar as a nation-state in 1948; thousands of Rohingya have been living in the western Arakan Kingdom, now Rakhine state, since the 15th century. Aside from the fact that there were no national boundaries as such in the 18th and 19th centuries, in the pre-colonial societies of the time, demographic and geographic fluidity was the norm. Arakan, or Rakhine, the fertile coastal region of the Bay of Bengal, was a multi-ethnic, multi-faith society until Bamar invaders arrived. Their forces destroyed the nearby kingdom in Mrauk-U and then expanded, annexing Arakan in 1785.

Although international attention has focused on the plight of the Rohingya, their persecution is only the most egregious symptom of the interethnic conflict that afflicts Burma, a violence fueled by the Bamar supremacism of the ruling government and the oppression it directs at the Shan, Kachin, Karen, Mon, and other historic peoples of Myanmar. Arguably, the idea of an ethnically pure nation-state is a product of the very colonialism you claim to decry. 

“For me,” you write to Suu Kyi toward the end of your letter, “you remain the heroine you truly are. And for many who dare not speak up but who secretly agree, you personify our own #MeToo movement.” 

The #MeToo movement arose because powerful persons used their positions to sexually harass and assault women (as well as some men) and then manipulated or threatened them into keeping quiet about it. If anyone in Myanmar personifies the #MeToo movement, it is the Rohingya women and girls whom the Tatmadaw has gang-raped and murdered. 

Suu Kyi has publicly stated that these rapes did not occur, making her an enabler of the kind of violence that the #MeToo movement arose to stop, not a victim of it. In this situation, it is Suu Kyi herself who is a powerful abuser aiding other powerful abusers. Moreover, we find your attempt to co-opt the #MeToo movement to be acutely disrespectful of both the Rohingya victims of sexual violence and of all the courageous women who stood up to say “me too” to call sexual abusers to account around the world.

After this quick reference to #MeToo, you then suggest it may be time to seek out “the Westerner’s weak spot” in that “they don’t dare criticize Muslims or Jews for fear of being called Islamophobic or anti-Semitic,” so “perhaps we need to coin new words for anti-Buddhist or anti-Asian bias to evoke their guilt.” Western countries are particularly sensitive to the Holocaust because so many of us were complicit in the deliberate, state-sponsored murder of six million Jews only 70-odd years ago. We are sensitive to Islamophobia both because of the recent warfare between Western governments and historically Islamic ones, and also because of real problems with violent Islamophobia in western countries, such as the mosque shooting in Canada in 2017. There is a great irony in your writing this at a time when the United States government has tried to impose a ban on Muslims entering the country and when heated anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish rhetoric has been normalized.

To close, we would like to call attention to one voice that is almost totally silent in your letter: the Rohingya themselves. Though your letter is really aimed at “Western” critics of Suu Kyi, the chief resistance to the genocide, and the primary critics of Suu Kyi and the Myanmar state, are not Westerners; they are Rohingya activists like Nural Islam, Razia Sultana, Tun Khin, and Nay San Lwin, to name a few, as well as groups like The Free Rohingya Coalition and Arakan Rohingya National Organization. Many of these Rohingya have been fighting for the last four decades against their impoverishment and oppression at the hands of the Myanmar state, and no one was more pleased by the revocation of Suu Kyi’s awards for human rights activism than they.

While there is always room for criticizing specific policies of a specific Western country or institution, when you paint matters with as broad as a brush as your letter does, opportunities for grappling with injustices in the real world are replaced by harmful meta-narratives that, to our mind, simply stoke the fires of conflict and division. It would be more fruitful for those opposed to colonialism, racism, violence, and injustice around the world to work together rather than to close ranks against each other. Your claim that Western institutions are guilty of colonial violence, both gross and subtle, is true. So is the claim that the Myanmar state and Aung San Suu Kyi are guilty of genocidal violence. Instead of putting these truths in opposition to each other, why not join hands to fight against injustice everywhere? Why not recognize greed, hatred, and delusion wherever they rear their ugly heads and create an international coalition of generosity, love, and clarity? 

With goodwill,

Maung Zarni and Matthew Gindin

Maung Zarni is a Burmese activist and scholar. He is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and the founder of the Free Burma Coalition.

Matthew Gindin is a journalist and meditation teacher in Vancouver, British Columbia. A former monk in the Thai Forest tradition, he is the author of Everyone in Love: The Beautiful Theology of Rav Yehuda Ashlag.

By Maung Zarni, Natalie Brinham | Published by Middle East Institute on November 20, 2018

“It is an ongoing genocide (in Myanmar),” said Mr. Marzuki Darusman, the head of the UN Human Rights Council-mandated Independent International Fact-Finding Mission at the official briefing at the full Security Council on October 24, 2018.[1] This official briefing was officially requested by 9 out of the 15 Council members over the objection of China, Russia, Equatorial Guinea and Bolivia). [2]

On the same day, before the Security Council briefing, Darusman, former Attorney General of Indonesia who headed his country’s National Human Rights Commission and served as UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea, had held a press conference in New York where he was joined by Professor Yanghee Lee of South Korea, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights situation in Myanmar.[3]Echoing the UN Fact-Finding Mission Chief’s concerns for Rohingyas’ safety arising out of the continuing existence of structures, institutions, practices and executioners of Myanmar’s genocidal policies, Professor Lee officially opposed the scheme of repatriation of one million Rohingyas who have taken refuge across the borders on Bangladeshi soil.[4] 

Amid calls for international accountability — international because Myanmar lacks an independent and competent judiciary, as well as the political will to bring to justice the main military perpetrators of the genocide[5] — the government of Bangladesh has prioritized the repatriation of Rohingyas.[6] To be sure, the massive influx of Rohingyas into Bangladesh has placed a heavy economic, social and political burden on the country. 

The flurry of activities by Bangladesh authorities — including organizing and attending international conferences and hosting countless visits by foreign heads of state and delegations, and celebrities that are focused on addressing the root cause of the recurring waves of refugee inflows from Myanmar — indicate that the continuing presence of Rohingya refugees in the country is an all-consuming concern for both its government and society at large.[7] 

Because third-country resettlement of one million Rohingyas is not a viable solution, Dhaka’s focus on repatriation — as opposed to holding Myanmar perpetrators of genocidal crimes accountable — is not only understandable but also warranted. However, the most crucial question is how to address the justifiable, widespread and profound fear of further waves of attacks and being sent back to live under genocidal conditions among the deeply traumatized Rohingyas in the camps in Cox’s Bazar district in Bangladesh.[8]

For two consecutive years, Prime Minister Sheik Hasina has gone to the UN General Assembly and presented her proposal to the international community in order to mobilize support for Bangladesh’s efforts to unload the burden placed on her country.[9] The large-scale impact of neighboring Myanmar’s genocide is all too visible for any visitor to the sprawling camp “city” in Cox’s Bazar. It is also a subject of criminal investigation by the pre-trial Chamber of the International Criminal Court after the ICC issued an unprecedented and fully justified ruling that the cross-border nature of Myanmar’s crimes — deportation and “other (international) crimes” — are within the Court’s jurisdiction and hence the preliminary investigations of allegations and facts must proceed,[10] despite non-signatory Myanmar’s official dismissal of the ruling as “meritless.”[11] 

To her credit, Prime Minister Sheik Hasina has highlighted the essential need of the Rohingya, most specifically the group’s safety, upon return to their places of origin inside Myanmar. In her proposals to the UN in 2017 and 2018, the PM even raised, officially, the issue of establishing “safe zone” for the Rohingyas inside Myanmar[12]— and rightly so.

Having had to deal with chronically large waves of Rohingya exodus into the Bangladeshi territories since 1978,[13] Dhaka is best positioned to comprehend and appear to fully appreciate, the absence of physical group safety, which is the direct outcome of Myanmar’s genocidal policies and practices, for this largely Muslim ethnic minority population as the prime “push factor.”[14] 

The predominantly Buddhist Myanmar has long singled out the Rohingya population — which qualifies, according to the UN Fact-Finding Mission report, as ‘protected group’ under international law[15] — for extermination on Myanmar’s soil. The military-controlled Myanmar state has perceived Rohingyas as a group with a distinct identity, language and culture, and as a demographic proxy which Bangladesh is using to ease its (Dhaka’s) population pressure[16]: although Bangladesh is 40% smaller in area than Myanmar, it is home to over three times as many people. 

Accordingly, the Myanmar military has instituted systematic measures, both violent and non-violent, designed to change the demographic character of the predominantly Rohingya region of Northern Rakhine, having reversed radically the official recognition[17] granted to Rohingyas in the 1950s and early 1960s as an ethnic nationality of the Union of Burma, who are full and equal citizens, like the country’s other minority populations (e.g., Shan, Kachin, Kayah, Chin, Mon, Rakhine, etc.) and that the 2.5 townships of Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathae Daung formed the main administration region of Rohingya people. 

When the Myanmar military realized that its peaceful scheme of changing the Muslim character of Northern Rakhine State of Rohingya homeland through the state-sponsored trans-migration of Buddhist and other non-Muslim internal migrants from other parts of the country was not having any appreciable impact on the region,[18] it decided to resort to waves of state-directed violence against the target-population of Rohingyas.

Since February 1978, Myanmar’s military leaders have attempted to reduce and eventually erase the Rohingyas’ presence from Bangladesh-Myanmar border region, which stretches 270 miles, framing the region next to the populous Muslim nation of Bangladesh as the “Western gate” of the Union of Myanmar. These systematic attempts at the erasure of Rohingya identity and presence are anchored in the military’s revisionist historical discourse — that Rakhine was a “purely Buddhist” land “contaminated” by the unwelcome intrusions and immigration of Muslims, as openly stated in The State’sWestern Gate (Yangon, 2016),[19] by retired General Khin Nyunt, former chief of the military intelligence services and one of the architects of what Amartya Sen calls “the slow genocide.”[20] 

This official and popular discourse of “Fortress Myanmar” is not applied in the equally porous borderlands with the country’s two giant neighbors, China and India.[21] Inside Myanmar, it is public knowledge that the country has received hundreds of thousands of Chinese migrants from the bordering Chinese state of Yunnan — with some estimates putting the number at roughly one million. The Burmese military and political class, including Aung San Suu Kyi and her NLD party leadership were acutely aware of this illegal Chinese immigration[22] into what is known as “Upper Myanmar,” but both have kept quiet since Myanmar’s relations with China solidified after the post-Cold War Western bloc took punitive measures against the formerly non-aligned State on grounds of the well-documented egregious and pervasive human rights abuses. As a matter of fact, under the previous military-backed government of ex-General Thein Sein (2010-15), Myanmar had even created a new ethnic name — Mong Yang Myanmar — exclusively for the almost 90,000 ethnic Han which assisted the military’s operations against restive Myanmar ethnic nationalities such as the Kokant.[23] 

The fact that Myanmar continues to deny its own official documentation supporting the Rohingyas’ claim of Western Myanmar as their homeland and to categorically dismiss their irrefutable historical and official group identity as Rohingyas[24] while imposing on the group a false identity of “Bengali,” that is, citizens of Bangladesh can only be understood within the framework of genocide.[25] It is not the lack of knowledge on the part of Myanmar leadership that ethnic identities are not simply innate or DNA-based, but are invented by political organizations and communities, states or sub-state level entities.

The overwhelming majority of the UN member states — save India, Japan, Russia and China — have been vocal in condemning Myanmar’s “gravest crimes in international criminal and humanitarian law,” as the UN Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar put it. But the public condemnations have not been matched by an equal amount of tangible support for the one million Rohingya genocide survivors in Bangladesh in terms of humanitarian funds, human resources (e.g., trauma counsellors, social workers, etc.), or livelihoods opportunities. Less than half of the need for humanitarian aid has been met.[26] Consequently, Dhaka feels enormous pressure to feed and house, however unsatisfactorily, such a large pool of refugees.

Against this background, the idea and schemes of repatriation, as well as Bangladesh’s anxiety over the need to begin the repatriation, need to be understood. Beyond the calls for justice and accountability in the form of ICC or ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal on Myanmar (i.e., International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia or International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda), Rohingya repatriation is correctly seen as the only viable, peaceful solution to one of the contemporary world’s greatest humanitarian challenges.[27] 

Importantly, repatriation is interpreted and pursued by different key players for different strategic and policy ends. 

Bangladesh advocates repatriation of Rohingyas, as they put enormous strain on Bangladesh government resources, on society and on the Environment.[28] 

The guilty party of Myanmar agree, largely in principle, to receive the returning Rohingyas back as Aung San Suu Kyi and her foreign ministry strategists regard repatriation as a tactic to placate the outraged UN and other state players calling for the establishment of the international tribunal on Myanmar and supporting the ICC’s criminal investigation of Myanmar’s crimes of deportation and other high crimes. This is an open secret among the politically conscious Burmese. In fact, in a recent interview with the Radio Free Asia Burmese Service, Tun Tin, a well-known member of the Myanmar Chamber of Commerce and a Burmese crony, explicitly stated that repatriation is a way of alleviating the pressure of the international campaign for criminal accountability around Myanmar genocide. 

China is pressuring both Bangladesh and Myanmar to start large-scale repatriation because the Communist leadership do not welcome the deepening of Western involvement in the resource-rich country which Beijing considers an integral component of its long-term strategic scheme of power projection into the Indian Ocean. 

India is following suit out of a different logic: New Delhi has recently begun de-nationalizing the several million Muslims in the country’s restive northeast region of Assam, a first step towards Myanmar-style expulsion and deportation. Additionally, India is vying with China for influence over the ruling Burmese military since the early 1990s, which necessitates Delhi’s unconditional support for Myanmar’s policies towards Rohingyas.

Japan is pushing repatriation out of its own strategic calculations, lending Aung San Suu Kyi’s government media and money support,[29] in an effort to counteract China’s growing influence over Myanmar.

ASEAN is split between reformist Malaysia[30] which is openly pushing for strong measures to end the genocide and the rest of the Southeast Asian bloc, made up of largely authoritarian regimes. 

Meanwhile, inside Myanmar, all the key pillars of Myanmar society and politics remain deeply genocidal in their outlooks. Nationally organized Buddhist monks continue to promote venomous anti-Rohingya view while rallying behind the main perpetrator, namely Myanmar Armed Forces. Anti-Rohingya public opinion has largely crystalized, as the direct result of the Myanmar military’s psychological warfare or mass propaganda campaign, using traditional media and, since 2012, Facebook, depicting Rohingyas, falsely as “Islamicists” and “Illegal Bengali invaders” hell-bent on taking over “Buddhist Myanmar.” 

Aung San Suu Kyi herself and her ruling NLD party share the public view that Rohingya identity is “fake” — a political invention dating from the 1950s — and that Rohingyas really belong in Bangladesh. Even if Suu Kyi and her civilian government have the political will — and there is no indication they do — they have no control over the most powerful organ of the State, the Security Sector, and the most culturally influential pillar of Myanmar, the Buddhist Order. Locally in Rakhine, the shared homeland between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingyas, Rakhine nationalists continue to mobilize openly against any large-scale repatriation.

Against this overwhelmingly hostile background — not to mention Myanmar’s state’s policies of persecution, including laws and regulations, which remain completely unchanged — no repatriation without guaranteed safety for Rohingyas is conceivable. The majority of Rohingyas may be illiterate, poorly educated or disorganized. This is in spite of Suu Kyi’s disingenuous public statement that her government has implemented 81 of 88 recommendations by the Rakhine Commission chaired by the late Kofi Annan.[31] 

The 40 years of life under genocidal conditions have taught a bitter lesson: the Rohingyas’ physical safety in Myanmar — whether they be future returnees (1.2 millions) from Bangladesh, the estimated 400,000 trapped in Rohingya villages and Rakhine’s southern regional town of Buthidaung, or those in IDP camps — cannot be assured without international protection. It is inconceivable that without this requisite safety any repatriation will be voluntary or sustainable.

Just one week before the planned bilateral repatriation, Myanmar continues with its official — and non-credible — framing of the human rights and humanitarian catastrophe as a direct result of (Muslim) “terrorism.” UN Ambassador Hau Do Suan told Fox News that “the root cause of this humanitarian issue is because of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) — the Muslim terrorist group. They attacked against the government in Rakhine State in October 2016 and again in August 2017. This humanitarian problem was ignited by those terrorist attacks.”[32]

It is therefore urgently necessary for the issue of the guaranteed safety for Rohingyas in Myanmar to be placed at the center of all international policy discussions on Myanmar’s ongoing genocide. 

However, no meaningful discussion which rightly prioritizes Rohingyas’ need for protection and guaranteed basic human and citizenship rights can take place in the face of the repeated refusals by the powerful Asian governments (such as Japan, China and India) and the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to accept the UN Fact-Finding Mission’s dire warning that Myanmar genocide is “ongoing.”

To overcome this obstacle, the Rohingya people urgently need an international coalition of UN member states prepared to pool their respective diplomatic, commercial, political and even military influences in order to bring an effective end to Myanmar’s slow genocide. In his October 4, 2018 talk at the Council on Foreign Relations,Prime Minister of Malaysia Dr. Mahathir Mohammad stated openly that military intervention (in Myanmar) may be needed.[33] 

Such interventions may not be in the cards, but certainly some form of coordinated and collective protection and guaranteed human rights for the Rohingya is fully warranted. In the attempts to set up protection mechanisms, churches and other non-Christian religious and civil society institutions can play more proactive and strategic roles, particularly given the fact that the religious and group identity of the Rohingya minority is a major driver behind Myanmar’s genocide.

[1] “Marzuki Darusman (Chairperson of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar) on the situation in Myanmar - Security Council, 8381st meeting,” Webtv.un.org, October 24, 2018, http://webtv.un.org/watch/marzuki-darusman-chairperson-of-the-independe…; See also “Rohingya genocide is still going on, says top UN investigator,” The Guardian, October 24, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/24/rohingya-genocide-is-stil….

[2] “China fails to stop U.N. Security Council Myanmar briefing,” Reuters, October 24, 2018, https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-myanmar-rohingya-un/china-fails-in-bi…. See also “8381st Security Council Meeting: Situation in Myanmar,” UNmultimedia.org, October 24, 2018, https://www.unmultimedia.org/avlibrary/asset/2284/2284841/.

[3] “Ms. Yanghee Lee, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar and Mr. Marzuki Darusman, Chair of the UN Fact-finding Mission in Myanmar,” Webtv.un.org, October 24, 2018, http://webtv.un.org/watch/ms.-yanghee-lee-special-rapporteur-on-the-sit….

[4] Ibid.

[5] International Commission of Jurists, “Myanmar: Government’s Commission of Inquiry cannot deliver justice or accountability,” September 7, 2018, https://www.icj.org/myanmar-governments-commission-of-inquiry-cannot-de….

[6] Personal communications with Bangladeshi authorities including the Speaker of the National Parliament of Bangladesh and the Foreign Minister, between November 2017 and Fall 2018.

[7] Ibid.

[8] “Aid groups say Rohingya ‘terrified’ about Myanmar repatriation,” AFP, November 9, 2018, https://www.dhakatribune.com/world/south-asia/2018/11/09/aid-groups-say…. See also “Exclusive: ‘Can’t eat, can’t sleep’ - Rohingya on Myanmar repatriation list,” Reuters, November 9, 2018, https://uk.news.yahoo.com/exclusive-cant-eat-cant-sleep-rohingya-myanma…;

[9] Our 5-point proposal can solve Rohingya crisis: PM,” The Daily Star, October 17, 2017, https://www.thedailystar.net/city/our-5-point-proposal-can-solve-rohing…. See also “PM Hasina at UNGA: UN-Myanmar deal must end Rohingya crisis,” The Daily Star, September 28, 2018, https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/foreign-affairs/2018/09/28/pm-h….

[10] International Criminal Court, “Statement of ICC Prosecutor on opening a Preliminary Examination concerning the Rohingya,” September 18, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBDakDv9s2o.

[11] “Myanmar Calls ICC Request For Jurisdiction Over Rohingya Expulsion ‘Meritless,’” Radio Free Asia, August 9, 2018, https://www.rfa.org/english/news/myanmar/myanmar-calls-icc-request-for-….

[12] “Bangladesh’s PM at UN urges ‘safe zones’ for Myanmar's Rohingya,” Agence France-Presse, September 22, 2017, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/22/bangladeshs-pm-un-urges-saf….

[13] Dr. Jeff Crisp, former head of Policy Development and Evaluation at UNHCR, shares his first-hand knowledge of ‘the shameful history of Rohingya repatriation since 1978. See “We must not repeat the shameful history of returning Rohingya refugees,” Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford University, January 17, 2018, https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/news/we-must-not-repeat-the-shameful-history-o…" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline. 

[14] See Natalie Brinham, “Breaking the cycle of expulsion, forced repatriation, and exploitation for Rohingya,” Open Democracy, September 26, 2017, https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/natalie-brinham/breaking-cy…; and Maung Zarni and Natalie Brihnam, “Waves of Genocidal Terror against Rohingyas by Myanmar and the Resultant Exodus Since 1978,” Middle East Institute,http://www.mei.edu/publications/waves-genocidal-terror-against-rohingya….

[15] Members of the Rohingya community are protected under the UN Declaration on the Right of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious and Linguistic Minorities. See “Report of the detailed findings of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar,” Human Rights Council, September 18, 2018, p. 15, #45.

[16]See Maung Zarni and Natalie Brinham, “An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide,” Middle East Institute, http://www.mei.edu/publications/evolution-rohingya-persecution-myanmar-….

[17] Official Encyclopedia of Burma (Burmese), Literary House, Union of Burma Government Press, V. 9, under “Mayu District” (of Rohingya), 1964. See also Gregory Poling, “Separating Fact from Fiction about Myanmar’s Rohingya,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC, February 13, 2014, https://www.csis.org/analysis/separating-fact-fiction-about-myanmar%E2%…; and Brigadier General Aung Gyi, Vice-Chief of Staff - Army, Myanmar Armed Forces, “Rohingyas are equal and full citizens and an ethnic minority integral to the Union of Burma,” Khit Yay (Current Affairs), Ministry of Defence, Rangoon, July 4, 1961, https://www.maungzarni.net/en/news/rohingyas-are-equal-and-full-citizen….

[18] A former military intelligence divisional head of the inter-agency Na Sa Ka based in Rakhine State capital of Sittwe openly admitted in a Burmese language essay that the peaceful means designed to change the demographic character of Muslim region of N. Rakhine failed because the military was not devoting enough financial resources

[19] See ex-General Khin Nyunt, The State’s Western Gate Problem (in Burmese, hereafter cited as “The State’s Western Gate Problem”) (Yangon: One Hundred Flowers Press, 2016). This is the single most detailed account of Rohingya persecution from the perspective of a key perpetrator, openly explaining different schemes, strategies and rationales, adopted by Myanmar military in order to change the demographic and ethnic character of the predominantly Muslim and Rohingya N. Rakhine State of Myanmar. Khin Nyunt was a young major who had played different roles since the very first state-directed terror campaign against Rohingyas under the false disguise of “illegal immigration” checks in February 1978 until his ouster as chief of military intelligence in October 18, 2004. In 1992, he founded Na Sa Ka, the border affairs inter-agency instrument of persecution made up of the ministries of Immigration, Customs, Religious Affairs, Justice, Home Affairs, Defence, and Foreign Affairs, which was formally dismantled only in 2013: for the agency came under a close scrutiny by international researchers and media as it came to be known as the main instrument of Myanmar genocide. Despite its formal dissolution the same repressive mission and institutionalized practices of persecution continue.

[20] Amartya Sen, “The Slow Genocide of the Rohingya,” Harvard University, November 4, 2014, https://tribunalonmyanmar.org/2014/11/15/the-slow-genocide-of-the-rohin…; See also Maung Zarni and Alice Cowley (aka National Brinham), “The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya,” Pacific Rim Law & Policy Journal 23, 3 (June 2014): 683-754, http://digital.law.washington.edu/dspace-law/handle/1773.1/1377.

[21] Myanmar shares over 1,000 miles of borders with each of these neighbors in the West, Far North and the East. 

[22] Personal communications with a former member of the National League for Democracy party team which screened public letters sent to the party leader Aung San Suu Kyi who answered written questions in her well-publicised weekly “Democracy Forum” which she held at the entrance of her house in Rangoon. Myanmar military intelligence has been widely blamed for “selling citizenship” to thousands of Han Chinese immigrants, residents and traders from the Sino-Burmese border province of Yunnan.

[23] “The Mong Wong, Burma’s newest citizens, face backlash,” ReliefWeb, May 6, 2016, https://reliefweb.int/report/myanmar/mong-wong-burma-s-newest-citizens-…" style="color:#0563c1; text-decoration:underline.

[24] At his invitation-only official talk at Chatham House in London in July 2013, the then Myanmar President and ex-General Thein Sein repeated the institutionalized denial: ”We do not have a group named Rohingya.” David Mepham, Dispatches Burma: “Excuse me, Mr. President…”, Human Rights Watch UK, July 19, 2013, https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/07/19/dispatches-burma-excuse-me-mr-presi… .

[25] As part of the systematic destruction of a targeted racial, ethnic, religious or national group, in whole or in part, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, conceived genocide as a two-phase process with respect to the group’s identity or “national pattern”, as he called it: first, the destruction of the group’s identity/pattern and second, the imposition on those group members, who survive the destruction, of a new identity/pattern as chosen by the perpetrators. This crucial point is often overlooked. See Raphael Lemkin, Axis rule in Occupied Europe, (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, Ltd., 2008), specifically Chapter IX, “Genocide”: 79.

[26] “Int’l humanitarian appeal for Rohingya crisis underfunded: UN chief,” China Daily, August 29, 2018 http://www.nationmultimedia.com/detail/breakingnews/30353212. ;

[27] For a thoughtful essay on putting the rights, safety and well-being of the Rohingyas at the center of policy discussions, see Bill Richardson, “Accountability Alone Will Not Solve Myanmar's Rohingya Crisis,” TIME, November 5, 2018, http://time.com/5442807/myanmar-bangladesh-rohingya-acountability-bill-….

[28] Mehdi Chowdhury, “Rohingya refugees remain a heavy burden on Bangladesh,” The Conversation, August 20, 2018, http://theconversation.com/rohingya-refugees-remain-a-heavy-burden-on-b…. >

[29] Writing in a Washington Post op-ed, Japan’s Foreign Minister Taro Kono exhorts the international “not to criticize, but to patiently support Myanmar’s own efforts for the early, safe, voluntary and dignified repatriation of refugees.” See Taro Kono, “The world must support Myanmar and Bangladesh,” Washington Post, September 25, 2018, https://www.mofa.go.jp/s_sa/sea2/page4e_000905.html.

[30] PM Mahathir Mohammad, “The world needs to draw the line. Military actions may be necessary (to end Myanmar genocide)," Council on Foreign Relations, New York City, October 4, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfwHmy_3UDQ. (Hereafter “The world needs to draw the line.”)

[31] Aung San Suu Kyi, “Democratic Transition in Myanmar: Challenges and the Way Forward,” The 43rd Singapore Lecture, Singapore, August 21, 2018, http://www.globalnewlightofmyanmar.com/democratic-transition-in-myanmar….

[32]“Burma doubles down on claims to justify treatment of Rohingya minority,“ Fox News, November 10, 2018, https://www.foxnews.com/world/burma-un-ambassador-denies-rohingya-genoc….

[33] “The world needs to draw the line.”

By Chisato Tanaka, Published by The Japan Times on October 25, 2018

A leader of a global network of activists for Rohingya Muslims on Thursday called on Japan to actively speak out against the alleged abuse and genocide against Myanmar’s ethnic minority by the country’s military and strongly criticized Tokyo for its relative silence on a crisis that has become a major international concern.

“There are 400 villages burned to the ground … Japan cannot be so out of line from the reality. Rohingyas are treated as guilty (just) because they exist,” Maung Zarni, leader of the Free Rohingya Coalition, said at a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan in Tokyo.

Around 723,000 Rohingya people fled to neighboring Bangladesh in the year after violence broke out in the Rakhine state in the Buddhist-majority country in August 2017, according to the UNHCR, the U.N.’s refugee agency. More than 40 percent of them were under age 12.

In September this year, a U.N. fact-finding mission released a report on the situation, saying that the armed forces of Myanmar are the main perpetrator of the “gross human rights violations and international crimes” committed in Rakhine and other states.

Zarni, who is visiting Japan to give speeches about the plight of the Rohingya people, said international intervention is imperative and Japan could take a leading role as the world’s third-biggest economy.

“Japan can simply say we are going to have a policy review,” he said, signaling his frustration with the Asian country, which he views as not doing enough to address the humanitarian crisis.

Michimi Muranushi, an international politics professor at Gakushuin University who will be giving lectures with Zarni, told The Japan Times that the Japanese government appears to be avoiding the use of the term “Rohingya” in consideration of the fact the Myanmar government does not recognize the people as citizens.

“The government has been really strict about not using that word,” said Muranushi, noting that it instead has usually referred to the people as “Muslims in the Rakhine state.”

Zarni argued that a language encyclopedia published by the Myanmar government says that “irrefutably and unequivocally, and officially, Rohingya people are an official ethnic minority who have ancestral lands in the northern Rakhine state of Myanmar” and that the Southeast Asian country’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi also “has access to this document.”

When Suu Kyi visited Japan earlier in the month, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said at a joint news conference that he values her efforts “to cope with a difficult agenda,” including economic reforms and “issues related to Rakhine state.” Abe also said the refugee issue poses a “very complex and grave” problem, and Japan will extend assistance to help them return to Myanmar and resettle there.

The Japanese government is reportedly said to be considering accepting more refugees who have fled their home to neighboring countries for resettlement. Zarni said Abe should accept more Rohingya people as they could become “assets,” for example by becoming part of the country’s workforce, which is experiencing shortages as Japan struggles with a graying population and declining birthrate.

By Dr. Maung Zarni

Anadolu Agency

October 5, 2018

- The writer is coordinator for strategic affairs at the Free Rohingya Coalition and adviser to the European Center for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge, UK

LONDON -- Rohingya campaigners and human rights organizations welcomed the UN Human Rights Council’s vote on Sept. 27 to set up a body to conduct a further investigation and future indictment of Myanmar for atrocity crimes, including genocide. The resolution, co-sponsored by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) and the European Union, was passed by a vote of 35-3 with seven abstentions, with only China, the Philippines and Burundi opposing it.

The current calls for justice and accountability for the victims of the Myanmar genocide -- ongoing still -- must go beyond conceiving justice in a narrow technical judicial sense and consider the tangible and pressing need of the Rohingya, including the sitting duck Rohingya inside Myanmar, those in camps in Bangladesh and those on the verge of deportation in India.

While the International Criminal Court and/or other ad hoc international tribunals in the style of the tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda would be a welcome step in the right direction, none of the international judicial processes will likely alter the genocidal conditions in which Rohingya have been forced to exist for several decades.

Here is a very grim picture: A Harvard Medical School study published in the Lancet (2016) found the doctor-patient ratio for Rohingya in the two predominantly Rohingya towns of Buthidaung and Maungdaw is 1:180,000 while the national average is 1:1,000. According to the World Food Program survey of July 2017 -- which was shelved a week after its release under pressure from the Aung San Suu Kyi government -- of 80,000 Rohingya children under the age of 5 surveyed in a select Rohingya region of Western Myanmar, severe malnutrition and acute severe malnutrition or semi-famine like characteristics are prevalent. A Physicians for Human Rights study in October 2016 uncovered the severe deprivation of access to even rudimentary health services: a Rohingya person is made to go through, on average, three to four security checkpoints from home to the nearest village clinic, typically without a doctor or emergency medical care.

Genocide against the Rohingya is more than a series of acts of genocide, but it is still an ongoing process, and its instigators remain with impunity at the highest levels of authority in Myanmar. As the 440-page Independent International Fact-Finding Mission report (Sept. 18) noted, the structures, institutions and policies designed to destroy the Rohingya community from its very foundations remain in place.

These conditions and the decades-old policies that have induced them remain in place. The World Court or other judicial processes, domestically or globally, are not going to alter them.

And there is something that is even harder to change that serves as the obstacle to ending Myanmar’s ongoing genocide: the utter impotence and non-functioning of the UN Security Council when it comes to large-scale, policy-induced human suffering, from Yemen and Syria to Palestine and Uighur East Turkestan, or Xinjiang, in China. The veto-wielders -- not just the usual illiberal suspects such as Russia and China but also the U.S. and UK -- have proven incapable of upholding the UN Charter.

Outrageously, one year after the now-well-documented genocidal acts committed by Myanmar, the Security Council has not been able to reach a consensus about what to call the crime, objectively, let alone ending it decisively.

In light of this realpolitik, the UN system, particularly the Security Council, is the last place where the Rohingya will find any meaningful support for either realizing their long-term needs for justice and closure (such as criminal prosecution of the perpetrators of genocide) or the immediate need for safety and protection of the remaining Rohingya populations inside Myanmar and in the refugee camps in Bangladesh.

The UN officials and ostensibly pro-human rights members have been urging the creation of “safe conditions” so that 1 million Rohingya in Bangladesh who fled Myanmar’s periodic waves of genocidal terror could return and rebuild their communities. Bangladesh’s Prime Minister, Sheik Hasina, has consistently called for safety -- and even “a safe zone” or international protection, “if necessary” -- for the Rohingya population inside Myanmar. She has made this sensible call at the UN General Assembly for the past two years since the genocidal killings hit world news headlines in August 2017.

No one has heeded these essential calls while promising to throw more aid money at the symptom, namely “the Rohingya humanitarian crisis”.

Meanwhile, echoing U.S. President Donald Trump, Aung San Suu Kyi’s man of the hour at the UN, Minister Kyaw Tint Swe of the Myanmar State Counsellor’s Office, rejected the World Court’s jurisdiction and dismissed the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar and its 440-page genocide report as having “no hard evidence”. The Burmese rejection of evidence is beyond belief in the face of the satellite images of nearly 400 destroyed Rohingya villages, consistently accurate and credible oral testimonies of thousands of genocide survivors and numerous legal and academic studies as well as journalistic investigations that reach a single conclusion: it is genocide, no less, that Myanmar is committing.

So what then needs to be done?

There are five concrete steps that can be undertaken with the view towards justice, repatriation and rebuilding of Rohingya communities inside Myanmar.

First, there is emerging a network of state actors -- governments, that is, -- which can establish something along the lines of “an international coalition of governments for ending Myanmar’s genocide”. Conceivably, Canada, Sweden, Ireland, Bangladesh, the Netherlands, the UK, certain Rohingya-concerned OIC member states (such as Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Kuwait etc.) and those from Latin and Central America with experience in atrocity crimes at home can form the core of this coalition.

This coalition can, in a more focused manner, explore concrete ways, with the requisite condition of safety, to facilitate Rohingya's return and the rebuilding of their lives once they are in their places of origin inside Western Myanmar adjacent to Bangladesh’s borders.

The word “international protection” conjures up images of UN peacekeepers. But the Blue Helmets have an extremely poor track record: consider the Dutch peacekeepers in Srebrenica whom the ICC ruled to be complicit in the genocide or Canadian troops shooting dogs that came to eat the corpses of Rwandan genocide victims because UN peacekeepers in the capital, Kigali, were ordered to stand down as the genocidal slaughter raged on.

For instance, the coalition can push for the idea of attaching significant numbers of civilian human rights monitors and experienced military veterans to UN agencies based in Myanmar, as well as to the humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross or Medicine San Frontiers. They would need to be based in Rakhine State in Western Myanmar, where these atrocity crimes occurred. The presence of these civilian human rights monitors ought to be made a non-negotiable condition for any interactions and agreements between Myanmar and the coalition’s partners as well as the UN agencies.

The job of providing for the returning Rohingya or those who remain inside Myanmar cannot be left in the exclusive hands of UN agencies. Besides being toothless even to secure their own unhindered access to the crime sites of Rakhine from where 725,000 fled in a span of a few months, the “UN as a whole” has been called out by the Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar for its categorical failures to implement the organization’s “Rights First” policies adopted in the wake of Sri Lanka’s war crimes in 2008.

Second, the coalition needs to start inter-state conversation about de-militarization of northern Rakhine state, where the persecution has been institutionalized by Myanmar’s military for several decades. Concretely, there needs to be established a de-militarized zone where Myanmar will be forced to engage in community policing designed to minimize and prevent petty criminality in the communities within its border region of Western Myanmar. In this respect, UN member states -- 35 in total -- who voted in favor of the UN Human Rights Council resolution last week to establish an international body tasked with collecting evidence for a future international tribunal on Myanmar may likely join this international coalition.

Third, as part of the neighboring state, Bangladeshi troops across the border need to step up their security functions to ease Myanmar’s (un-warranted) fear of Islamist “penetration” into the Rohingya communities. That should not be a problem for Dhaka, which has come under heavy international criticism for its heavy-handed if effective handling of radicalization and violence among Bangladeshi communities.

Fourth, individual nations that are prepared to be a part of this coalition can take unilateral actions designed to signal to Myanmar -- and the world -- that genocide is the red line that no fellow UN member will be allowed to cross.

As a matter of fact, Canada took an exemplary action when its parliament unanimously declared Myanmar a genocidal state while its executive stripped, in an unprecedented move, Aung San Suu Kyi of Canada’s highest honor -- honorary Canadian citizenship.

More concretely, other nations in the coalition can review their ties -- commercial, military, intelligence, educational, etc. -- with the view towards using them as leverage or simply suspending them as a signal of condemnation of Myanmar’s heinous Rohingya policies. These nations of conscience need to, at the bare minimum, suspend, downgrade or outright cut diplomatic relations if Myanmar doesn’t change its genocidal course. Specifically, the coalition members need to send Myanmar ambassadors, counsel generals and military attaches packing.

These measures have been proven effective in the past: when worldwide ostracism of South Africa and its apartheid regime took place, the racists in power were eventually forced to dismantle their savage political system.

Worldwide, governments and societal actors (universities, football clubs, theatrical groups, etc.) ought to be persuaded to shun Myanmar in various aspects of its foreign interactions and revive the “Pinochet Precedent”. Australia’s lawyers and rights campaigners are using the Commonwealth Law to hold Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi accountable for her vital role in Myanmar’s crimes against humanity regarding Rohingya people.

Fifth and finally, on the economic front, the governments within the coalition should advise their national investors to either divest from the Myanmar market or not to invest in the country. To be sure, a commercial boycott of Myanmar may not bring about the needed behavioral change on the part of the country’s leaders if only because investments from Myanmar’s neighbors such as China, Singapore, South Korea and Japan make up the country’s largest foreign direct investment.

But Western and Middle Eastern investors and markets still have sufficient global influence that the medium and long-term impact of such collective action by the coalition partners will affect foreign economic actors from the genocide-bystanding or collaborating states such as India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and China.

China may be too big and too thick-skinned for, say, the reputational damage incurred from such a critical stance and boycotts from the coalition. Already being in a trade war with the United States (and its Western allies), and under close watch from human rights campaigners for its Uighur “re-education camps”, Beijing may be more vulnerable to global negative opinion that is assumed. But less important actors such as Singapore or South Korea will certainly be forced to review their ‘business-as-usual’ ties with Myanmar.

And the EU and Organization of the Islamic Cooperation, which co-sponsored a human rights resolution on Myanmar on the grounds of a fact-finding mission’s genocidal allegations, will need to reconsider their contradictory behavior on Myanmar: 300+ EU investors and some of the leading investors from the OIC remain very active in Myanmar. Neither bloc can slam Myanmar for committing the gravest of crimes while their money is propping up the genocidal perpetrators in Naypyidaw.

There are 200 UN member states, and about 140 of them are signers of the Genocide Convention. That is a lot to work with to effect positive change for the Rohingya, and for Myanmar’s violent and regressive politics.

Since the closure of the last Nazi death camp in August 1945, one hears of “Never again!” ritualistically. It’s the 11th hour of Myanmar’s genocide. Nations of conscience must band together, punish Myanmar’s perpetrating regime and provide effective protection to the genocide victims.

By Dr. Maung Zarni

September 20, 2018

NGOs destroy civil society, said a top sociologist at Columbia.

He is absolutely correct.

If Rohingyas do NOT hang together they will be hang separately.

I see the disaster or humanitarian colonialism being repeated in Rohingya situation. There is an immediate need to forge and expand intra-Rohingya solidarity and collaboration.

I define INGOs as neo-COLONIAL, that do not identify with Rohingya resistance to repatriation under duress, or have organic ties to Rohingya's struggles (meaning groups that impose their agendas & priorities).

Mine is not an original insight, but drawn from David Korten's: the only western or external NGO that is NOT colonial is the type that is connected with and support the oppressed's resistance and movements.

If I were a Rohingya refugee, or a member of the diaspora, I would work with any NGO that comes in with $, has political connections, and a voice.

However, I would NOT have any expectation or illusions that humanitarian INGOs (and politicians) will have pure moral desire or political will to respect, listen to or appreciate Rohingyas' wishes

and needs.

Generally, or typically, INGO-recipient relations will necessarily be INSTRUMENTALIST. That is, they come because it's their job, income generator, career, or professional or personal interests. There are of course NGO individuals who care, genuinely. But in the INGO politics it is organizational interests and logic that in the final instance drive what these entities officially say and do. Human rights INGOs are not immune from this cancer.

Rohingyas deal with them because there are no better choices - accept their money, medicine, work as fixers, field "researchers", informants or informers, whatever the case, etc.

That's the reality: the crucial thing is to know this instrumentalist nature - they use the refugees and refugees use them - of these interactions.

The last thing Rohingyas need is be swayed by these INGOs and their slanted, trendy advocacy campaigns - that never ask for what Rohingya really need, that is, protected homeland where they can live in peace and safety as normal human community, like everyone else.

To be able to maintain a healthier power equation between the INGOs and the refugees - nearly 1 million now - Rohingya refugees and the diaspora must forge ties that go beyond little family circles , or that cling to petty little organizations where they are "Chairmen" or "Chairwomen" "President" or whatever.

So far I have not seen Rohingya elites in diaspora building this absolutely necessary intra-Rohingya solidarity, respect and organizational collaboration.

The absence of this broad-based solidarity amongst the victims, both the diaspora and in sub-human camps, is deeply troubling, both from moral and strategic perspectives.

If Rohingyas do NOT hang together they will be hang separately.

I have seen this NGOs as disease in the context of the armed Karen revolution. The result is ugly: capable potential revolutionaries are snatched out of the movement and into program manager positions, from where they sing the NGO tunes.

With absolutely nothing - beyond the presence of 1 million bodies in the sub-human camps in Bangladesh - Rohingyas are far more vulnerable to this politics and exploitation by the NGOs and politicians than the Karens have ever been.