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Rohingya refugees gather in the “no man's land” behind Burma's border with Bangladesh on April 25. (Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images)

By Shibani Mahtani
June 12, 2018

Last week, the United Nations inked a deal with the government of Burma to begin the long process of resettling some of the 700,000 Rohingya refugees who fled their homes for neighboring Bangladesh after a brutal military campaign last year.

The Burmese government promoted the agreement as proof that it is doing right by the Rohingya, a persecuted minority that is denied citizenship rights and freedom of movement in Burma. The United Nations has celebrated it as a major first step that would help secure the future of the Rohingya in Burma. 

But no outside observers are able to verify the claims: The agreement has been kept unusually secret. 

The three parties that signed the memorandum of understanding — the U.N. refugee agency, or UNHCR; the U.N. Development Program; and the Burmese government — have declined to make the text of the agreement available to those who have asked to see it, including journalists, other U.N. officials and U.N. donor countries such as the United States.

Nongovernmental organizations, including Refugees International, have urged that the text be made public and warned in a statement that “conditions for Rohingya in Myanmar remain appalling,” referring to Burma by its official name. A statement from about two dozen Rohingya organizations across the world also raised concerns about keeping the text secret.

“All previous records showed that the U.N. agencies, including UNHCR as the agent of the interest of the international community, could not provide adequate protection to the Rohingya returnees due to obstinacy of the Myanmar government,” the groups said. “We are intrinsically aware of the false promises of the Myanmar authorities who are characterized by cheating and brutality.”

A Western diplomat closely following the negotiations said the United Nations has withheld the text of the agreement at the request of the Burmese government and called the lack of transparency “problematic.” The diplomat, who was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, spoke on the condition of anonymity. A spokesman for the Burmese government could not be reached to comment. 

In response to questions from The Washington Post, Knut Ostby, the U.N. resident and humanitarian coordinator in Burma, said the UNHCR, the UNDP and Burma's government are in “discussion about publicly releasing the contents of the MoU.”

“Such a decision would require consent of all three parties,” he added.

Negotiations between the U.N. agencies and the Burmese government took about four months, with especially heated discussions about the issues of citizenship and identity for the Rohingya. Most Burmese, including Aung San Suu Kyi and other government officials, do not even use the term “Rohingya.” The U.N. news release on the resettlement agreement referred to the group as “refugees in Bangladesh.”

Ostby said in an interview before the signing of the agreement last week that both sides eventually agreed that the Rohingya need to have “an identity and need to exist as normal people.”

He also said that the agreement specifies that the Rohingya need to be able to live in safety and be provided basic services, including access to work and shelter. “We have requested and agreed that there should be a clear and predictable pathway to citizenship,” Ostby said.

But no details have been provided by the United Nations, which will not be handling the citizenship verification process, or the Burmese government. And a statement from Suu Kyi’s office on the repatriation agreement simply refers to the Rohingya community as “displaced persons” rather than using the word “Rohingya.”

In an interview with the Japanese broadcaster NHK, Suu Kyi pointed to the agreement as a sign that Burma's government has “carried out all [their] responsibilities” toward the refugees, and she urged the international community to study its text — the same text that has not been made public.

The Rohingya refugees themselves doubt that the government can ensure their safety. Many fled amid atrocities that allegedly included rape, torture and extrajudicial killings at the hands of the Burmese military, carried out in response to attacks by a militant group on police posts in Rakhine state.

The United Nations has not negotiated with the refugees themselves on the terms of their resettlement but says it can do so now because it will be granted access to northern Rakhine, where the attacks occurred. The area was all but sealed off after the violence in August.

“We have not been in a position to negotiate with refugees before this, but UNHCR will now be in a position to have these conversations,” Ostby added.
A refugee girl sings a song for Swiss Federal President Alain Berset at the Kutupalong Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on Tuesday. (Peter Klaunzer/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)

By Azeem Ibrahim
February 7, 2018

The international community and the politics of the word “genocide” have a long and complex history. In the wake of the Holocaust, the prevention of mass atrocities was one of the founding aims of the United Nations. Yet ever since the U.N.’s establishment, and the enshrinement into international law of the duty of the international community to intervene in cases of mass slaughter, individual member nations and the U.N. assembly as a whole have systematically resisted characterizing humanitarian crises as “genocides” in order to avoid their moral and legal duty to intervene. In other words, we take the concept of genocide extremely seriously. But we tend to take a more “nuanced” approach when genocides are actually happening in the world.

Even so, French President Emmanuel Macron has now spoken of the Rohingya crisis in Burma – where, since August, two-thirds of the minority population have been pushed out of the country in a sustained campaign by the country’s military — as “genocide.” U.N. humanitarian officials describe the situation as bearing “the hallmarks of genocide.”

Meanwhile, Yanghee Lee, the U.N. special envoy on human rights in Burma, has held back from making the categorical declaration of genocide “until a credible international tribunal or court had weighed the evidence,” presumably for the usual political reasons. But given the mounting evidence, it is becoming increasingly difficult to characterize what is happening with euphemisms or legally watered-down terms such as “ethnic cleansing.”

As if the obvious fact of large-scale displacement were not enough, evidence is now emerging of a number of previously unreported mass graves around Rakhine state, the area where most Rohingya resided before the current wave of persecution began.

The details are telling. According to Associated Press reports, the bodies were deliberately and systematically disfigured to make them unrecognizable. For the attackers, massacring their enemies does not seem to have been enough; they also appear to have been intent on destroying the identity and memory of those they killed.

Needless to say, no one in the Burmese state apparatus has heard anything about mass graves. But just to be sure that no evil shall be seen or heard, the U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Burma has been barred from the country — like just about every humanitarian nongovernmental organization involved with the Rohingya, Médecins Sans Frontières being only the most notorious example.

Diplomatic “politeness” aside, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Burma has reverted to its previous status as a rogue state. It pursues a systematic policy of genocide within its borders and completely stonewalls any attempt, however feeble, by the international community to establish the facts of the situation and impose some degree of accountability.

That Burma would choose to pursue such a course of action is not completely surprising. But it is deeply disappointing after the hard work the country has put into re-engaging with the international community in the past 10 years. Since 2008, the former military junta has been working to implement a putative transition to democracy, which culminated with the election of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi as leader of the civilian government. Many Western observers, myself included, had hoped that this could lead to an improvement in the humanitarian record of the country.

Yet despite the so-called transition to democracy, the old military leadership retains an extraordinary amount of power and influence in the country, including complete autonomy over matters of security, defense and foreign relations. What is more, much of the Burmese Buddhist population, including the leadership of the civilian government, has absorbed the decades of dehumanizing anti-Rohingya propaganda perpetrated by previous military regimes, and the current “crackdown” does in fact have wide popular support. Most of the country is rallying around the assault on the Rohingya.

Nevertheless, the fact that democracy and genocide can go hand in hand is not even the most fundamental and disturbing aspect of this crisis. Rather more frightening is the impotence of the United Nations, the hollowness of international humanitarian law and the moral vacuity of the international community in the age of President Trump. Everyone at the United Nations and in capitals around the world knows that what is going on in Rakhine state is genocide and will one day be defined as such legally. But it is equally certain that the world’s political leaders will contrive to postpone assigning that status until the complete removal of the Rohingya from Burma is a fait accompli. At most, in a decade’s time, some lower-ranking military officials might get carted off to the Hague and scapegoated for the crimes of an entire society. And with that, we will also have washed our hands of our complicity in yet another genocide.

This tragic episode paints a bleak picture of the years ahead of us. Human rights are a keystone of global stability and security. The world’s leaders undermine them at their own peril — and, unfortunately, at our peril, as well. But in an age of collapsing American global power under a callous and unenlightened presidential administration, realpolitik is the name of the game. The West sees nothing to be gained by standing up for the basic human rights of a Muslim population in a faraway country, and no other global power cares. But the precedent this sets for the authoritarian regimes of the world is as dangerous as it is clear. We will be reaping the consequences of our inaction for decades to come.

Azeem Ibrahim is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Policy in Washington and the author of “The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide.”

Rohingya refugee children watch a football game during sunset at Kutupalong refugee camp near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh on Wednesday. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)

By Richard Cockett
January 5, 2018

The Yangon School of Political Science, squashed into an upper floor of a grimy old apartment block, is almost as hard to find as the liberalism that it tries to teach. Inside, the head of the school, U Myat Thu, concedes that the small foundation he has created to nurture “tolerance, liberal individualism and freedom of conscience” suddenly finds itself out of step with the times. Beyond the walls, the rest of the country has largely given itself up to the easy certainties of prejudice, hatred and ignorance.

Yet Myat Thu has spent many years as a member of National League of Democracy (NLD), the party co-founded by Aung San Suu Kyi in 1988 to challenge the murderous military regimes that hijacked Burma in the early 1960s. He thought, like many other members of the opposition, that he was fighting for those hallowed values of a liberal, tolerant and open society. In November 2015, his devotion finally seemed to have been vindicated when the NLD won a landslide majority in a historic general election, ushering in Suu Kyi as the de facto leader of the country.

He was hopeful. But a great deal has happened since then — above all, the military-led ethnic cleansing campaign that has terrorized hundreds of thousands of Burma’s ethnic Rohingya minority into fleeing the country. “It’s horrible, and people have no feelings for them at all, no sympathy at all.”

Sadly, he is right. But what most worries him is that none of his fellow political warriors in the NLD have spoken out in the same way. Indeed, merely his use of the R-word marks him out in contemporary Burma as something of a hero of our time. The term “Rohingya” is officially banned, and so cowed are most people by this edict that almost no one uses it in private conversation, either.

Myat Thu believes that one reason for the NLD’s silence is that party members have for so long taken their cue from the top. If Suu Kyi is not going to say anything about the Rohingya, then they aren’t going to, either. In this sense, he, and others, wonder whether the NLD was ever the human-rights-based democratic movement that its Western supporters took it to be. Today it looks more as if it was merely a Suu Kyi fan club all along. Now that she is in power, nobody seems interested in advancing the values that the NLD was supposed to have stood for. “The process of democratization has stopped,” laments Myat Thu.

Anti-Muslim prejudice has a long history in Burma. The British encouraged millions of South Asians, many of them Muslims, to emigrate to Burma during the colonial period to run and exploit the latest addition to the empire. Burmans bitterly resented this, particularly the consequent loss of cultural and political control even in the Burman heartlands. By the eve of World War II, Yangon, the political and commercial capital, was an Indian-majority city.

The independence movement, and radical politics in general, thus became as much an anti-Muslim and anti-foreigner struggle as it was a specifically anti-British one. Suu Kyi herself is only one NLD activist to have written eloquently about the existential threat that Burman Buddhists felt from the unwelcome, uncontrolled influx of Indian Muslims, particularly when the men, relatively privileged in the colonial pecking order, started marrying Buddhist women.

These same fears dominate political discourse in Burma today, and they are as deeply embedded in the NLD as anywhere else. When the Rohingya issue first flared up before the 2015 election, some local party committees started to expel their Muslim members — despite orders to the contrary from NLD leaders. Animus against Muslims is widespread. The militant, xenophobic Buddhist monks who have whipped up most of the anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya rhetoric in the country regard Rakhine state as the “Western Gate,” the first bastion against the oncoming Muslim hordes of South Asia. The Rohingya breached that bastion and have to be pushed out again. It is a view shared by many Burman Buddhists.

Furthermore, although NLD activists still use a lexicon of human and political rights, as Suu Kyi sometimes does, the Rohingya can effectively be excluded from this because they are not citizens of Burma. Notoriously, they were not granted citizenship in the old military regime’s deeply flawed 1982 Citizenship Act, despite the fact that many of them had been living in Rakhine state since precolonial times. Often, young NLD supporters, sounding very progressive, tell me that they want to extend the same democratic and political rights to all “citizens” of Burma, but it does not seem to occur to them that this should include the Rohingya, as they are not citizens. Too often, I suspect that this is an easy excuse, masking deeper, rather less progressive sentiments. Maybe it is just ignorance, but they seem to forget all too easily that the Citizenship Act was designed by the military regime — their enemy — to divide and rule. Now many in the NLD seem happy enough to play the same game.

Myat Thu will keep on teaching against the current, but fewer and fewer want to hear what to has to say. He himself is a practicing Muslim, but he proudly traces his ancestry to many of the ethnic groups of Burma, intertwined over many generations. He embodies the promise of a different NLD, but one that now, sadly, appears to be gradually receding.

Richard Cockett is the Economist’s former Southeast Asia bureau chief and is the author of “Blood, Dreams and Gold: The Changing Face of Burma.”

Rohingya women cry while watching a graphic video of the Tula Toli massacre in their home in Thaingkhali Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh in December. (Allison Joyce for The Washington Post)

By Jamille Bigio and Rachel Vogelstein
January 4, 2018

Burma’s ethnic cleansing campaign against Rohingya Muslims has been rife with sexual violence, according to recent news accounts. Among the more than 600,000 people who have fled to neighboring Bangladesh, many are survivors of rape, gang rape and sexual slavery.

How many? Pramila Patten, the United Nations special representative on sexual violence in conflict, reports that every woman she encountered during her November visit to Bangladesh had either witnessed or endured brutal sexual assault. Their stories are harrowing. One 15-year-old girl was ruthlessly dragged on the ground for over 50 feet, tied to a tree and then raped by 10 Burmese soldiers. Patten has urged the U.N. Security Council to take action.

To be sure, the rape of Rohingya women is a gross violation of human rights. But why should the Security Council — charged with maintaining international peace and security — address sexual violence?

Because sexual violence in conflict is not simply a human rights issue — it’s also a security challenge, according to a significant body of social science research, which we highlight in our recent Council on Foreign Relations report. What’s more, widespread rape in wartime can be prevented. Here are five key insights into how this works.

1. Sexual violence is often a symptom of military weakness.

Sexual violence committed by troops can signal weak command and troop discipline, which makes military units less effective in their mission. For example, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a mass rape of more than 150 civilians in 2011 was attributed to local armed forces’ lax command and control structures. When state forces regularly commit sexual violence, the command hierarchy may simply be too weak to enforce a policy forbidding this crime — and therefore may be ineffective in maintaining peace once a conflict is resolved.

In other cases, armed groups that recruit through abduction command those troops to rape in order to build solidarity among them. These groups have lower levels of unit cohesion and effectiveness than groups that rely on volunteers. A review of 91 civil wars, for example, found that groups that recruit by force committed significantly higher levels of rape against civilians, in an attempt to build social bonds through rape.

While groups or individuals commit sexual violence in conflict for any number of reasons, when it happens there are strategic implications. Research shows that military units and law enforcement bodies that respect human rights and prevent sexual violence are more effective at promoting security.

2. Sexual violence can increase the flow of refugees.

When armed groups commit sexual violence, more people flee — making the region less stable. As we can see from the staggering number of Rohingya refugees, wartime rape forces people from their homes, depriving them and their families of their livelihoods, property and access to health services and education, destabilizing communities. Sexual violence has increased displacement around the world, from Guatemala to Iraq to Syria, where reports suggest that the danger of rape is a primary reason people flee cities under siege.

3. Unchecked sexual violence can undermine trust in the state.

Conflict-related sexual violence signals a government’s inability or unwillingness to protect its citizens. That’s particularly true when, as in South Sudan, the military commits this crime widely and with impunity. The lower citizens’ level of trust in the state, the more difficult it becomes for a government to undertake economic, social or political reforms, which undermines stability.

4. Countries with widespread sexual violence incur high financial costs.

Wartime rape is costly in ways that undermine national stability. Victims of sexual violence may suffer long-term physical and psychological aftereffects, which impose high costs of care, reduced economic productivity and lost income. In the DRC, for instance, agricultural output decreased partly because women were afraid to return to working in the fields.

Further, some evidence suggests that sexual violence during wartime continues as gender-based violence in peacetime, leaving behind still more costs long after the conflict has ceased. In Burma, neighboring governments are bearing the burden of these costs, with the support of humanitarian agencies that provide services to Rohingya refugees.

5. Sexual violence can undermine reconciliation efforts after ethnic conflicts.

Particularly when it’s ethnically driven, sexual violence used as a tactic of war can make reconciliation much harder — including any efforts the Burmese government may pledge to pursue if the Rohingya return. Women raped by opposing parties are often stigmatized, treated as guilty by association with their perpetrators. Children born of rape frequently suffer discrimination, fostering tension in a community long after the conflict.

Rape in wartime corrodes future stability — but it is not inevitable. It’s true that throughout history, many armies considered rape to be one of the legitimate spoils of war; this crime was tacitly accepted as unavoidable through the early 20th century.

But more recently, legal rulings have outlawed sexual violence and recognized it as a war crime. And research shows that while some conflicts include widespread sexual violence, not all do: One analysis of 177 armed groups in 21 African countries found that 59 percent were not reported to have committed sexual violence. Another analysis of 91 civil wars between 1980 and 2012 revealed that 17 percent did not include widespread sexual violence.

In other words, armed groups don’t always rape with impunity; levels of sexual violence vary from one conflict to another. That’s because while some leaders of armed organizations may order or tolerate rape by their soldiers, others prohibit it. That suggests that sexual violence in conflict can be prevented. Research has revealed best practices around the world, from community-based police reformsinitiated in Nicaragua in the 1990s to innovative prosecutorial approaches recently instituted in the DRC.

It’s possible, therefore, to drive down sexual violence in conflict — and evidence suggests that doing so matters to security and stability.

Jamille Bigio is a senior fellow for Women and Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. Find her on Twitter @jamillebigio.

Rachel Vogelstein is the Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow and director of the Women and Foreign Policy program at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a visiting fellow at the Center for Global Legal Challenges at Yale Law School.

A Rohingya refugee man holding children walks towards the shore as they arrive on a makeshift boat after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border on Nov. 9, 2017. (Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters)

By Brian Murphy and Max Bearak 
November 22, 2017

The United States sharply escalated pressure on Burmese officials Wednesday, describing apparent state-backed violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority and their massive refu­gee flight as “ethnic cleansing.”

The statement by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signals a greater push by the Trump administration to possibly impose targeted sanctions against Burmese authorities and others blamed for the humanitarian crisis. But it does not automatically trigger broader action against Burma, also known as Myanmar.

More than 600,000 Rohingya have fled from Burma’s western Rakhine state to neighboring Bangladesh, creating one of the world’s most dire refu­gee dilemmas.

“No provocation can justify the horrendous atrocities that have ensued,” said Tillerson, who cited Burmese forces and “local vigilantes” as responsible.

Last week, following talks with Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Tillerson cited “credible reports” of atrocities committed by Burma’s security forces and said Washington could consider pinpoint sanctions against some Burmese officials.

Authorities in Burma deny accusations of a systematic offensive against the Rohingya and claim the military intervened in Rakhine to battle Muslim insurgents in the mostly Buddhist nation.

On Aug. 25, militants belonging to the extremist group Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army attacked outposts of Burmese security forces. According to human rights groups, those forces responded with a brutal and indiscriminate crackdown on Rohingya communities, drawing in local Buddhist mobs as they went.

Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, as well as many who remain in Burma, have provided chilling testimony of the campaign, which they say was accompanied by widespread arson, rape, and summary executions.

An exact death toll is unknown, and most aid groups and journalists have been prevented from traveling freely to the affected areas. Satellite imagery shows hundreds of Rohingya villages reduced to ashes.

A spokeswoman at the State Department said the decision to employ the term ethnic cleansing was the result of a long, deliberative process, but also said that international definitions of the term are varied and using it carries no imperative to act.

The term “ethnic cleansing” is largely descriptive, as opposed to “genocide,” which carries legal weight.

“Congress has at various points referred to ethnic cleansing but it doesn’t have clear implications for U.S. law,” said David Bosco, an associate professor in Indiana University’s School of Global and International Studies and author of a number of books on international law.

As such, the labeling is distinct from the Bush administration’s 2005 decision to label the killings in Darfur, then a region of Sudan, a genocide. In either case, however, the legal implication was unclear and there were no automatic policy responses mandated by law.

“Ultimately these things come down to the politics of it,” Bosco said. Even if the United States did declare a genocide in Burma, “it’s really just a question of whether that helps generate pressure for action,” he added.

Matthew Smith, co-founder of Fortify Rights, a human rights organization working in Burma, said Tillerson’s statement was nevertheless a significant step toward holding Burmese officials accountable.

“The civilian and military authorities are aligned in their outright denials and crude whitewashing,” said Smith. “Ethnic cleansing is as reprehensible as genocide and crimes against humanity.”

Not lost on Rohingya commentators was the symbolic significance of Tillerson’s statement coinciding with the International Criminal Court’s sentencing of former Bosnia Serb commander Ratko Mladic, convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity.

“The U.S. government should find more facts to declare the persecution against Rohingya is genocide,” said Ro Nay San Lwin, a prominent Rohingya blogger and activist based in Europe. “Myanmar’s military commanders must be punished as Ratko Mladic was.”

The United States sharply escalated its pressure on Burma officials on Wednesday over widening attacks on the country’s Muslim minority, describing the violence and massive refu­gee flight as “ethnic cleansing” against the Rohingya Muslims.

The statement by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson could signal a greater push by the Trump administration to impose wider sanctions against Burmese authorities and others blamed for the humanitarian crisis.

More than 600,000 Rohingya from Myanmar’s Rakhine State have fled to neighboring Bangladesh, creating one of the world’s most dire refu­gee dilemmas.

“No provocation can justify the horrendous atrocities that have ensued,” said Tillerson, who cited Burmese forces and “local vigilantes” for the campaign against the Rohingya.

Last week, following talks with Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Tillerson cited “credible reports” of atrocities committed by Burma’s security forces and said Washington could consider targeted sanctions against Burmese officials.

Officials in Burma, a mostly Buddhist nation also known as Myanmar, deny accusations of a systematic offensive against the Rohingya and claim the military intervened in Rakhine to battle Muslim insurgents.

Adam Taylor and Carol Morello contributed to this report.

Mohammed Shoaib, 7, who was shot on his chest before crossing the border from Burma in August, shows his injury outside a medical center after seeing a doctor at Kutupalong refugee camp near Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on Nov. 5, (Adnan Abidi/Reuters)

By Omar Waraich
November 7, 2017

COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh — They may be out of harm’s way, for now, but their ordeal continues. Over the past two months, more than 600,000 Rohingya refugees have crossed the border from Burma, also known as Myanmar, to seek shelter in Bangladesh. Not since the Rwandan genocide has a humanitarian crisis unfolded so fast and on such a scale. If one counts the hundreds of thousands who were already based here, driven out by earlier waves of violence in Rakhine state, there are now more than a million Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

At first, the new arrivals were welcomed. Across Bangladesh, there is an outpouring of sympathy for the persecuted minority who have been driven from their homes by a harrowing campaign of torture, rape, killings, arson and other human rights violations. The Bangladeshi government, which had long been ambivalent towards the Rohingya, embraced them. On a visit to the camps last month, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina declared that if Bangladesh could feed 160 million people, it could feed hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees. Across the Cox’s Bazar district, she is shown consoling refugee children on placards that hail her as the “Mother of Humanity.”

Now, the mood is slowly giving way to anxiety. Bangladeshis are keenly aware that the humanitarian crisis has enhanced their prestige abroad, but there are worries about how their poor, densely populated country will cope. With an eye on next year’s elections, which are clouded by fears about how the religious right might exploit the crisis, ministers routinely grumble about the insupportable burden they are forced to carry. There is no sign that the refugees will be able to return to their homes anytime soon, and there is no plan to provide for their long-term needs.

As far as Burma’s generals see it, they have successfully executed a plan to finally rid themselves of the Rohingya. Stripped of their citizenship, denied recognition as an ethnic group, the Rohingya have long been subject to an entrenched system of discrimination. The heart-rending testimonies of the past two months bear a chilling consistency with reports from the late 1970s, when 200,000 Rohingya were also driven out of their villages amid a frenzy of violence.

Back then, many Bangladeshis found it easy to sympathize with the plight of the Rohingya. The memories of 1971, when the Pakistan army carried out large-scale human rights violations and drove millions of refugees into India, were still fresh. But that didn’t stop the government from trying to force them back. “We are not going to make the refugees so comfortable that they won’t go back to Burma,” a minister said at the time. Within the space of six months, 10,000 refugees had died in the camps of hunger.

The desire to see the refugees return to Burma appears to dominate the current Bangladeshi government’s thinking. It has refused to grant the Rohingya refugee status, leaving them without any legal status on either side of the border. That decision may seem trivial, but it’s of fateful significance, since it prevents international humanitarian aid agencies from mobilizing the kind of support needed. Also against the wishes of the humanitarian community, the government is constructing what may become the world’s largest refugee camp.

The Kutupalong refugee camp, assigned to Rohingya refugees who fled here during the early 1990s, has now been extended in every direction. Scattered across 3,000 acres of previously forested land, it will become home to more than a million people. Plans are underway to coax earlier arrivals of Rohingya refugees out of the makeshift dwellings and onto the rambling hills where they have been assigned shelter. There is no direct access by road; supplies have to be delivered by foot.

The weather is oppressive. The searing heat is only interrupted by monsoon rain or severe gusts of wind. The thought of the camp’s fate during the coming cyclone season fills the humanitarian community with dread, as do other looming hazards. A fire in a tent, or the outbreak of disease, will sweep across the camp with a fury that will be difficult to tame. Doctors Without Borders has described health conditions in the camp as a “time bomb.” The government is still toying with the reckless idea of moving the Rohingya refugees offshore, to a pair of uninhabited and uninhabitable silt islands that have barely emerged into view. Meanwhile, criminal gangs, human traffickers, armed groups and others who sense opportunity in misery are a constant menace.

Every refugee I spoke to said they wanted to go home — but not before “shanti,” or peace, returns. It will not be enough for the violence to stop. The cruel, entrenched system of discrimination and segregation that made them so vulnerable in the first place has to be dismantled. The Rohingya cannot be left living in fear of a fresh wave of violence that will drive them across the border yet again, condemned to their tragic status as a perpetually unwanted people.

For that to happen, Burma’s military must be held accountable and Bangladesh’s government must be helped with its burden. This is not a crisis that will disappear any time soon, and unless there is a determined global response over the long-term, it could become worse still. The plight of the Rohingya is a test — a moment that demands the international community demonstrate that the words “never again” still carry some meaning.

Omar Waraich is deputy South Asia director at Amnesty International

Kulsuma Begum, 40, a Rohingya refu­gee, cries while recounting her story at Kutupalong refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on Friday. She said that her daughter was missing and that her husband and son-in-law were killed by Burmese soldiers. (Hannah Mckay/Reuters)

By Editorial Board
October 30, 2017

THE BIGGEST and most ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing the world has seen in years continues unabated in Burma. Since Aug. 25, more than 600,000 members of the Rohingya community have been driven across the border to Bangladesh by the Burmese military, which has systematically torched their homes and killed those who resisted. The United Nations says it expects most of the 500,000 remaining Rohingya in the Rakhine state to cross the border in the coming weeks; the military has pushed many of them into camps, to which aid groups and journalists are denied access.

This atrocity is being perpetrated against a despised minority: The Rohingya are Muslims who are regarded by Burma’s Buddhist majority as foreign interlopers, even though they have lived in the country for generations. Virtually no one in Burma, also known as Myanmar, has come to the victims’ defense — not even Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who controls the civilian government, if not the generals. A senior U.N. official, Yanghee Lee, pointed out last week that the country’s revered leader might be the only one who could counter the popular “hatred and hostility” against the Rohingya if she were to “reach out to the people and say, ‘Hey, let’s show some humanity.’ ” But Aung San Suu Kyi has remained silent.

After weeks of hesi­ta­tion, the United States has finally begun to act against this staggering crime. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said on Oct. 18 that “the world can’t just stand idly by and be witness to the atrocities,” adding that the military leadership would be held accountable. A few days later, the State Department followed up by pulling the waiver allowing current and former Burmese military officials to travel to the United States, and said military units involved would be deemed ineligible for U.S. aid. It called on the government to “facilitate the safe and voluntary return of those who have fled” and “address the root causes of systematic discrimination against the Rohingya.”

That, however, is not enough. So far State has not formally adopted the term “ethnic cleansing” to describe the forced exodus. Mr. Tillerson called Burma’s army chief on Thursday, but a statement issued afterward referred only to “reported atrocities.” In fact, as Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, has said, what is occurring is “genocide” — and the U.S. response should be proportionate.

Burma was something of a pet project for the Obama administration, which lavished attention on the regime and lifted long-standing sanctions after it held a democratic election. It’s now clear that those who questioned whether President Barack Obama acted prematurely in removing the remaining sanctions before leaving office were correct. President Trump, who seems to take a visceral pleasure in reversing Mr. Obama’s legacies, would be right to do so in this case. Senior Burmese military officials should be targeted with asset freezes, and all business with the military and its affiliates should be suspended.

Mr. Trump has yet to speak out about the assault on the Rohingya, though it is the most serious human rights crisis to occur so far in his presidency. His upcoming visit to Asia, during which he will attend a summit of Southeast Asian nations that includes Burma, provides him an opportunity to show he will not ignore crimes against humanity.

Sayid Alam and his childhood friend Mohammad Shafi, both 19, stand in one of the three spots in the Kutupalong refugee camp where Burmese cell service is available. (Max Bearak/The Washington Post)

By Max Bearak
October 2, 2017

KUTUPALONG, Bangladesh — Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma’s de-facto leader, recently claimed that an unprecedented exodus of half a million Rohingya Muslims from her country in just five weeks “has quieted down” and that people are “carrying on as normal.” 

The Burmese government has locked down troubled Rakhine state, blocking independent access to media and aid organizations. But there is another, albeit less precise, way to assess the ground reality for Rohingya in Burma: calling them on their cellphones. 

Testimony gathered last week from more than a dozen such conversations suggests that Burma’s leaders are either misinformed about events in Rakhine or intentionally misrepresenting them. 

Since Rohingya militants attacked Burmese police posts on Aug. 25, the Burmese military has swept through northern Rakhine in “cleansing operations” they say are aimed at eliminating terrorists. The United Nations has called it a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” Rohingya have fled that scorched-earth campaign at a rate not seen since the Rwandan genocide in 1994, although the flow has slowed over the past two weeks. Now more Rohingya live in severely overburdened camps in Bangladesh than they do in Burma.

The people contacted by or in the presence of a Washington Post reporter were at various stages of peril. Some were in a Rohingya village under siege, where anyone who tries to sneak out is reportedly gunned down. People there are beginning to starve. Others were among thousands stranded on a beach in the village of Alel Than Kyaw, corralled by the Burmese military while waiting for boats to take them to Bangladesh. 

The Washington Post cannot independently verify these claims because of the lockdown in Rakhine state. But the accounts, which are in line with interviews done by human rights organizations as well as satellite imagery, indicate that the Rohingya exodus is far from over.

Only three tiny spots in this sprawling expanse of tents offer access to a few bars of Burmese cell service. Rohingya refugees who’ve been at the camps for decades — since earlier waves of violence — have shown the new arrivals exactly where to stand to make calls. Streams of people gather there, clutching scratched-up phones, sometimes laughing, often crying. 

The calls are laden with anxiety. Each holds the possibility of heartbreak.

When a call to Shazia Alam finally went through on Thursday, the sound of babies wailing reverberated as she said hello through speakerphone. She was with about 400 people from her village, on a steep hillside near the Burmese coast, with a rain-swollen river in the valley below. The chance of catching a boat from Alel Than Kyaw to Bangladesh was just a half-day’s walk ahead, but they’d heard the military was there. After all they’d seen, they were avoiding uniformed men at all costs. 

Their village in Rathedaung township, Tar Zaw, was torched three weeks ago she said, and its residents had sought shelter in other Rohingya villages not yet “visited” by the military. But the soldiers and their accompanying mobs of local Buddhists were never far behind. Last Tuesday, in their third village, elders made the decision to leave Burma for good. They’d all been walking since then. And now they were stuck.

“The only food we have is uncooked rice, and we can’t boil it because we have no roof to be under, no dry wood. No one has eaten since yesterday. It has been raining so, so hard,” she said. She began to sob. “There are snakes everywhere here.” 

“We have no money at all to pay a boatman even if we do survive this,” she said. “Please help us.”

Her 19-year-old son, Sayid, listened helplessly to her voice. He fled to Bangladesh three years ago after being beaten by Burmese military officers. He’d missed his mother before, too, but said the past two weeks had been excruciating as he has struggled to find the means to call her as often as possible. Spending the dollar it costs to buy the smallest package of minutes for his cellphone might mean skipping meals.

“Sometimes there is no signal,” he said. “Other times, it’s hard to find Burmese top-up cards. But most of the time, there’s just no money.” 

Although the flow of Rohingya started to slow about two weeks ago, recent satellite imagery shows a mass of people camping at Alel Than Kyaw, probably numbering in the thousands. Most are from Buthidaung and Rathedaung townships. The first month’s influx came mostly from Maungdaw township, where Reuters reporters found all but one Rohingya village reduced to smoldering ash in early September. 

On Thursday night, more than 60 drowned when an overloaded boat from Alel Than Kyaw capsized just minutes from reaching the Bangladeshi coast. Most of the dead were women and children. 

“The soldiers told us that if we try to leave Burma, they will shoot us,” said Dilpurukh, an elderly woman who made the crossing the night before the capsizing. Like many Rohingya, she goes by one name. “We only slipped away when the officers started to drink their alcohol after dark. There is one place by the water where you can get Bangladesh mobile network and we called a boatman and begged him to come.”

That the Burmese military is trying to turn back Bangladesh-bound Rohingya is a new dynamic. Since the exodus began on Aug. 25, Burma’s goal had appeared to be the expulsion of the Rohingya, whom it considers illegal interlopers from Bangladesh.

Both Matt Wells, senior crisis adviser at Amnesty International, and Chris Lewa, director of the Arakan Project, said they had heard reports of Rohingya being forcibly prevented from fleeing. Burmese state media has touted the decision, saying authorities have promised to provide food and transportation to villages. Whether Rohingya would be safe doing so, and whether their villages even exist anymore, are big unknowns.

“Internally displaced Bengalis, they can return home and the government will provide their needs to build and reconstruct their homes,” said Zaw Htay, a spokesman for Suu Kyi’s office, using the government’s preferred term for the Rohingya. “The government will provide food and other necessary aid.”

Cooped up in the Burmese township of Buthidaung, a Rohingya religious scholar scoffed at the idea that the government had suddenly become compassionate. Rather, he said, it has realized that Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh are exposing atrocities in Rakhine and tarnishing Burma’s image. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he interacts with Burmese military officers regularly and did not want to jeopardize his safety.

“In the city, the military comes around on patrol. They say, ‘The ones who’ve fled are bad people who just want to make a bad name for Burma,’ ” he said. “They say, ‘You stay, you are the good ones.’ But then they interrogate us about Rohingya militants. We’ve heard of a Rohingya army, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes. No, not even in my dreams have I seen them, I swear to God.”

As dire as others’ circumstances were, they seemed enviable to Mohammad Arif, speaking by phone from the Rohingya village of Sin Gyi Pyin, in central Rakhine’s Minbya township, far from the epicenter of the crisis in the north. Lewa, of the Arakan Project, said that the situation in central Rakhine had been tense since August, too, and that outside organizations had little to no access. The Post spoke with two others from Sin Gyi Pyin who repeated Arif’s claims. 

“There are some very wealthy families in our village and together they put together enough money to bribe the military so that they wouldn’t burn our village. But now it is the Buddhist people from the nearby villages who have us surrounded. If anyone gets caught leaving, they are killed immediately,” said Arif, listing the names and approximate ages of 13 men and one woman who he said had met that fate. “The ones who are risking it are the poorest people, who are starting to starve. My family’s stock of food is getting low, so we’ve had to stop sharing with the poor. Ten of us are eating a serving of rice that used to feed one person.”

The line went near-silent for almost a minute as Arif wept. 

“Do you understand? We’re surrounded from all four sides. We would have to sneak out and stay hidden for days to escape. Last year, when there was violence, the military would take bribes from us and buy us food from the market. But this year it is different,” he said. “Our only hope is that they will take pity. Otherwise, this is how we die.”

Rohingya refugees make their way to permanent tents in the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh. (Ismail Ferdous/Bloomberg News)

Joe Freeman in Rangoon contributed to this report.

A Rohingya refu­gee from Burma. (Allison Joyce/Getty Images)

By Editorial Board
August 18, 2017

IN FEBRUARY, the United Nations released a report detailing the Burmese government’s human rights abuses against the long-suffering Rohingya Muslim minority in Rakhine state — abuses that likely amounted to crimes against humanity. Burma should have responded by allowing U.N. investigators into the country and creating accountability mechanisms to prevent further violations. Instead, a government inquiry has concluded that there is “no evidence of crimes” and that “people from abroad have fabricated news claiming genocide had occurred.” 

On the contrary, there is considerable evidence to suggest that systematic human rights violations have occurred in Rakhine. The Rohingya have long been denied citizenship and pushed into ghetto-like conditions. This persecution escalated last year, when Burmese security forces conducted a scorched-earth campaign in the state amid widespread reports of mass rape, torture, arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial killings. The government has also restricted the movements of Rohingya people, imposing curfews and contributing to extreme food shortages. Nearly 90 people have died since the violence erupted last year, while an estimated 65,000 have fled Rakhine.

Burma’s response was to establish an investigative commission that lacked credibility from the outset. The 13-member committee was headed by former military leader and current Vice President Myint Swe and included no Rohingya representatives. According to reports from civil society, its investigators used sloppy research methods, browbeat villagers and ignored complaints.

The commission made a few common-sense recommendations. It rightly acknowledged that imposing restrictions on Rohingya and the media in Rakhine could create conditions for violence and extremism, and it suggested relaxing limitations on humanitarian assistance. Yet these proposals are overshadowed by the commission’s denial of any systematic wrongdoing. Along with new calls to expand security measures against Muslim insurgents and reports of a troop surge in Rakhine, this essentially gives the military the green light to continue using excessive force. 

It is becoming increasingly clear that Burma’s partially democratic government bears many similarities to its autocratic predecessor: It is overly sensitive to criticism, repressive toward minorities and willing to go to great lengths to protect the military. The international community should take note and renew calls to allow a U.N. fact-finding mission to visit the country. Congress should rethink the idea of expanding American military ties with Burma or, at the very least, consider imposing a vetting process and human rights benchmarks for any further military engagement. The United States has long championed democracy in Burma; the commission’s announcement proves this fight is not over yet.

Aung San Suu Kyi delivers a speech last month in Naypyidaw, Burma. (Hein Htet/European Pressphoto Agency)

By Francis Wade
August 12, 2017

For years, Burma’s state-run media viciously denounced Aung San Suu Kyi. Yet this week, the country’s de facto leader endorsed the very organizations that led the charge, declaring that anyone eager to understand the government should “read the newspapers and listen to the news. .. released by the government.” Her statement echoed the commands of the military junta that ruled before her, but it was not altogether out of character. Burma’s civilian government has increasingly cracked down on independent journalists and activists, dispelling hopes that the democratic transition would break the military’s oppressive style of rule.

Since the National League for Democracy (NLD), the erstwhile figurehead of Burma’s pro-democracy movement, took power in April 2016, a puzzling paradox has emerged. At least 80 people have been arrested under the archaic Telecommunications Law that restricts free speech online – a leap from the seven cases filed under the military-backed government. The recent arrest of prominent journalist Swe Win on accusations of defaming a firebrand anti-Muslim monk adds to a growing fear that as the transition advances, media freedom is conversely being tightened.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s government faces a daunting task in wresting ownership of the government from a military that retains considerable power. Yet, among those arrested are critics of the NLD itself. This raises serious questions about the country’s democratic transition. Under military rule, the party campaigned relentlessly to limit the military’s role in political life. But now, factions of the party appear to be aligned with the army’s zero-tolerance position on public dissent.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the party’s crackdown on the free press. In late June, three local journalists were arrested and charged under the Unlawful Associations Act — a law that was often used by the military to arbitrarily imprison dissidents and members of ethnic opposition groups — for reporting on a drug-burning ceremony by a rebel army. The NLD could have taken the military to task on this issue, highlighting the fact that similar ceremonies have been attended over the years by generals, U.N. officials and foreign diplomats and that dozens of interlocutors of various stripes have met with armed groups during recent cease-fire talks.

But it didn’t. Under pressure to explain the arrests, Aung San Suu Kyi deflected, arguing that it was a matter for the courts and not the government. Aung San Suu Kyi knows, however, that the court system remains beholden to the military and is unlikely to defend the free press. Then, when the U.N. special rapporteur on Burma, Yanghee Lee, tried to visit the town where the journalists are being held, she was denied access. The government justified the decision on the grounds that it disagreed with Lee’s end-of-mission statement, which was critical of the country’s human rights record. It also threatened to deny visas to a U.N. fact-finding mission charged with looking into military abuses against ethnic minorities — yet another indication of its intolerance of negative press.

The NLD’s actions are particularly disappointing because its ranks are populated by hundreds of luminaries of the pro-democracy movement who spent years behind bars for doing exactly what this new crop of political prisoners is doing: calling out the shortcomings of authority in Burma and illuminating critical issues — military abuse, corruption and so forth — that affect the country’s most vulnerable. The NLD’s inability (or unwillingness) to engage with criticism of its handling of the transition is fundamentally at odds with the promise of pluralistic change that gained the party such overwhelming support just over a year ago.

Analysts have spoken of the trade-offs the government needs to make to persuade the military to open itself to reform. There is some truth in that. And, indeed, there are some in the NLD who oppose the party’s stance on free speech and are seeking ways to revise the law. Yet the refusal to condemn the jailing of its own critics reflects a deeper problem. Authoritarianism, if left to develop long enough, can produce a culture that envelops even those who outwardly resist it.

This paradox has left the country’s political landscape as uncertain as ever. In Burma today, the uncertainty over what lines can and cannot be crossed is breeding a culture of fear that is entirely antithetical to the democratic compact. “Without a revolution of the spirit,” Aung San Suu Kyi once said, “the forces which produced the iniquities of the old order would continue to be operative, posing a constant threat to the process of reform and regeneration.” Today, it seems, the momentum toward that goal is being compromised by the very same party that once championed that revolution.

Francis Wade is a journalist and the author of "Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and The Making of a Muslim ‘Other.’"

Border police are shown last week at Ngayantchaung village, Buthidaung township, in Burma’s northern Rakhine state. (Hla Htay/Agence France-Presse)

By Olivia Enos and Hunter Marston
July 19, 2017

Olivia Enos is a policy analyst in the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center. Hunter Marston is a Washington-based Burma analyst who writes on U.S. foreign policy and Southeast Asia.

At the end of June, authorities in Burma — including the country’s leader, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi — denied United Nations investigators access to Rakhine state, where the Burmese military is allegedly abusing the Muslim minority Rohingya. The action placed Burma on a short list of nations that have denied U.N. access in their countries. The list includes the unsavory regimes of North Korea, Venezuela, Congo and Syria.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s decision is a huge disappointment to U.S. policymakers who hoped that the Obama-era velvet-glove approach to Burma (also known as Myanmar) would improve conditions for the nation’s long-suffering people.

Under President Barack Obama, policy regarding Burma changed dramatically. Long-standing sanctions were loosened, and Washington offered technical assistance ahead of national elections. Burma’s “opening” was hailed as proof that the new approach had worked.

The rose-colored view of Burma has continued in the Trump administration. The State Department recently upgraded Burma’s rank in its Trafficking in Persons report and removed the nation from its Child Soldier Prevention Act list. These diplomatic rewards are, at present, unmerited.

Now comes the denial of U.N. access, suggesting that the democratic transition in Burma has stalled, at the very least. At worst, it has seriously deteriorated.

After multiparty elections in 2015 brought Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy (NLD) to power, the international community hoped that Burma had finally taken a turn for the better — one that put it on solid footing for democratization. But elections alone do not a democracy make.

Burma’s democratization did not begin with a solid foundation. While the Obama administration described the 2015 elections as “credible, transparent, and inclusive,” many observers disagreed. And certainly the elections were far from being free and fair. All 1.3 million Rohingya – and hundreds of thousands of others — were not allowed to vote.

The military retains control over key government organs, the powerful Ministry of Home Affairs, the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Border Affairs, as well as the oft-overlooked General Administrative Department, which is responsible for matters of sub-national governance. Active-duty military hold a quarter of all parliamentary seats, effectively granting the army a veto over constitutional amendments, which require a 75 percent vote of approval. If that weren’t enough, the 2008 Constitution grants the commander in chief of the armed forces the right to declare a state of national emergency and retake political power whenever he deems it necessary to preserve national unity.

There are other indications that Burma has strayed from a path toward democratization. Since the election of the NLD, Aung San Suu Kyi has displayed strong authoritarian tendencies and a willingness to acquiesce to the military’s demands that far exceeds the call of duty in the Burmese political system. She has failed to institute meaningful economic reform or substantive reform to political institutions.

Nor has she been able to muster the political clout necessary to arrange a cease-fire among the nation’s disparate separatist and ethnic movements. Richard Weir from Human Rights Watch believes that violence has actually risen since Aung San Suu Kyi’s election.

While the international community focuses largely (and rightly) on the plight of Rohingya, Weir fears that other groups experiencing violence and oppression — such as the Kachin and Shan in the north — are slipping off the radar. Weir’s on-the-ground observations were recently corroborated by reports from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom that note rising violence against the Christian minority Kachin.

Now Aung San Suu Kyi’s denial of U.N. entry should be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Human rights groups and local media have reported a slew of abuses by security forces across Rakhine state: the systemic use of rape as a weapon of war, beatings and killings of civilians, and the widespread looting and destruction of Rohingya homes.

Aung San Suu Kyi faces a difficult political situation. A deep bias against ethnic Rohingya (extending to Muslim believers in general) is rampant among the Burmese majority. If she lets racial divisions foment social discord, she risks provoking a military reaction — perhaps even an attempt by the generals to return to power.

It is clear the NLD would rather ignore the problem until tensions dissipate. On Monday, an NLD spokesperson acknowledged that the ruling party had used the recent international Rakhine state commission, chaired by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, as a “shield” from political criticism.

While Aung San Suu Kyi remains, for many, a powerful symbol of the struggle for democracy, the time has come for stronger international pressure to condemn her moral abstention regarding the abuse of her country’s ethnic minorities.

Burma’s democratic transition is faltering. The Trump administration should respond by shoring up and maintaining democracy programming in Burma. Moreover, it should press the NLD government to begin to implement a path to recognize Rohingya as citizens. Such actions would affirm the U.S. commitment to promote human rights and freedom, not just in Burma but also throughout Southeast Asia.

    • Rohingya Exodus