By The Nation

March 8, 2018

The United Nations human rights body said acts of genocide may have taken place in Myanmar’s Rakhine state since August when the recent Rohingya crisis erupted, while asking the UN General Assembly to prepare to bring the case to court. 

“I am not surprised by reports that Rohingya villages, which were attacked in recent years, and the alleged mass graves of the victims, are being bulldozed,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein said in a statement at the 37th session of Human Rights Council in Geneva on Wednesday.

“This appears to be a deliberate attempt by the authorities to destroy potential evidence of international crimes,” he said.

More than 700,000 people have fled from Rakhine state since an attack on Myanmar security outposts on August 25, prompting a brutal crackdown by the Tatmadaw, as Myanmar’s military is known.

While Myanmar authorities have said the situation is calm, the UN and Rohingya community have stated that violence is ongoing in Rakhine.

The township of Maungdaw has been essentially emptied of its Rohingya community and people continue to flee to Bangladesh because of systematic persecution and violence in other towns and villages, although at a lower intensity than previously, Zeid said.

“Victims have reported killings, rape, torture and abductions by the security forces and local militia, as well as apparently deliberate attempts to force the Rohingya to leave the area through starvation, with officials blocking their access to crops and food supplies,” he said.

“I have also received reports of the appropriation of land inhabited by Rohingya and their replacement by members of other ethnic groups.”

A recent announcement that seven soldiers and three police officers will be brought to justice for the alleged extra-judicial killing of 10 Rohingya men was “grossly insufficient”, he added.

The UN demanded the government in Nay Pyi Taw take steps towards accountability for violations, and must fully respect the rights of the Rohingya, including to citizenship.

“While awaiting the final report of the fact-finding mission, I again recommend that this council ask the General Assembly to establish a new independent and impartial mechanism to prepare and expedite criminal proceedings in courts against those responsible,” Zeid said.

The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar Yanghee Lee said last month that Aung San Suu Kyi could be complicit in the systematic persecution of the Rohingya people, in violence that “bears the hallmarks of genocide”.

They potentially face the final two stages of genocide—mass annihilation and erasure from the country’s history.

I recently met Penny Green to discuss the situation in Myanmar and Aung San Suu Kyi’s role in the perpetration of the horrific crimes carried out against the Rohingya.

A professor of law and globalization and the founding director of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at Queen Mary University of London, Green has been closely monitoring the treatment of the Rohingya in Myanmar for the past five years. In a 2015 report based on 12 months of field work and over 200 interviews, ISCI found ample evidence that the Rohingya have been subjected to systematic and widespread human-rights violations, including killings, torture, and rape; denial of citizenship; destruction of villages; land confiscation; and forced labor. Citing Daniel Feierstein’s Genocide as Social Practice, which outlines six stages leading to genocide, ISCI claimed that the Myanmar regime had already perpetrated four: (1) stigmatization and dehumanization; (2) harassment, violence, and terror; (3) isolation and segregation; and (4) the systematic weakening of the target group. Now the Rohingya potentially face the final two stages of genocide—mass annihilation and erasure of the group from Myanmar’s history.

Neve Gordon: Can you provide some background about the Rohingya’s plight and the processes that have brought us to where we are today?

Penny Green: Burma, known today as Myanmar, received independence in 1948. The country had been part of a vast British colony, and not unlike India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, Burma’s borders were determined partly according to religious lines, with the Bengal state being mostly Hindu, Bangladesh mostly Muslim and Burma mostly Buddhist. The Rohingya, who are Muslim, had been living for centuries mostly in what became Rakhine State in the newly established Burma. In 1950, they were issued citizenship identification cards and granted the right to vote under the first post-independence Prime Minister, U Nu. Until the late 1970s, the Rohingya held important government positions as civil servants, the official Burma Broadcasting Service relayed a Rohingya-language radio program three times a week, and the term “Rohingya” was used in school textbooks and official documents. 

In the early 1980s, we start to witness the beginning of the process that ultimately aims at erasing the Rohingya from Myanmar’s history and geography. In 1982, the Rohingya were removed from the list of Myanmar’s 135 officially recognized ethnic minorities and stripped of citizenship. A little more than a decade later, the government suddenly refused to issue birth certificates to Rohingya babies. It then began to completely erase the term “Rohingya” from the official texts and even to condemn anyone who uttered the word. After the 2012 government-sanctioned Rakhine violence, the Rohingya were restricted to secure zones, detention camps, ghettos, and prison villages, and were excluded from higher education, all professions, the military and the public service.

Finally, in 2014, the Rohingya were excluded from the census. This is crucial in my mind, even more so than the prohibition to participate in the November 2015 elections, since, as history teaches us, when the state stops counting people it means that the state no longer considers them subjects of management and control, and when people are no longer monitored and managed, it means that they are considered superfluous.

NG: Before turning to the current crisis and to Aung San Suu Kyi’s role, can you explain what led to the concentration of Rohingya in camps, prison villages, and ghettos, and could you tell us about the living conditions within them?

PG: The concentration of the Rohingya in camps was a key part of the 2012 violence, which was, in turn, a consequence of a concerted hate campaign backed by the government and orchestrated by a hard-line group within the Buddhist Sangha (a term used for the monkhood) led by Ashin Wirathu. You must keep in mind that even though there were periods of tension before 2012, the Rohingya used to go to school with all the other ethnic groups living in Rakhine, not least the predominant Buddhist population. They lived together, they shopped at each other’s stores, and they participated in each other’s celebrations.

Over the years, however, an anti-Muslim fever effectively gripped the country. While the degree of xenophobic nationalism inside Myanmar is astonishingly high and penetrates every level of society, rendering life extremely difficult for Muslims residing in Mandalay, Yangon, and other parts of the country, the Rohingya in Rakhine State experience a double sense of persecution: both general xenophobia and a specific racial hatred directed against their ethnic group. 

The 2012 violence was directly precipitated by the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman, allegedly by three Rohingya men. This was the pretext for the violence in and around Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State, which was perpetrated by Rakhine nationalists and fomented by hard-line Buddhist monks and local Rakhine politicians. From the people we interviewed, it was very clear that the security forces did nothing during the first three days, allowing the violence to run its course before they intervened. There were no prosecutions following this violence, even though 200 people had been killed.

As the Rohingya fled their burning homes, they were herded into an area that we now call the camp detention complex. That is where they have been contained for the past five years. A relatively small number of Rohingya remained in Sittwe and live in Aung Mingalar ghetto. They were apparently protected by a Burmese commander, whom we have been unable to locate, but testimonies suggest that he stood up against the Rakhine nationalists and other members of the security forces, protecting the Rohingya from the mob. Aung Mingalar is a very deprived ghetto. It does not receive aid from the World Food Program because it is not a registered camp, and therefore the Rohingya there rely on aid from Muslim communities and limited rations from the state.

When we visited the camps and ghetto in 2014 and 2015, the conditions were utterly deplorable. It was as if we were witnessing a process of social death, to cite Claudia Card’s analysis of genocide. The camps were squalid, and the only livelihood that we witnessed was the collecting of cow dung and drying it off to sell as fuel. There is hardly any access to health care—there are clinics but no local doctors, nurses, medical equipment, or drugs. It is said that Rakhine doctors offer services for two hours per week in camps housing thousands of people. Médecins Sans Frontières were offering emergency health care, but they were expelled from Rakhine State (and later the whole of Myanmar) in 2014 after issuing a report that they had treated 22 people from the village Dar Chee Yar Tan for gunshot, beatings, and knife wounds.

Toilets in the camps are collective and located on the camp’s outskirts, a long way from the living quarters, which could, I would think, be dangerous for women. People are terrified of leaving the camps for fear of violence, and as our fieldwork suggests, their fear is justified, given the vicious attacks perpetrated against those who dared go to Sittwe.

The people we saw were profoundly depressed. We visited the overly crowded huts, and people would just be lying on the floor because there was nothing to do, no work, no food to prepare, nowhere to go, and indeed very limited opportunities to do anything. In all these senses, it felt like we were witnessing first hand Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare life.”

NG: In your 2015 report you claim that the Rohingya are under threat of genocide. Do you think what we are witnessing is actually a process leading to genocide, or would ethnic cleansing be a more appropriate term? I ask this because, according to the United Nations, ethnic cleansing is defined as “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.” In other words, the violence associated with ethnic cleansing is directed at emptying a space of certain populations and has a spatial dimension that is vital to the definition of the violence. Genocidal violence, by contrast, focuses on the extermination of populations, and its object is the human body, while the spatial dimension exists but is incidental.

PG: The term “ethnic cleansing” is problematic for a number of reasons. First, it has no legal recourse, rendering it easy for foreign governments to describe what they are witnessing in Myanmar as ethnic cleansing because it places no obligation on them to intervene, either to prevent the violence and protect the Rohingya or to punish the culprits. Another problem is that the term “ethnic cleansing” was initially used by Slobodan Milosevic to mask the genocidal elements of the attacks against the Bosnian Muslims. It is the perpetrator’s term. 

Raphael Lemkin understood that genocide is a process when he first coined the term and campaigned for the introduction of an international law against it. Genocide begins with practices of stigmatization and dehumanization, which we have witnessed in Myanmar for a very long time. In the process of othering the Rohingya, the stigmatization continues, but we move into a stage of harassment, where civil rights are gradually removed, such as the right to vote, the right to take certain forms of transport, and the right to have as many children as you like. The Rohingya have been denied these rights as well as many others. During this period of harassment, you often witness instances of sporadic violence, violence used to test the local population’s capacity to engage in violence against the target group. As I explained earlier, as a result of the 2012 Rakhine-led violence the Rohingya were forced into concentrated spaces and were removed from the sight of the rest of Rakhine’s communities. They were completely isolated. All of these practices are necessary for securing the compliance and active involvement of the local population in the annihilation process.

The history of the Jews in the 1930s teaches us that when a group is isolated and systematically weakened—through lack of food, limited access to health care, work and livelihood—and their community is deliberately fragmented, the group becomes extremely vulnerable. This is what has been happening to the Rohingya, and the Myanmar government has been an active supporter of this process. We know, for example, that local politicians were involved in planning the violence of 2012; they organized buses that picked up Rakhine men and women and brought them to Sittwe to torch Rohingya houses. Rakhine nationalists who carried out the pogroms recounted in the interviews with ISCI how free food was laid out for them and how they were given weapons. 

Moreover, it is crucial to understand that genocidal annihilation is not only about decimating the body but also about destroying the ethnic identity of a people. This is what the Myanmar state has been embarking on. Aung San Suu Kyi, who has effectively been the equivalent of a prime minister for over a year and a half, called the US ambassador to her office and told him that the term “Rohingya” was not to be used. Along similar lines, when ISCI was still allowed to work in Myanmar, we had to be very careful not to use the term “Rohingya.” This process of annihilating an ethnic identity fits well with Lemkin’s notion of genocide.

From August 25, 2017, we have been witnessing an escalation of this whole process. As far as I understand, the destruction of villages continues despite the denial of the Myanmar government. We do not know how many people have been killed, but it is undoubtedly in the thousands. Over half a million have fled, crossing the Naf River into Bangladesh. But what most people do not understand is that they are joining another five to seven hundred thousand Rohingya who have fled since 2012. So, all along the Bangladesh side of the Naf River, there are over a million Rohingya living in appalling conditions, in unregistered camps, while only a few hundred thousand are still living in Rakhine State.

In several senses, Myanmar has been successful. The Rohingya who are still living in Rakhine can only identify as Bengali and the term “Bengali” is coded as illegal immigrant. What we are now witnessing is the social reorganization after the annihilation of the Rohingya identity. Former Buddhist prisoners have been resettled under the government’s Na Ta La village program in an effort to change the demographic structure of northern Rakhine State, creating an ever-increasing hostile environment for the remaining Rohingya community.

NG: The world has condemned Aung San Suu Kyi for her silence. What do you think is her role, if any, in this new stage of violence against the Rohingya?

PG: I challenge this idea of silence. Aung San Suu Kyi has not been silent. Every step of the way she has exercised agency. I understand how difficult it is for people in the West to consider her as an active perpetrator of the horrific crime of genocide, given that she is the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, the Congressional Gold Medal, and literally scores of other significant awards. But let’s remember that Henry Kissinger was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, as he was carpet-bombing Cambodia. It is important to also understand that for the past 19 months, Aung San Suu Kyi has been Myanmar’s State Counselor, the equivalent of prime minister. She is definitely not a minor or weak actor in Myanmar.

During her tenure as premier, she has not once criticized the violence perpetrated against the Rohingya. She has condemned all violence, all human-rights abuses, as if somehow this was a symmetric conflict.… I cannot call it a “conflict,” because this is a one-sided annihilation of a particular people. She, as I mentioned, called the US ambassador and instructed him and all other diplomats not to use the term “Rohingya.” She has not condemned the hate speech pouring out from the monk groups that aim to destroy the Rohingya. She has continuously lied about the situation in northern Rakhine State while simultaneously denying international access to the region, and has actively participated in covering up her government’s crimes.

But even before the current crisis, she participated in sowing the seeds of violence. Although the National League for Democracy had Muslim candidates in the past, in the 2015 elections Aung San Suu Kyi refused to include any Muslims on the party’s list, thus pandering to her constituency and to the Islamophobic atmosphere in Myanmar. In 2017, following the publication of a UN Flash Report that documented mass killings and mass rapes by Myanmar’s security forces in northern Rakhine State, Aung San Suu Kyi’s office declared that these were “fake rapes” and fake news. This is precisely around the same time that Trump began using the term. 

When the most recent cycle of violence began this past August, her office made the ludicrous claim on Facebook that the international community was aiding and abetting the terrorists, by which she meant the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, which in August had attacked a security outpost. As a result, all aid and humanitarian agencies were forced to leave Rakhine State, and consequently Rohingya camps were left without food for weeks—another act that precipitated the massive exodus. She has also consistently and unreservedly aligned herself with the military, refusing to condemn its actions against the Rohingya.

Her relationship with the military is interesting, since in the West she is considered the one person who for years stood up against the military junta. We need to keep in mind that her father was Gen. Aung San, who led the independence movement in 1948, and therefore there is a historical family link with the military. She is also a member of Burma’s Bamar, the Buddhist elite. She was indeed held under house arrest for 15 years, but in a rather beautiful house on Inya Lake; she had servants and was on occasion allowed to meet with international visitors. Despite the fact that it was the junta that imprisoned her, she famously declared her love for the Burmese military not long after her release. How can one explain this apparent paradox?

In my mind, Aung San Suu Kyi is a very ambitious and utterly ruthless politician whose primary goal is to become Myanmar’s president, regardless of what it takes. According to the country’s Constitution, because she married an English citizen and her two sons were born in the UK, she is prohibited from becoming president. In the past 19 months, all of her political efforts have been designed to change the Constitution. This, however, is impossible without the military’s support, since according to the deal she brokered before the 2015 elections, the military retains 25 percent of the seats in Parliament, and, to change the Constitution, one needs over 75 percent of the votes. In other words, without the military, the Constitution cannot be altered. Consequently, she not only refuses to condemn the military but has also allowed it to continue controlling three key ministries, defense, interior and borders. She has, in other words, created an unholy pact with those who were her enemies.

The sacrifices Aung San Suu Kyi is willing to make are many. The annihilation of the Rohingya is one of them.

Neve Gordon is the author of Israel’s Occupation (2008) and recently completed, with Nicola Perugini, The Human Right to Dominate (Oxford University Press).

By Roland Watson (www.dictatorwatch.org)

Fifteen years ago the website I run chose to issue a statement criticising Aung San Suu Kyi (“End the Dialogue: An Open Letter to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi”, www.dictatorwatch, February, 2002).

It was perhaps the first comprehensive criticism of Suu Kyi, at a time when pretty much everyone supported her. A few people from the ethnic nationalities were suspicious about her lack of cooperation with them, but no one was going to confront the international democracy icon and cause her to lose face. I realised that it would be useful to say what people of the country were too deferential to mention.

The statement was exceedingly polite, pointing out that you can’t negotiate with tyrants – and certainly not from a position of weakness. She was a the time involved in a “dialogue” with the ruling junta, which had released some political prisoners to give her “ammunition” that the approach might yield real results. To my knowledge, this was the first time they “played” her, using her to reduce the domestic and international pressure that their human rights atrocities generated. But it was absolutely clear that the regime was not sincere, that the release was a token step, and that the dialogue would never change anything. Now, 15 years later, she is still following that same failed strategy.

My criticism became much more pointed when she betrayed the pro-democracy movement by reregistering the NLD in 2011, ending her election boycott; when she ignored fresh offensives in the North against the Kachin and other groups that began that year; and when she refused to condemn the pogroms against Muslims that were perpetrated the following year, and which grew into the Rohingya genocide. It seemed Suu Kyi was walking the same path as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, changing from a resistance leader into an authoritarian ruler. Now she has progressed even further, from surrendering to the generals, to actively covering-up and attempting to justify their crimes.

The people of Myanmar have to throw off their reservations and oppose her forcefully. If she is allowed to have her way, you will always be dominated by the Tatmadaw. You will never know true freedom. There will be no peace, and the crimes against humanity will never cease.

By The Nation

April 18, 2017

The thousands uprooted by violence in Rakhine are being moved again – but it’s not known where

The international community and particularly the Association of Southeast Nations deserve to be fully apprised regarding the fate of thousands of displaced people in Myanmar’s Rakhine state. Instead, all we’ve had is a worrying government announcement that refugee camps were being shut down. Nothing has been said about what happens to them next. These people sought shelter five years ago amid violent conflict between Buddhists and Muslims. Many fled the country, retreating to the Bangladeshi frontier, but the government in Dhaka was no more accepting than its neighbour to the east has been.

Thaung Tun, Myanmar’s National Security Adviser, said last week the government had begun shutting down three camps named in a report compiled for de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi by a commission led by Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general. One camp shelters ethnic Rakhine and another holds Kaman Muslims.

Suu Kyi had last year chosen Annan, a fellow Nobel laureate, to head a commission seeking solutions to the crisis in Rakhine. It was mandated to examine ways to develop the state, strengthen civic institutions, provide humanitarian assistance, seek reconciliation and prevent further conflict. But the mission was flawed from the start, restrained by a law that doesn’t recognise the Muslim Rohingya of Rakhine as citizens. Myanmar is a predominantly Buddhist society and nationalist intolerance of other religions is rife.

Annan’s commission recommended that the government formulate a comprehensive plan to close the displacement camps as part of any attempt to curb festering communal tensions. It noted that efforts to relocate the more than 120,000 “internally displaced persons” (IDP) in the camps had “shown little progress” since 2012. A sounder strategy was needed, it said, and a clear timeline. The commission identified 335 households within the IDP camps, a mix of Kaman, Rakhine and Muslim people who it said ought to be allowed to return to their homes or be relocated elsewhere as an initial expression of “goodwill”.

In briefing foreign diplomats last week, Thaung Tun unveiled no plan beyond the camps being shut down. He said nothing about measures to relocate the refugees or about aid or facilities to be provided. Thus international criticism of Myanmar over its official mistreatment of Rakhine’s million-plus Rohingya is unlikely to abate. Most of these people, despite their families having lived in Myanmar for generations, are denied citizenship and face severe restrictions in movement and access to education and healthcare.

Matters have been muddled ever since the military – reacting to militant Rohingya attacks on police border posts last October – launched a bloody crackdown in north Rakhine that reportedly claimed hundreds of lives. UN investigators concluded that security forces might have carried out crimes against humanity as well as ethnic cleansing. Suu Kyi last week rejected the accusations, calling “ethnic cleansing” “too strong an expression”. Annan agreed, while Thaung Tun insisted the authorities were doing their best to push forward a process of citizenship verification.

The leaders of the Asean countries, presumably including Myanmar President Htin Kyaw, will this month gather for a summit in the Philippines, but, as usual, the subject of the Rohingya will remain off the agenda, since members of the bloc are loathe to meddle in one another’s internal affairs. That doesn’t prevent any members from raising concerns or even suggesting possible solutions, however. Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia have provided humanitarian assistance in the past. They and others should seek larger roles in helping Myanmar tackle the issue at its roots. At the very least, they should press Myanmar’s representatives for more information about the latest developments and, better still, what the long-range plan is.

By The Nation

February 14, 2017

Asean and the UN should shun Hun Sen’s hands-off advice and act to help the Rohingya

The suggestion by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen that the ongoing crisis being suffered by the Muslim Rohingya in Myanmar be left to that country’s government and regarded as purely an internal affair is likely to fall on deaf ears. So it should. Hopefully Cambodia and Myanmar’s other partners in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will display greater compassion and care than Hun Sen is offering.

Hun Sen is right only in the sense that Myanmar will have to make the final call on the means to address this grievous problem. But international pressure is clearly needed to compel it towards fair resolution of the issue, just as foreign influence resulted in the 1991 Paris Accord that finally ended Cambodia’s own drawn-out horror. Consider that Hun Sen would not be in his position today had Vietnam not intervened to rid his country of the brutal Khmer Rouge, halting genocide. 

The murderous mistreatment of the Rohingya might be a different kind of situation, but it too is having an impact beyond national borders, and thus the need for international involvement apart from humanitarian concerns. And only when the matter is resolved can Myanmar continue its peaceful progress towards democracy, which is also in the world’s interest.

Bangladesh, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and other nations have been obliged on moral grounds to take in thousands of refugees fleeing the bloodletting in their home state of Rakhine. Clearly the government of Myanmar requires outside prodding to end the brutality. Since the conflict stems in large part from widespread prejudice against the Rohingya, it is a political issue, and the government has been shockingly slow to act.

As Muslims in a predominantly Buddhist population, the million-plus Rohingya in Rakhine have been scapegoats for the uncertainty and anxiety arising from Myanmar’s sudden “opening” to the world. When a handful of Rohingya men were accused in 2012 of raping a Buddhist, it was the spark needed to ignite deep-seated xenophobia, and this already repressed minority was an easy target. 

In the eyes of officialdom, the Rohingya will always be outsiders, even though they’ve lived in the country for many generations. They are denied citizenship, their travel is curtailed and they have long been the victims of sporadic bouts of suppression that have extended to torture, rape and murder. The latest round of army-led violence has been characterised as a form of ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Just last week the United Nations was told the death toll now tops 1,000. Two separate UN agencies working in Bangladesh estimated that nearly 70,000 Rohingya have fled in recent months and expressed concern that global understanding of the severity of the crisis is still lacking.

The most that Aung San Suu Kyi’s government has offered thus far is a pledge to investigate rights abuses. The official line in Nay Pyi Taw appears to be that the Rohingya have engaged in unlawful activities and their rights have not been violated. If an investigation does proceed, it’s difficult to believe it would be transparent, since both the military and the police would be involved, and they are the accused perpetrators of the abuses. The military remains politically powerful and its core mission is containing insurrection among ethnic minorities. 

There needs to be an enforced peace in Rakhine and then an open investigation of the atrocities – not by local authorities but by the international community. The United Nations and Asean should be prepared as needed to examine the claims and the evidence and work out a resolution. To not intervene, as Hun Sen suggests, would be aiding and abetting a crime against humanity.

December 1, 2016