Latest Highlight

RB Channel








By Dr. Maung Zarni | Published by Anadolu Agency on June 16, 2018

Myanmar’s leader is doing her best to cover up her country’s international crimes against Rohingya people

Cambridge, THE UK -- In the first meeting on June 13 between Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi and Christine Schraner Burgener, the Burmese urged the freshly-minted Special Envoy on Myanmar for the UN Secretary General to understand “the real situation” about the Rakhine State, from which 700,000 Rohingyas fled, in what the Secretary General himself characterized as “ethnic cleansing”.

The phrase “the real situation” rings alarm bells in my head. It was all déjà vu.

For 13 years ago, ‘the real situation’ (of Myanmar) were the very words Lt. Gen. Myint Swe, the then Chief of Myanmar’s military intelligence services, used when he urged me to convey their approach to the world -- in my writings, media appearances, and meetings with politicians and diplomats.

The chief spook and I were meeting one-on-one for the first time at the Dagon Hall of the old War Office in Yangon, with only his deputy, Col. Mya Tun Oo -- now the Joint Chief of the Armed Forces -- present in the meeting, as the notetaker.

Then, I had just returned to my country of birth after nearly 17 years of active U.S.-based opposition to the Burmese military rule. I rationalized my return -- and support -- for the generals as a citizen’s effort to help the embattled military leadership under Western sanctions so that our country could be re-integrated into the wider world community, particularly from the West, which had attempted to isolate the post-Cold War Burma on the grounds of the Burmese military’s egregious violations of human rights. The general was my official host who arranged my safe and voluntary return and resumption of Myanmar citizenship.

In due course, I came to realize what the spy chief meant by “the real situation”. He simply wanted me to be the mouthpiece for the military and help amplify the military’s version of Burmese affairs and events; for, in his own words, “the world doesn’t believe us”, having implied that I, as a western educated Burmese, would be more credible.

Whether the military’s “real situation” corresponded to the lived experiences of the people or not was of no concern to the spy chief (and the entire military leadership).

I have since ended my support for the “reformist” military leadership, whom I had initially given the benefit of the doubt.

The reality is, the same military leaders went on to slaughter Buddhist monks in the non-violent “Saffron Revolt” of 2007, calling for more compassionate policies to address the country’s economic woes and blocked emergency aid to several million Cyclone Nargis victims in 2008. My host general was centrally involved in these sordid turn of events that were marked by the military-government’s brutality and inhumanity.

Ex-Lt.Gen. Myint Swe is still around and is now the powerful military-backed Vice-President in the military-NLD partnership that jointly runs the country today.

A year ago, after the first wave of “security clearance” operations against the newly emerging “Muslim insurgents” led to the less-reported exodus of nearly 100,000 Rohingyas in 2016, Vice President Myint Swe chaired the national Inquiry Commission on the violence in the Maung Daw Township, Rakhine, for Aung San Suu Kyi’s NLD government, and proceeded to unequivocally exonerate Myanmar’s security forces whose brutalities were well-documented. The Myanmar troops, the National Commission concluded, acted in accordance with the rules of engagement and the law of the land.

It is in fact painful to watch national leaders, politicians and generals (and ex-generals) treat facts and truths as if they were a rubber band that can be manipulated into any elastic shape or length.

Because of her active dismissal and denial of the ugly truths about the military, which her father had founded three years prior to her birth, Suu Kyi has been denounced worldwide, from His Holiness the Dalai Lama to S. Africa’s retired Archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu and fellow women Nobel laureates to editorial boards of the world’s leading newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Times, the Guardian and the New York Times. Worse still, leading lights of international law and human rights including Milosevic’s prosecutor Sir Geoffrey Nice of Britain and UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar Professor Yanghee Lee have raised the very real possibility that the former icon of nonviolence may find herself in the dock together with the senior military leaders, her partners in power.

In the last six years, that is, since the two bouts of large-scale violence against Rohingyas -- in June and October of 2012 -- during which Myanmar’s decades-old systematic state persecution of this Muslim minority community came to the world’s attention, Aung San Suu Kyi’s leadership performance has gone from bad to worse, from studied silence to willful ignorance to proactive denial and dismissal of
well-documented international crimes, which seniormost UN human rights officials and envoys view as having ‘hallmarks of a genocide’ or ‘strongly suspected’ as ‘acts of genocide’.

On her 67th birthday -- 18 June 2012 -- I had the great pleasure of sharing a televised Rule of Law Roundtable with the iconic Burmese leader whom the Burmese public revere and address as “Mother” (of the People). (Other panelists included Sir Geoffrey Nice, Oxford University Law Professor Nicola Lacey and LSE Professors Mary Kaldor and Christine Chinkin.) Because just a few days prior to the LSE roundtable, Suu Kyi flunked the media test about her knowledge of the emerging crisis in Western Myanmar -- she could not answer a basic question by a U.S. National Public Radio journalist Anthony Kuhn: “Do you know if Rohingyas are your people, Myanmar people?” -- she sent instructions via the British Foreign Office to the LSE organizers that she was in effect unprepared to address Rohingya questions. I was pre-assigned to respond to any Rohingya question, which has since come to define the country.

From adopting the strategy of studied silence six years ago, Aung San Suu Kyi now engages in varying acts of adamant denial, outright dismissal, intentional distortions, and disingenuous obfuscation about the Rohingya, all with the express intention of telling the world “the real situation” on the ground.

Her recent exclusive interview with NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster as well as a Myanmar-friendly TV station, for the first time in five years is a case in point. She falsely frames what Professor Amartya Sen -- Suu Kyi’s old teacher at Delhi University and a close friend of her late husband Michael Aris -- called “the slow genocide”, which began several decades ago. Disingenuously, Suu Kyi mischaracterizes Myanmar military’s institutionalized persecution of Rohingyas, a well-documented fact since the late 1970’s, as “a communal conflict” dating back “several centuries” while saying “very few people in the world know the (intricate) historical issues”.

Studies after studies of past genocides have established the fact that genocides, from the Holocaust to Rwanda and Bosnia, are not military or violent conflicts of communities that could be placed on a moral parity: they are, with no exceptions, state-directed large-scale crimes -- now illegalized by the 1948 Genocide Convention -- targeted to erase the presence of ethnic, religious, racial or national minorities, which are typically misframed by the perpetrating groups, both state and societies, as “a threat to nationhood or national security”.

She is now in the process of forming yet another inquiry commission in order to establish facts about the “real situation” in Rakhine, which the ICC Prosecutor’s Office in The Hague is convinced is one involving crimes against humanity targeting the Rohingya ethnic minority.

While the rest of the world see Myanmar as systematically committing egregious international crimes -- whatever their legal names -- and the UN attempts to seek access to the crime sites, her NLD government has openly defied the UN Human Rights Council’s mandate to send the International Fact Finding Mission since its establishment in 2016. Instead, Suu Kyi established the Rakhine Commission with Kofi Annan as its chair and proceeded to use it as a public relations shield against strident global criticisms rightly directed at both her leadership and the country.

Furthermore, the former human rights icon did not shy away from resorting to acts of bullying and threats against anyone who dares raise the issue of Myanmar’s crimes against Rohingyas.

According to UN Special Rapporteur Yanghee Lee, Aung San Suu Kyi personally threatened that “you know, if you continue with the UN’s (pre-human rights) line you won’t be able to come back here (Myanmar)” -- a threat she followed through: Professor Lee has been barred from entering the country for the rest of her tenure. Aung San Suu Kyi is also the Foreign Minister who ultimately decides who is to be issued visas and who is to be denied them.

Suu Kyi now argues that her government has carried out constructive activities to move the Rakhine situation forward in accord with the Kofi Annan-led Rakhine Commission’s recommendations. But from its inception, the Annan commission was, by its own official admission, mandated not to examine any allegations of human rights abuses in the Rakhine state, or alleged violations of international treaties and bodies of law by Myanmar such as the Genocide Convention, which Myanmar ratified in 1956, or the Child Rights Convention. She officially barred the Annan Commission from calling Rohingyas by their group name.

Despite the easily accessible official documentations that offer irrefutable evidence in support of Rohingyas’ claim that they belong in Myanmar as an integral ethnic minority who enjoyed full and equal citizenship even in the early years of the military rule in the 1960’s and the early 1970’s, the Ministry of Information under Suu Kyi’s control just banned the Washington-based U.S. Government’s Radio Free Asia TV from broadcasting on Myanmar channels for the latter’s continued use of the word Rohingya. The RFA board of directors issued an official statement describing her government as “Orwellian,” and highlighted the fact that the Myanmar government is trying to “deny the existence of a people” starting with the attempts to “erase its group identity”.

In the aforementioned NHK interview, Suu Kyi, a former prisoner of conscience and victim of state persecution for 15 years, also defended the state’s detention of two local Buddhist journalists on the grounds that they are violators of “state official secrets” just because they uncovered the first mass grave of Rohingyas with photographic evidence and eyewitness stories.

For 15 years as a Burmese activist foot soldier, I held her in highest esteem, and followed her policies of isolating and sanctioning our country to the letter. None of Suu Kyi’s acts of deception, distortions and denial of facts on the ground surprises me. It was these negative qualities of Suu Kyi which I discerned as early as 2004 which compelled me to break ranks with her NLD party, turn my back on her as the opposition leader and seek alternative paths to pushing for political liberalization in my country of birth -- specifically working with the generals considered “potential reformers”.

While the tragic turn of events has vindicated my withdrawal of support for and cooperation with both the generals and NLD leadership, it is excruciating to watch the two bitter enemies now colluding, not on the path towards democratization or a peaceful end to the world’s longest civil war (between Myanmar armed forces and non-Rohingya ethnic resistance groups such as Kachin, Karen, etc.) but in covering up our country’s crimes against humanity and genocide against the Rohingya Muslims.

It is not difficult to discern Suu Kyi’s underlying utilitarian logic which runs something like “we have the whole country’s future to be concerned about, not just a small population of Muslims in one region”. The former icon of human rights now holds, in unconcealed contempt, the world that previously rallied for her human rights and is now standing up for Rohingyas’ right to life and belonging, and for that matter, human rights for all Myanmar people including journalists.

For the record, my own public opposition 30 years ago to the military rule and its hallmark rights abuses was inspired by her heroic example of privileging principles of truth and liberalism.

Today, I want Aung San Suu Kyi to be held accountable for her willful collusion with Myanmar military leaders in the latter’s crimes against an entire ethnic community. Suu Kyi’s crimes are no longer her studied silence or failure to extend her government’s primary responsibility to extend the benefit of “peace and security” to the Rohingya people.

The last thing the UN officials and envoys on Myanmar should do is to allow themselves to be used as “conveyers” of Suu Kyi’s version of “the real situation”. As infectious as it is, the international actors are best advised to not embrace Suu Kyi’s utilitarian discourse of economic development, poverty alleviation, centuries-old civilizational conflicts, and incremental approach to addressing the crisis in Rakhine.

In the face of Myanmar’s ongoing international crimes against Rohingyas as a people, inside Myanmar and in the refugee camps in Bangladesh -- all under Suu Kyi’s watch, and with her complicity -- the UN needs to stop promoting Myanmar’s lies -- such as bypassing the calls for ICC-led accountability in order to support its “fragile democratic transition”.

The UN must not allow Suu Kyi to form yet another whitewash “inquiry commission” within Myanmar’s fundamentally dysfunctional criminal justice system equipped with neither conceptual tools for atrocity crimes nor judicial independence.

No political regime, civilian or military, that commissions international crimes against its own national minorities should be given the benefit of the doubt when its smooth-talking Oxford-educated politician says it is on the path towards incremental liberalization and constructive resolution of the crisis confronting a people whose existence she herself denies.

[The writer is an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism in Cambridge, UK and a coordinator for the Free Rohingya Coalition]



By Maung Zarni & Natalie Brinham
June 11, 2018

Newly-organized UN in Myanmar has shelved organization’s own governing principles of transparency and inclusivity, as evidenced by freshly-inked MOU with Myanmar

- Maung Zarni is Coordinator for Strategic Affairs with the Free Rohingya Coalition (www.freerohingyacoalition.org). 

- Natalie Brinham is an Economic and Social Research Council PhD scholar at the Queen Mary University of London and co-author of “The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya” (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal, Spring 2014). 

CAMBRIDGE, UK -- One million Rohingya survivors of the Myanmar genocide, who took refuge across the borders in the neighboring Bangladesh, remain largely unpersuaded by the news of the latest repatriation deal the United Nations agencies have signed with their perpetrators in Naypyidaw, and openly call for “UN Security Forces” to guarantee safe return to their homelands in the Western Myanmar state of Rakhine.

On 6 June, the two UN agencies with mandates for refugee protection and “development” inked the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Government of Myanmar, a hybrid military-Aung-San-Suu-Kyi regime. Knut Osby, UN’s man in Yangon, took to the Twittersphere, putting the spin that “Secretary General Antonio Guterres welcomes the agreement”, whose content is treated as if it were Myanmar’s top national security secret. Additionally, Mr. Osby, who holds the assistant secretary general position, tried to assure the Rohingya refugees via the mass media that UN would be pressing for “group identity” recognition by Myanmar and a “voluntary, safe, dignified and sustainable” return.

Leading INGOs, including the Nobel Peace Prize winning Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) and the Washington-based Refugees International, headed by Eric Schwartz, the former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Refugees and Migration, issued statements, stressing the total absence of necessary conditions and injecting a dose of reality as if to pre-empt the typically phony reactions of ‘welcome’ that pervade diplomatic quarters. Both organizations express varying degrees of valid skepticism about the MOU. The conditions on the ground indicate no semblance of physical safety for any returning Rohingyas. There is no indication that the official acceptance of Rohingya by Myanmar as an integral ethnic minority of the Union is forthcoming, especially when one remembers the national standing Rohingyas had enjoyed as a group until the early years of the military rule in the 1960’s. And there is little prospect for their re-integration into the predominantly Buddhist society where the most powerful Senior General Min Aung Hlaing publicly declared his genocidal intent, that the presence of the Rohingya in N. Rakhine was an “unfinished business” from the pogroms of the Second World War.

In addition to the frightening prospects of being marched back to Myanmar’s “killing fields”, what has truly unnerved the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh -- thousands have been in refugee camps in Bangladesh since the early 1990’s as they fled the earlier waves of violent persecution -- about this latest UN-Myanmar refugee deal is this: UN agencies -- the UNDP, the UNHCR, the World Food Program (WFP) -- have a dismal record when it comes to standing up for the Rohingya in the last 40 years since the UNHCR first became involved in the repatriation process in the summer of 1978.

The UNHCR operates in both countries at the pleasure of the governments in Dhaka and Naypyidaw, neither of which is a signatory to the Refugee Conventions. The UN’s rotating international staff in Myanmar may lack the institutional memory about their uncomfortable role in the broken sacred principle of non-refoulment, but those Rohingya who were forcibly repatriated have not. The UN agency whose principal mandate is protection of the refugees was in fact in no position to stand up for the most vulnerable Rohingyas sandwiched between the perpetrating Myanmar and Bangladesh.

In the decades that followed the 1990’s repatriations, the UN’s refugee watchdog had consistently put keeping good relations with host governments in order to secure access -- or “pragmatic humanitarianism” -- above its own organizational mandate of protection. That is why the UNHCR, and all other UN agencies operating in Myanmar, have had an open, if unwritten, directive for all staff to comply with regarding Myanmar’s refusal to use the term ‘Rohingya’. So the staffs of all UN agencies operating in Myanmar avoid using the word ‘Rohingya’ in all their communications seen or heard by Myanmar officials. On the eve of Myanmar’s “ethnic cleansing” of the N. Rakhine state, the WFP reportedly recalled its July 2017 report about the semi-famine like conditions in which 80,000 Rohingya children under the age of 5 were living at the “request” of the Myanmar government.

Specifically, UN agencies in Myanmar lead an organizational double-life, speaking in two different scripts: one, tailored to placate the host regime by not calling Rohingyas by the group’s ethnic name in meetings and interactions with Myanmar authorities, who have attempted to systematically erase the group’s identity from Myanmar’s collective consciousness, history and official records; the other one to please the ears of global human rights organizations and Rohingya campaigners internationally by calling the group by their proper name, Rohingyas.

At the level of individual management of the UN’s in-country team, the last UN Resident Coordinator, Renata Lok-Dessallien, opted to maintain cordial relations with Myanmar leaders and prioritizing (business-friendly) development approach over human rights, an act which undermined the then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s policy of Human-Rights-First, which was adopted as a result of the widespread failures of UN agencies during the last phase of the civil war in Sri Lanka, where Colombo was accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity and even genocide against a Hindu Tamil minority group. Specifically, Lok-Dessallien commissioned an internal report entitled “The Role of the United Nations in Rakhine state” but subsequently “suppressed” the report. The report’s recommendations included the call for frontloading human rights with respect to the oppressed Rohingya group, pointing out the UN’s ill-preparedness in the face of (likely) mass atrocities against the group and enjoining taking a firmer stance on the state’s egregious rights abuses in the Rohingya area.

The UN had since replaced the disgraced Resident Coordinator with Knut Osby, significantly increased its Myanmar budget and elevated its office in Myanmar one-notch up the UN bureaucracy to the level of Assistant Secretary General-ship.

The UN’s reputation -- and most specifically the reputation of the UNHCR and the UNDP -- is on the line in Myanmar, and beyond. Any part they play in facilitating returns from Bangladesh to Myanmar is risky, when returns could potentially result in another round of mass killings, further decades of containment in concentration camps or deliberate slow starvation. The UN agencies simply must place protection and human rights first this time around. The signs of a new secretive deal do not bode well for the Rohingya survivors. The newly-organized UN in Myanmar has even shelved the organization’s own governing principles of transparency and inclusivity, as evidenced by the freshly-inked MOU with Myanmar. Myanmar is now a suspect in the eyes of the International Criminal Court and international law circles. In apparent compliance with the demands for secrecy typically made by Myanmar’s military-controlled National League for Democracy (NLD) government, the UN has not made public the MOU for scrutiny. Neither has the UN included Rohingyas in any stage of the negotiations over the MOU, nor spelled out their future role. There is then little wonder that the Free Rohingya Coalition, the emerging global network of the widely recognized Rohingya representatives, with deep roots in their communities, both inside Myanmar and in diaspora, including Bangladesh, cry foul against the MOU, which remains shady. 

The UNHCR have added a fourth adjective -- “sustainable” -- to the mainstreamed mantra of “voluntary, safe and dignified”. To make the fourth adjective viable, the UN must listen to Rohingya voices that call for a “protected return to a protected homeland in Myanmar”.



By Nadia MASSIH
May 31, 2018

We speak to Maung Zarni, a human rights campaigner, academic and co-author of "The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar's Rohingya". He joins us on set a week after Amnesty International published a report detailing a massacre carried out by Rohingya militants last August in Myanmar's Rakhine state, where nearly 100 Hindus were killed. Zarni vocally criticises Amnesty, saying the report whips up anti-Rohingya sentiment, not just in Myanmar but across Southeast Asia.





By TRT Newsmaker
May 28, 2018

Despite its big name, Amnesty under fire for its latest report on Rohingyas: shoddy research, flimsy evidence on which questionable findings are presented as 'facts".






By Dr Maung Zarni
April 29, 2018

Northern Rakhine State, which is ancestral home of Rohingya need to be declared and turned into Homeland for Rohingya protected by international armed forces.

Arakan National Party (Rakhine racist party) openly opposes Rohingya presence South of Maung Daw. One Rakhine MP reiterated this opposition at the Myanmar Parliament this week.

The least Rohingya survivors deserve is all the area North of Maung Daw from where they have been expelled in the last 40 years in waves of genocidal terror.

South of Maung Daw needs to be made de-militarized zone where no Myanmar Tatmadaw troops would be allowed to cross.

Bangladesh the creation of which was made possible by the international community, particularly India and certain western governments such as Canada, will likely be in a position to foster cross-border trade between Rohingya Homeland and Bangladesh provinces of Cox Bazaar, Tef Naaf, and Chittagong.

Rohingya homeland will NOT be landlocked.

When Myanmar is prepared politically and psychologically to re-accept Rohingyas as an ethnic group with full and equal political citizenship then Rohingya Homeland may be reintegrated back into Myanmar.

Until then Rohingya community around the world and 'friends of Rohingya' must devote their energy to turning Protected Homeland into an interim solution - in fact, this is THE ONLY VIABLE SOLUTION - to end Myanmar Genocide.

---


Makawp maga da ya hkrum ai Rohingya ni aq Buga ginra byin pru wa na matu saw lajin ai lam 
​ 
Rakhine mungdaw aq dingda maga na ginra gaw Rohingya ni jiwoi jiwa prat kaw na nga pra wa ai ginra rai nga ai. Dai ginra hpe shanhte madu ai Buga ginra(Homeland) langai hku ndau nna, mungkan mungdan ni aq pawng hpawn laknak lang hpung ni makawp maga ya ra na re. 

Arakhan Amyusha Pati( Arakan National Party) gaw Maung Daw mare aq dingdung maga hta Rohingya amyu sha ni shanu nga ai hpe ning hkap ma ai. Ndai bat laman hta sha Rakhine mung shawa rap daw salang langai gaw Myen rap daw(Parliament) hta Rohingya ni hpe ning hkap ai lam kahtap tsun lai wa sai. 

Rohingya amyu sha ni gaw lai wa sai shaning 40 ning jan kawn Maung Daw mare kaba a dingda maga kaw na amyu sha shamyit masing hkrum sha nna, shanhte Buga kaw na gau shale hkrum wa sai re. Shanhte amyu sha ni yawm dik htum hku nna ndai ginra yawng hpe madu ging ai. 

Mung Daw mare a dingdung ginra hpe gaw Myen laknak lang wuhpung ni n mai shang ai ginra hku nna ndau masat ra ai. 

Bangladesh mungdan byin pru wa ai gaw mungkan mungdan law law jawm shakut lai ya wa ai majaw re. Grau nna India mungdan hte Canada mung dan zawn re ni atsam dat garum ya lai wa sai. Rohingya amyu sha ni madu ai lamu ga hte Bagaladeshg mungdan na Cox Bazaar, Tel Naaf hte Chittagong mare kaba ni lapran hta sut masa, dut lu dut sha galaw lu na matu Bangaladesh mung dang hku nna garum ya ra na re. 

Rohingya ni aq lamu ga gaw panglai hkinggau n nga, lamu ga ni hte sha pat da hkrum ai(Landlocked) ginra rai na nre. 

Myen asuya maga hku nna Rohingya amyu sha ni hpe mungchying sha langai hku masat na matu mung masa lam ya hku sha n ga, myit kraw kata kaw na mung hkapa la lu ai aten, mungdan masha ni yawng lu ging ai ahkaw ahkawng ni hpe hpring tup jaw lu ai aten hta gaw lahta kaw tsun mat wa ai Rohingya ni a Buga ginra hpe Myen mung dan aq daw chyen langai hku bai masat mat wa mai ai. 

Rohingya ni hpe galaw nga ai amyu shamyit masing hpe tsep kawp jahkring kau lu na matu gaw aten ladaw langai laman shanhte madu ai Buga ginra hpe n dau nna, makawp maga ya na matu jawm galaw ai ladat hte sha galaw sa wa ra na re. Dai zawn n lu galaw shi ai aten hta chyawm gaw mungkan shara shagu hta nga ai Rohingya amyu sha ni hte shanhte hpe madi shadaw ai ni yawng gaw Rohingya ni madu ai Buga ginra langai byin pru wa hkra atsam dat jawm shakut sa wa na re. 



By Maung Zarni
April 9, 2018

Only 2 generations ago the Rohingya people of Northern Arakan or Rakhine State of Myanmar had a homeland.

The homeland of Rohingya people was officially referred to as the Mayu Frontier region, and was a separate administrative district made up of the two predominantly Rohingya, but not segregated towns of Maung Daw and Buthidaung, and parts of Rathaey Daung. Owing to the specific request of the Rohingya community leaders and parliamentary representatives, who were worried about being placed under the regional control of Akyab or Sittwe-based Rakhine nationalists, who clamoured for an autonomous statehood for Rakhine, the Burmese Ministry of Defence in Rangoon established Mayu District in the late 1950’s as a distinct administrative region, and placed it under the Ministry’s Border Affairs Division. The first founding chief administrator of this homeland for Rohingyas is the then young Lt-Colonel Tin Oo, now 95-years-old Vice Chair of the ruling National League for Democracy.

Because of the two ongoing separatist movements – Rakhine Buddhists’ independence struggle and Rohingyas’ Mujahedeen movements –the new Rohingya district was not fully operational under Tin Oo’s military command until 1961.

By virtue of his deputy-commandership of the All Rakhine Command (now Western Command), my own relative, Zeya Kyaw Htin Major Ant Kywe, was deputy administrator of Mayu District in 1961 while the Commander Lt-Colonel Ye Gaung, who later became Ne Win’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, was Mayu Region’s Chief Administrator.

Even in the formative years of General Ne Win’s coup government that went by the name of the Revolutionary Council, the military government kept intact the official recognition of Mayu District as Rohingya’s ancestral and contemporaneous homeland. The official Myanmar Encyclopedia Volume 9 (1964) left nothing equivocal about this recognition: “the Mayu District is home to the Rohingya people, who make up 70% to 75% of the district’s population. Largely adherents of Islam, Rohingyas are native people of this region. Majority of them are farmers, labourers and fishermen.”

Today, the large swath of their homeland – stretching 100 Km – has become a UNESCO-worthy World Heritage site of mass killings where 318 villages had been burned systematically by Myanmar Tatmadaw and auxiliary troops which subsequently bulldozed both charred village remains and unknown number of mass graves.

Since the 1990’s when the United Nations first set up the UN Special Rapporteur to monitor and investigate pervasive human rights abuses in Burma, including those to which Rohingya population in Northern Rakhine have been subjected to successive Myanmar or Burmese governments, both military and civilian, have categorically denied the existence of Rohingya people as an ethnic community of the country, let alone acknowledge truthfully that Rohingyas were accorded a specific region of their own.

In fact, ex-General Tin Oo, the elderly Vice Chair of the ruling NLD and the oldest colleague of Myanmar State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi knew these facts – about the state’s official embrace of Rohingyas as an ethnic people of the Union of Burma and the Ministry of Defence’s patronage in the establishment of Mayu Frontier Region for the Rohingya community. After the two bouts of organized violence took place in Rakhine state involving both Rohingya Muslims and Rakhine Buddhists, Tin Oo was heard on the Burmese language service of the Radio Free Asia denying that Rohingyas were a distinct ethnic people, in spite of his own intimate knowledge of the fact to the contrary.

The Burmese public, known for their pervasive anti-Muslim and anti-Indian subcontinent racism, is of course to believe one of their iconic anti-military veterans when Tin Oo repeated the Burmese military’s institutionalized stance: the country has no ethnic group named Rohingya, and those who identify as such are unwanted “Bengali” migrants which the neighbouring Bangladesh tacitly encouraged to illegally migrate into the sparsely populated Rakhine or Arakan through the 170-miles-longtah porous land and river boundaries.

When Aung San Suu Kyi infamously asked the US Ambassador Scott Marciel (UN officials and international diplomats) not to use the name “Rohingya” because in her misguided view calling Rohingya by their own group name was going to further inflame the Burmese nationalist passion against the group she was in fact driving the last nail into the coffin of Rohingya identity and presence as an ethnic community living in their own ancestral land of Mayu Frontier region.

In 3 consecutive years since the mass violence flared up against Rohingyas in Rakhine state, I had attempted to provide a select network of Burmese opinion makers – including nationally acclaimed writers, journalists, artists, as well as a few dozen spiritual leaders drawn from Buddhist clergy, Christian churches, Hindu and Muslim communities – with Burmese language official documentation which expose the intense and intentional denial of Rohingya identity, presence and history and, conversely, support solidly the claims of Rohingyas’ claim of Northern Arakan as their ancestral homeland and their pre-British presence on it.

The power of 40-years of sustained propaganda by the military is such that the otherwise intelligent and compassionate Burmese remain unpersuaded by the facts about Rohingya people: my non-Rohingya Burmese friends stare at the official encyclopedia, official transcripts by Prime Minister U Nu, high ranking military officials including the Deputy Commander in Chief of the Burmese armed forces, as well as a wide array of documentation as if the old official facts were lies and the new official lies were facts.

Alas, truths are fragile and lies die hard, in a deeply racist mental culture such as today’s Myanmar.

Tragically, Myanmar’s rejection of Rohingya people is complete and total: all key pillars of the State and society – namely the powerful Armed Forces, the Sangha or Buddhist Order, the political class led by Ms Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy – have stated their counter-factual view that Rohingyas do not exist, never existed and will never exist as who they say they are as an ethnic group. Worse still, the country’s Christian and other ethnic non-Burmese who also suffer from decades of military oppression and cultural subjugation at the hands of the dominant Bama majority have expressed no empathy or solidarity when it comes to Rohingya’s plight.

In light of this society-wide rejection of Rohingya people a mere bilateral repatriation scheme has proven to be absolutely no panacea: in fact, repatriation has become a vicious cycle for Rohingyas and Bangladesh. Such well-worn repatriation mantra expressed as “voluntary, safe and dignified” return will simply not do.

The only viable way for the Rohingyas to regain normalcy of life and have a chance to rebuild their communal life is more proactive and aggressive intervention by the external state and non-state actors.

Specifically, Rohingyas need to be provided with their own homeland under international protection. The talk of the restoration of homeland to this world’s largest population with no piece of earth they can call home, belong to or settle down must not be misconstrued as another attempt at ‘ethnic separatism’ as the Burmese military and the public have done, in reaction to the call made by the Berlin Conference on Myanmar Genocide. How the protected homeland will work, and which forces will provide the protection, who will administer the protected homeland are questions that can be pursued once the idea is accepted among key state and non-state actors with express concerns about the plight of 1 million Rohingyas which Myanmar has “dumped” on the sovereign territory of the Bangladeshi neighbour.

As a matter of fact, in her address to the UN General Assembly last fall Prime Minister Sheik Hasina of Bangladesh officially proposed the creation of a ‘safe zone’ in N. Arakan state where Rohingyas have been expelled. Hasina’s proposal needs to be looked afresh again with urgency and seriousness, with the view towards forging an international alliance of friends that can in turn firmly push for restoring Rohingyas their rightful homeland where they can belong, and where they can rebuild their communities, under international protection.

Over the last 40 years, there have so far been 3 such agreements since the perpetrating state of then Burma launched the very first centrally organized wave of violent mass expulsion of Rohingyas in February 1978. None had worked. There are absolutely no indications that the current bilateral agreement ceremoniously signed in the Burmese capital Nay Pyi Daw on 23 November will be any different.

By all means maintain the current talks of economic sanctions, as well as international justice and accountability regarding Myanmar perpetrators including Suu Kyi and her military partners in power. But what Rohingyas need and want more than anything is a homeland where they can live in peace and rebuild their scorch-earthed communities under international protection. The solution to Myanmar genocide will not come from the perpetrators.

It is high time that Bangladesh lead a serious international effort to help actualize the protected return of Rohingyas to their protected homeland in their ancestral place of Northern Arakan or Rakhine. Such an effort needs to be given a serious grassroots and state-level backing worldwide. For Rohingyas deserve and need a piece of earth which they can call home, just like every human community that walks this planet.


A Buddhist humanist from Burma, Maung Zarni is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal, forthcoming). He holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education) , National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015).

Maung Zarni at the Oxford Union Genocide Panel on January 29, 2018 - Courtesy

By Rifat Islam Esha
February 19, 2018

Maung Zarni is a Myanmarese academic exiled in the UK who is an activist, commentator and expert on Myanmar. He is currently a scholar with the Documentation Centre of Cambodia at the Sleuk Rith Institute. In an exclusive interview with the Dhaka Tribune, he talks about the Rohingya repatriation to Myanmar which, he says, from the Myanmar army’s perspective is a tactical retreat in the face of heavy artillery of international condemnations, criticisms and reimposition of sanctions, and it might take around 10-20 years to complete

Over 688,000 Rohingya entered Bangladesh between August 25, 2017 and February 11, 2018, after Myanmar security forces launched a brutal crackdown against the mainly Muslim minority – following militant attacks on border outposts and an army base by insurgents.

As agreed between Bangladesh and Myanmar on November 23, the Rohingya repatriation process was supposed to start on January 23. However, it was delayed, and on Friday (February 16), Bangladesh handed over its first list of 1,673 Rohingya families (8,032 individuals) to Myanmar to start the first phase of repatriation to their homeland.

Do you think the Rohingya repatriation ever will take place?

Yes, the repatriation will take place because both Dhaka and Naypyidaw wants it. Dhaka wants it to take place because the pressure of 688,000 (in addition to the pre-existing Rohingya refugees from the previous waves since 1991) needs to be relieved and wants to set the new process of reducing the number of Rohingyas from its soil. Myanmar wants repatriation because it wants to show the world that its intention is not genocide or ethnic cleansing, and it has this mistaken belief that taking back the Rohingyas who survived the Myanmar troops’ mass-slaughter will make it difficult for the world to press charges of ethnic cleansing or genocide. As the former Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson, the veteran US envoy and diplomat, said it openly: “Repatriation is a big whitewash,” of Myanmar’s international state crimes against Rohingya. From the Myanmar military’s perspective repatriation is a tactical retreat in the face of heavy artillery of international condemnations, criticisms and reimposition of sanctions.

How long do you think it might take?

Well, there are estimated one million Rohingyas who fit the textbook example of refugees – although Dhaka chose to invent its own term “displaced people of Myanmar,” even under the most conducive circumstances it will take 10-20 years, especially at the rate Myanmar side wants to receive.

Do you think the Rohingya people’s return will be “safe, voluntary and dignified”?

Absolutely not. I actually avoid that international mantra coming from INGOs, UN agencies and governments following Kofi Annan’s phraseology. How can the return ever be “safe, voluntary and dignified” for a million people whose physical, cultural, economic, social and intellectual existence, as a minority community has been completely and intentionally destroyed from its very foundations? Myanmar military burned nearly 350 villages systematically in a region stretching 100 kilometres within several months. Myanmar’s Commander in Chief Min Aung Hlaing viewed – and officially told the nation of anti-Rohingya racists – that the army is engaged in completing the “unfinished business” from the WWII. I will say the “finished business” is charred villages where any physical traces of Rohingyas are being bulldozed. Those thousands of Rohingya who still remain inside Myanmar today just told the Canadian Special Envoy to Myanmar, Bob Rae, last week that they feel like they are “in a big cage” where they have absolutely no freedom of movements for accessing food, medicine, jobs, etc. I want to ask those politicians and officials who spit out this mind-numbing delusional phrase, why they are knowingly pussyfooting around Myanmar’s blatant violations of the Genocide Convention – an inter-state treaty, and focusing on sending the Rohingya survivors back to what really is a vast complex of past and future concentration camps inside Myanmar.

What role can the UNHCR play?

UNHCR is primarily mandated to protect Rohingyas. Its leadership has been doing a good job, telling the Security Council – and the world at large – the unpalatable truth being that the conditions inside Myanmar are absolutely non-conducive to any form of return of Rohingyas. It should continue to discharge its main mission of protecting and promoting the well-being of the one million Rohingyas on Bangladeshi soil. It should persuade Dhaka to accept Rohingyas as legally defined refugees and genocide survivors – not simply “forcibly displaced persons from Myanmar.”

How much power does the military still have over the state and how much power does the government have to address this crisis?

The military has all the power to end the persecution of Rohingya. But the military will not cease the genocide because it has since late 1960’s institutionalized the eradication of Rohingyas from the group’s very foundations on the false, racist and paranoid ground that they are Bangladesh’s “proxy” Muslim population inside the strategic Western region. Suu Kyi’s civilian leadership shares these paranoid and anti-Muslim racist policies as well. The difference between the Myanmar generals and Suu Kyi government, particularly Suu Kyi herself, is not in kind, but in degree. This is the racist woman who cannot bring herself to respect the right of Rohingya to self-identify as Rohingya or cannot embrace the truth that Rohingyas are a part of Myanmarese society at large, despite her Oxford education and decades of life in liberal western societies. It’s no longer about whether if Suu Kyi had more power would she have been able to end it. The fact is whatever limited power the civilian government has it uses it to deny, dismiss and cover up the military’s crimes against humanity and genocide against Rohingyas. Remember, Suu Kyi has consistently praised the ethnic cleansing and Myanmar army for “doing a good job.”

How effective do you think are the recommendations made by the Advisory Commission?

Absolutely zero effect, despite the loud chorus of support from UN and government quarters for its recommendations. To start with, the military did not welcome Kofi Annan’s involvement from day one at all. It attempted to derail, block or otherwise mitigate the commission’s influence on policy and public opinion. As a matter of fact, it was Myanmar military that was determined to kill the final report upon delivery in August 2017: Annan’s recommendations stand in the way of the military’s attempt to complete its “unfinished business.” One has to be absolutely delusional and stupid not to see how this report plays right into the hands of the Myanmar generals. The military strategists simply honey-trapped the young, primitively armed angry Rohingya militants to attack a few military and police outposts as they wanted the pretext to launch the large scale genocidal campaign of terror within a few days of Kofi Annan’s report.

My reading of the turn of events since August 26, 2017 stands in sharp contrast with the mainstreamed but patently false view that ARSA triggered these military operations by Myanmar that led to the displacement of 688,000 Rohingyas, burning of nearly 350 villages. ARSA is no Hamas in terms of its capacity or strength. Not even Israel has inflicted this level of genocidal destruction of its target. Myanmar is worse than Israel.

Lt General Kyaw Swe, the home affairs minister, who was in Dhaka on an official visit mentioned that Myanmar was keen to implement a few Annan Commission recommendations. It is a complete act of deception. When the military failed to derail Kofi Annan commission’s work, it attempted to use Annan as its outermost shield internationally. The ex-major and Myanmar spokesperson Zaw Htay said this openly.

What should be done to ensure the security and basic rights of the Rohingya people?

In the short run, the world needs to monitor the Rohingya’s plight very closely. Four types of large Rohingya populations exist today: 307,500 pre-existing Rohingya refugees and 688,000 new arrivals in Bangladesh; nearly half a million inside Myanmar among whom 120,000 are in IDP camps where they are languishing in inhuman conditions; then there are Rohingyas in vast open prisons in areas that are not yet attacked or destroyed by Myanmar military and its Rakhine local militia and vigilantes. Dhaka needs massive infusion of humanitarian assistance both in cash and in kind so that no public health epidemics break out in these large refugee areas of Cox’s Bazaar and Chittagong. 100,000 Rohingyas who are apprised as the most vulnerable as soon as the monsoon season begins, need urgent assistance with relocation, and material support.

In the long run, the only viable safeguard for Rohingyas against Myanmar’s evidently genocidal national policies is to help establish North Arakan sub-region – which has been predominantly Rohingya since Myanmar’s independence – and historically, as UN-protected self-administered Rohingya home. Of course, Myanmar will resist any attempt to help put Rohingyas back on their own ancestral soil. But no genocides ever end without the intervention of some sort from outside power. The Security Council will never authorize intervention although it is tasked with the principal duty of promoting peace and protecting world’s population. Just remember how Bangladesh was liberated from the nasty genocidal attacks by West Pakistan in 1971. Bangladesh had 12 million Bengali or East Pakistani refugees back then. Now you are a nation with a vibrant economy.

Rohingya people deserve and need a piece of earth they can call home, where they can be Rohingya, where they go to school, access medical services, have proper villages, tend to their farms and look after their families – without having to fear being locked in this cycle of large scale terror and violence, forced repatriation, living in “big cages” inside Myanmar – until the next waves of killing and destruction comes.

Dr Jacques Leider in a strategic discussion with retired Myanmar Military Officers at the Ministry of Defence's Historical Museum on 7 and 8 Sept 2017 when Myanmar Troops were committing ethnic cleansing of Rohingyas on the ground

Please sign this petition: http://chn.ge/2EfJ7NV

Letter of Concern to Oxford University Press regarding Dr Jacques Leider and ORE Asian History Series 


5 February 2018 

We, the undersigned group of scholars and rights campaigners, are disturbed by the fact that OUP’s Oxford Research Encyclopedias (ORE) Asian History series has commissioned Dr Jacques Leider, head of the Bangkok-based Ecole Française de l’ Extrême-Orient (EFEO) and a well-known advisor to the Myanmar military’s Armed Forces Historical Museum in Naypyidaw, to write a reference article on the subject of the Rohingya people in the forthcoming series: the ORE Asian History (under “Political”, see “Rohingya: Emergence and Vicissitudes of a Communal Muslim Identity in Myanmar (Jacques Leider), forthcoming Jan–Mar 2018”, found 03 February 2018 at: http://asianhistory.oxfordre.com/page/forthcoming/). 

As you know, the Tatmadaw (the official name of the Myanmar armed forces) has been credibly accused of committing crimes under international law including crimes against humanity and even the crime of all crimes, genocide, against the predominantly Muslim Rohingya. 

As you also know, the Oxford University Press (OUP) has a very well-earned reputation for fairness and authority in the fields in which they publish reference material. Anything published by OUP online about the Rohingya and Myanmar will be given a great deal of credibility by both scholars and the general public and carry a great deal of weight in any ongoing disputes over the exact legal name of the crimes against this world’s largest stateless population whose group identity and historical presence is being erased officially and popularly in Myanmar. 

We therefore draw your attention to our following concerns regarding your selection of Dr Jacques Leider to write a reference article for the ORE Asian History series: 

(1) We find that positions taken by Dr Leider in interviews with the press, in public talks and in published articles raise serious questions about his objectivity regarding the Rohingya and their history. His well-documented pattern of denials that the Myanmar military-directed mass violence and scorched-earth military operations against the Rohingya community – the subject of his ORE article – is challenged by the growing body of legal analyses and human rights research reports which point to the fact that Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya as a group amounts to international crimes including crimes against humanity and genocide. 

(2) We believe that televised appearances by Dr Leider with military and government officials condoning state policies against the Rohingya give the appearance to the viewing public that he validates views that underlie the Myanmar military's ousting in 2017 of 680,000 people and the massacre of Rohingya for which the military has recently admitted responsibility. A recent English-Burmese bilingual book entitled “Talk on Rakhine Issue: Discussion on Finding Solutions” published by the Ministry of Defence’s Myawaddy News Group in Myanmar highlights the fact, in photos and text, that Dr Leider was the only foreign expert to participate in the strategic discussion organized by this official propaganda organ of the Myanmar MOD in the first month of what the United Nations officially described as “ethnic cleansing” of the Rohingya. On 7 and 8 September 2017, Dr Leider was on stage seated with two ex-Lt-Colonels named Than Aye and Ko Ko Hlaing (respectively, ex-officer-in-charge of the strategic affairs unit and the ex-adviser to the former General and former President Thein Sein 2010-15) in the Myanmar capital Naypyidaw at the said invitation-only event billed as “Talk on Rakhine Issue: Discussion on Finding Solutions”. 

In the introduction of the aforementioned book published by the Myanmar Military, the position of Myanmar regarding the actions taken against the Rohingya – which have been abundantly documented and assessed as egregious human rights violations by six successive UN Special Rapporteurs on the human rights situation in Myanmar since 1992 as well as by the world’s leading human rights monitors such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch – is presented as a legitimate course of action (that is, by the Myanmar military to defend the country against Islam’s attempt to expand its demographic power base and dominate the world; see supra at p. 4 “Talk on Rakhine Issues”, Ministry of Defence Myawaddy News Group). 

In these strategic discussions, ex-Colonel Ko Ko Hlaing openly singled out Oxford University as a very influential institution which hosted an international conference on the Rohingya where knowledge about the Rohingya (history, identity and repression) was discussed and disseminated. By this, he implied that Oxford University – and other similarly influential entities – is somewhere that the Myanmar military needs to try to make strategic inroads to promote its official denial both of Rohingya identity and history, and of the state-directed terror and expulsion. 

The audience was mainly composed of officials from the Ministry of Defence. Myanmar’s official and popular Islamophobia – whereby Muslims have been scapegoated in the same way as the Jews were in the old Europe – is well-documented in scholarly and human rights literature. These discussions took place at the time Leider’s host organization (the Myanmar military) was responsible for the violent deaths of “at least 6,700 Rohingya, in the most conservative estimations […] including at least 730 children below the age of five years,” in the first month alone of the military operations conducted in Northern Rakhine state of Myanmar (i.e. from 25 August to 24 September 2017), according to the findings from a limited survey carried out by the international humanitarian NGO Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) among the survivors of this wave of ethnic cleansing who are now in refugee camps in Chittagong, Bangladesh (see “Myanmar/Bangladesh: MSF surveys estimate that at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed during the attacks in Myanmar” http://www.msf.org/en/article/myanmarbangladesh-msf-surveys-estimate-least-6700-rohingya-were-killed-during-attacks ). 


(3) Dr Leider’s insistence (see “History Behind Rakhine State Conflict” https://www.irrawaddy.com/from-the-archive/history-behind-rakhine-state-conflict.html, “The Frictions in the Rakhine State Are Less About Islamophobia Than Rohingya-Phobia” https://thewire.in/182611/frictions-rakhine-state-less-islamophobia-rohingya-phobia/ , and “The Truth About Myanmar’s Rohingya Issue” https://thediplomat.com/2016/03/the-truth-about-myanmars-rohingya-issue/ ) that Rohingya identity – not Rakhine or the majority Burmese – be critically scrutinized as a political identity born out of political and communal conflict indicates a bias against Rohingya claims of their long documented history of settled existence in Rakhine state. This pronounced bias (in addition to his evident relations with the Myanmar military) should have raised doubts about his appropriateness to write a reference article about the Rohingya. We perceive in Dr Leider’s writings and public statements an unconcealed bias against Muslim Rohingyas, which results in his dismissal or wilful ignorance of irrefutable (and easily accessible) evidence that effectively undermines his thesis which is that the Rohingya, unlike other “genuinely ethnic identities”, were manufactured by Muslim fighters or Mujahideens in the post-independence period of the 1950’s. For instance, Dr Leider labels it a “delusion” that the Government of the Union of Burma recognized the Rohingya as a constitutive ethnic group of the Union following the surrender of the separatist Mujahideen in July 1961. The irrefutable fact is this: as late as 1964, the Government of Burma officially included the Rohingya as an ethnic group of Burma in its official Burmese language “Encyclopaedia Myanmar” (V. 9). In addition, the Rohingya were granted a slot on the country’s sole broadcasting station known as the Burma Broadcasting Service (BBS) as an indigenous language programme, broadcast three times per week, alongside other indigenous languages such as Shan, Lahu, etc., until the 3rd year (1964) of the military rule of General Ne Win. 

The readily accessible official documentation supports the Rohingya’s collective claim that they were officially recognized as an ethnic group of the Union of Burma, from which follows the conclusion that it is the State of Myanmar that has embarked on the project of erasing Rohingya ethnic identity, their history and presence which predates the formation of the post-colonial state of the Union of Burma in 1948. Dr Leider’s choice to ignore these primary and official sources regarding Rohingya ethnic identity and nationality further reinforces Myanmar’s institutionalized propaganda and Fake News that the Rohingya do not exist as an ethnic nationality, while lending a veneer of objective scholarly authority. We observe, further, that there is an alarming parallel between Myanmar’s de-nationalization and identity destruction and the German de-nationalization of the Jewish population under Nazi rule. 

(4) Genocide denial is a crime in countries such as Germany. Although there is no UK or international law against which the denial of state-directed crimes against humanity, including genocide, of the Rohingya can be judged, the consensus is emerging among the world’s leading institutions and scholars in the field of genocide studies – from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yale University Human Rights Law Clinic, the University of Washington Law School, the Queen Mary University of London International State Crimes Initiative to the Russell-Sartre-inspired Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on Myanmar – that Myanmar is responsible for genocide. Even the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has expressly stated that he is “not ruling out” that genocide is being committed against the Rohingya. Yet, despite the well-publicized findings by world-renowned research institutes and scholars of genocide, Dr Leider dismisses them. He also fails to acknowledge that Myanmar’s majoritarian racism among the country’s Buddhists is violent. He characterises Buddhist racism towards the Rohingya as merely “strong sentiment”. 

We do not deny that Dr Leider, like anyone else, has a right to comment on the Rohingya or any other topic, but when someone takes such a strong position against the historicity of one group's claims regarding ethnicity/identity (and only one group's in a context of conflict between two or more groups), it seems unfair that they should be commissioned for a project to write an article on the ethnic group in question that seeks to present itself as a fair and unbiased reference source. The ORE is certainly not an appropriate vehicle in which to publish such views. Indeed, OUP should have nothing to do with them. 

We note also that OUP appears only to have commissioned an article on the Rohingya and not on the Rakhine Buddhist community whose ethnic claims, we understand, are no stronger than those of the Rohingya. It is hard to interpret this as other than OUP’s taking a stand in favour of the Myanmar military and against the Rohingya for reasons unclear and that OUP supports, at least indirectly, the current ethnic cleansing which Dr Leider's writings and media appearances are used to deny. 

Finally, it needs to be stressed that there is something more consequential than our objection per se to OUP’s commissioning a reference article by Dr Leider on the target of the Myanmar military's repression. That is the question whether Western educational institutions of worldwide influence should allow themselves, wittingly or not, to be used as a platform by illiberal regimes through academics and scholars whom the regimes view as supporters of their views (and hence as, in effect, their proxies for propaganda). The well-reported cases of Cambridge University Press and China, or the LSE and the Ghaddafi regime, spring to mind. 

It is worth quoting the recent words of Ruth Barnett, a Jewish Kindertransport survivor in Britain: 

“‘Never Again’ is unlikely to be achieved in our lifetime but it is we who need to make an effective input towards making it happen. Each and every one of us can do something. It is essential to learn to contain our own violent impulses so that we can talk and negotiate instead of exacerbating and increasing the violence of others. 

“Perhaps the most poisonous factor is the toleration and cover-up of denial. Denial opens the door for others to commit crimes against humanity, as we clearly see others getting away with it. We need to enthuse and stimulate curiosity and an insistence to expose the truth. 

“We live with so much denial that many people can no longer distinguish between misinformation, disinformation and truth." 

(Ruth Barnett, 27 January 2018, "I Survived The Holocaust. Merely Remembering It Is No Longer Good Enough", RightsInfo.org, 


We sincerely urge OUP to reconsider your editorial decision to commission Dr Leider to write a reference article on the subject of the Rohingya. We ask that if this article goes ahead, it includes a clear disclaimer that Dr Leider is not a distant observer and that the article should be considered as an opinion piece, not as an unbiased reference source, regarding a controversial subject which has already been documented by MSF to have caused the deaths of over 6,700 Rohingya in the first month of Myanmar’s 2017 military attack and the flight of 680,000 refugees over several months. 


1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University, USA 

2. Nursyahbani Katjasungkana, National Coordinator of Indonesia Legal Aid Association for Women, Indonesia 

3. Rainer Schulze, Professor Emeritus of Modern European History, University of Essex, and Founding Editor of the journal “The Holocaust in History and Memory,” UK 

4. Noam Chomsky, American linguist, philosopher and activist (Institute Professor, MIT), USA 

5. Mofidul Hoque, author and activist, Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Justice, Liberation War Museum, Bangladesh 

6. Tapan Bose, filmmaker, human rights defender, India 

7. Richard Falk, Professor of International Law, Emeritus, Princeton University, USA 

8. Barbara Harrell-Bond, OBE Emerita Professor and Founding Director of The Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford 1982–1996, UK 

9. Barbara Harriss-White, Emeritus Professor of Development Studies, Oxford University, Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, UK 

10. Ritu Dewan, Vice President, Indian Society of Labour Economics; Director Centre for Development Research and Action; Executive Director, Centre for Study of Society and Secularism; President, Indian Association for Women's Studies (2014-17) 

11. Prof. Gregory Stanton, Founding Chairman, Genocide Watch & George Mason University. Arlington, Virginia, USA 

12. Johan Galtung, Founder, Peace Studies 

13. Youk Chhang, Chairman, Genocide Documentation Center of Camboda/The Sleuk Rith Institute, Cambodia 

14. Abdul Malik Mujahid, Chair Emeritus Parliament of the World's Religions 

15. Karen Jungblut, Director of Global Initiatives, USC Shoah Foundation, USA 

16. María do Mar Castro Varela, Professor of Pedagogy and Social Work and activist, Alice Salomon University, Berlin, Germany 

17. C Abrar, Professor of International Relations, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh 

18. John H. Weiss, Associate Professor of History, Cornell University, USA 

19. Khin Mai Aung, Burmese American civil rights lawyer and writer, New York, USA 

20. Maung Zarni, Burmese human rights activist and scholar, Genocide Documentation Center of Cambodia/The Sleuk Rith Institute 

21. Harn Yawnghwe, Executive Director, Associates to Develop Democratic Burma Inc./Euro-Burma Office, Canada 

22. Bilal Raschid, Past President of Burmese Muslim Association 

23. Swagato Sarkar, DPhil (Oxford), Associate Professor, O.P. Jindal Global University, India 

24. Sumeet Mhaskar, DPhil (Oxford), O.P. Jindal Global University, India 

25. Prof. Donesh Mohan, Academic, India 

26. Dr. Peggy Mohan, Author, India 

27. Prof. Ranabir Samaddar, Academic, India 

28. Rita Manchanda, Feminist writer, India 

29. Samsul Islam, Author, India 

30. Neelima Sharma, Theatre activist, India 

31. Jawed Naqvi, journalist, India 

32. Seema Mustafa, journalist, India 

33. Ashok Agrwaal, lawyer, India 

34. Dr. Walid Salem, Al Quds University & the Director of The Centre for Democracy and Community Development, East Jerusalem, Palestine 

35. Jun Nishikawa, PhD, professor emeritus, Waseda University, Japan 

36. Dr Ravi P Bhatia, an educationist and peace researcher & Retired professor, Delhi University, India 

37. Gill H. boehringer, Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Macquarie University School of Law, Sydney , Australia 

38. Paul Copeland, C M, (Recipient, Order of Canada), Lawyer, Toronto, Canada 

39. U Kyaw Win, Professor Emeritus, Orange Coast College, California, USA 

40. Professor Michael W. Charney, Academic, UK 

41. Dr Amit Upadhyay, Assistant professor, TISS Hyderabad, India 

42. Dr. Nicola Suyin Pocock, United Nations University International Institute of Global Health, Malaysia 

43. Rezaur Rahman Lenin,Academic Activist, Adjuct Faculty, Eastern University Bangladesh & Executive Director, Law Life Culture, Bangladesh 

44. Natalie Brinham, ESRC PhD scholar, Queen Mary University of London School of Law, UK 

45. Niranjan Sahoo, PhD, Senior Fellow, Observer Research Foundation, India 

46. Prof. Dr. Célestin Tagou, Prof. of PS, IR P&D Studies, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and International Relations, Protestant University of Central Africa, Executive Secretariat of the Network of Protestant Universities of Africa

47. Dr. Tilman Evers, Germany 

48. Jørgen Johansen, Deputy Editor of Journal of Resistance Studies, Sweden 

49. Sarah Tobias, philanthropist & activist, Canada 

50. Miki Lanza, Movimento Nonviolento c/o Centro Studi Sereno Regis, Torino, Italy 

51. Oskar Butcher, human rights activist and scholar, Germany 

52. Professor Emeritus George Kent, University of Hawai'i and Deputy Editor, World Nutrition, USA 

53. Sebastian Eck, Galtung-Institut, Switzerland 

54. Robert J. Burrowes Ph.D., co-founder 'The People's Charter to Create a Nonviolent World', Australia 

55. Shadi Sadr, Executive Director of Justice for Iran, UK 

56. Tasnim Nazeer, Award-winning journalist and Universal Peace Federation Ambassador for Peace, UK 

57. Emir Ramic, Academic, Ph.D., Chairman of the Institute for Research of Genocide, Canada 

58. Nadeem Haque, P.Eng. - Director of the Institute of Higher Reasoning (IHR), Canada 

59. Diana de la Rúa Eugenio, President of Asociación Respuesta para la Paz -ARP-, member NGO of OAS, President of International Peace Research Association Foundation -IPRA Foundation, Argentina 

60. Dr. Syeda Hamid, Academic and Author, India 

61. Dr. Siddiq Wahid, Historian and Educationist, India 

62. Dr. Syed Ahmed Haroon, Psychiatrist, Pakistan 

63. Anis Haroon, Poet, Pakistan 

64. Sushil Pyakurel, Adviser to President of Nepal 

65. Porf. Noor Ahmad Baba, Academic, India 

66. Anand Patwardhan, Filmmaker, India 

67. Rodolphe Prom, President, Destination Justice, Cambodia 

68. Doreen Chen, Co-Director, Destination Justice, Cambodia 

69. Syed Zainul Abedin, Painter, Poet, Journalist, Bangladesh 

70. Dr. Navsharan Singh, Researcher and author, India 

71. Leo fernandez, IT Specialist, India 

72. Feroz Medhi, Filmmaker social activist, Canada 

73. John Packer, Associate Professor of Law and Director, Human Rights Research and Education Centre, University of Ottawa, Canada 

74. Fathima, MA Women's Studies Student, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India 

75. Rana Jawad, University of Bath, UK 

76. Prof. Dr. Sami A. Al-Arian Director and Public Affairs Professor, Center for Islam and Global Affairs İslam ve Küresel İlişkiler Merkezi, Turkey 

77. Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation and Director of the International State Crime Initiative, Queen Mary University of London, UK 

78. Karen Busby, Professor of Law & Director, Centre for Human Rights Research, University of Manitoba 

79. Lyal S. Sunga, Visiting Professor in International Relations and Global Politics, The American University of Rome, Italy 

80. Dr. Christina Szurlej, Assistant Professor, St. Thomas University (Canada) 

81. Matthew Smith, Chief Executive Officer, Fortify Rights


    • Rohingya Exodus