By Mehdi Hasan 

The Intercept 

April 13, 2017

AUNG SAN SUU KYI IS ONE of the most celebrated human rights icons of our age: Nobel Peace Laureate, winner of the Sakharov Prize, recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an Amnesty International-recognized prisoner of conscience for 15 long years.

These days, however, she is also an apologist for genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass rape.

For the past year, Aung San Suu Kyi has been State Counselor, or de facto head of government, in Myanmar, where members of the Rohingya Muslim minority in the northern Rakhine state have been shot, stabbed, starved, robbed, raped and driven from their homes in the hundreds of thousands. In December, while the world focused on the fall of Aleppo, more than a dozen Nobel Laureates published an open letter warning of a tragedy in Rakhine “amounting to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”

In February, a report by the United Nations documented how the Burmese army’s attacks on the Rohingya were “widespread as well as systematic” thus “indicating the very likely commission of crimes against humanity.” More than half of the 101 Rohingya women interviewed by UN investigators across the border in Bangladesh said they had suffered rape or other forms of sexual violence at the hands of security forces. “They beat and killed my husband with a knife,” one survivor recalled. “Five of them took off my clothes and raped me. My eight-month old son was crying of hunger when they were in my house because he wanted to breastfeed, so to silence him they killed him too with a knife.”

And the response of Aung San Suu Kyi? This once-proud campaigner against wartime rape and human rights abuses by the Burmese military has opted to borrow from the Donald Trump playbook of denial and deflection. Her office accused Rohingya women of fabricating stories of sexual violence and put the words “fake rape” — in the form of a banner headline, no less — on its official website. A spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry — also controlled directly by Aung San Suu Kyi — dismissed “made-up stories, blown out of proportion.” In February, the State Counselor herself reportedly told the Archbishop of Yangon, Charles Bo, that the international community is exaggerating the Rohingya issue.

This is Trumpism 101: Deny. Discredit. Smear.

It was all supposed to be so different. In November 2015, Myanmar held its first contested national elections after five decades of military rule. An overwhelming victory for Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) and former political prisoner, was going to usher in a new era of democracy, human rights and respect for minorities. That, at least, was the hope.

The reality has been very different. Less than a year after taking office, Burmese security forces launched a brutal crackdown on the Rohingya after an attack on a border outpost in Rakhine killed nine police officers in October. The northern portion of the state was sealed off by the military and humanitarian aid was blocked, as was access to foreign journalists and human rights groups. Hundreds of Rohingya Muslims are believed to have been slaughtered and tens of thousands driven across the border into Bangladesh.

This is only the latest chapter in the anti-Rohingya saga. The Muslim residents of Rakhine have been subjected to violent attacks by the military since 2012 and were stripped of citizenship, and rendered stateless, as long ago as 1982. The 1-million odd Rohingya Muslims live in apartheid-like conditions: denied access to employment, education and healthcare, forced to obtain permission to marry and subjected to a discriminatory “two-child” policy. “About 10 percent are held in internment camps,” according to Patrick Winn, Asia correspondent for Public Radio International. “The rest are quarantined in militarized districts and forbidden to travel.”

The standard Western media narrative is to accuse The Lady, as she is known by her admirers, of silence and of a grotesque failure to speak out against these human rights abuses. In an editorial last May, the New York Times denounced Suu Kyi’s “cowardly stance on the Rohingya.”

Yet hers is not merely a crime of omission, a refusal to denounce or condemn. Hers are much worse crimes of commission. She took a deliberate decision to try and discredit the Rohingya victims of rape. She went out of her way to accuse human rights groups and foreign journalists of exaggerations and fabrications. She demanded that the U.S. government stop using the name “Rohingya” — thereby perpetuating the pernicious myth that the Muslims of Rakhine are “Bengali” interlopers (rather than a Burmese community with a centuries-long presence inside Myanmar.) She also appointed a former army general to investigate the recent attacks on the Rohingya and he produced a report in January that, not surprisingly, whitewashed the well-documented crimes of his former colleagues in the Burmese military.

Silence, therefore, is the least of her sins. Silence also suggests a studied neutrality. Yet there is nothing neutral about Aung San Suu Kyi’s stance. She has picked her side and it is the side of Buddhist nationalism and crude Islamophobia.

In 2013, after an interview with the BBC’s Mishal Husain, Aung San Suu Kyi complained, “No one told me I was going to be interviewed by a Muslim.” In 2015, ahead of historic parliamentary elections, the NLD leader purged her party of all Muslim candidates, resulting in the country’s first legislature without any Muslim representation whatsoever. Like a Burmese Steve Bannon, she paranoiacally speaks of “global Muslim power” being “very great” — only 4 percent of the Burmese population, incidentally, is Muslim — while conspiratorially dismissing reports of Buddhist-orchestrated massacres in Rakhine as “Muslims killing Muslims.”

This is a form of genocide denial, delivered in a soft tone and posh voice by a telegenic Nobel Peace Prize winner. Genocide, though, sounds like an exaggeration, doesn’t it? Pro-Rohingya propaganda, perhaps? Yet independent study after independent study has come to the same stark and depressing conclusion: genocide is being carried out against the Rohingya. For example, an October 2015 legal analysis by the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School, found “strong evidence… that genocidal acts have been committed against Rohingya” and “that such acts have been committed with the intent to destroy the Rohingya, in whole or in part.”

Another report published in the same month, by the International State Crime Initiative at Queen Mary University of London, concluded that “the Rohingya face the final stages of genocide” and noted how “state-sponsored stigmatisation, discrimination, violence and segregation … make precarious the very existence of the Rohingya.”

Aung San Suu Kyi, argues Maung Zarni, a Burmese scholar and founder of the Free Burma Coalition, holds “genocidal views towards the Rohingya” because “she denies Rohingya identity and history.” Genocide, he tells me, “begins with an attack on identity and history. The victims never existed and … will never exist.”

The State Counselor, from this perspective, is not simply standing by as genocide occurs; she is legitimizing, encouraging and enabling it. When a legendary champion of human rights is in charge of a government that undertakes military operations against “terrorists,” smearing and discrediting the victims of gang rape and loudly denying the burning down of villagesand forced expulsion of families, it makes it much harder for the international community to highlight those crimes, let alone intervene to halt them. In recent years, in fact, Western governments have been rolling back political and economic sanctions on Myanmar, citing the country’s “progress“on democracy and pointing to the election victory of Aung San Suu Kyi and her NLD.

Politicians and pundits in the West, observes Zarni, long ago adopted Aung San Suu Kyi as “their liberal darling — petite, attractive, Oxford-educated ‘Oriental’ woman with the most prestigious pedigree, married to a white man, an Oxford don, connected with the British Establishment.” Belatedly, the West’s journalists, diplomats and human rights groups “are waking up to the ugly realities that she is neither principled nor liberal,” he adds.

It may be too little and too late, however. Around 1,000 Rohinga are believedto have been killed since October and more than 70,000 have been forced to flee the country. Yet Aung San Suu Kyi continues to shamelessly tell interviewers, such as the BBC’s Fergal Keane last week, that there is no ethnic cleansing going on and that the Burmese military are “not free to rape, pillage and torture” in Rakhine. Is this the behavior of a Mandela… or a Mugabe?

“Saints should always be judged guilty,” wrote George Orwell, in his famous 1949 essay on Mahatma Gandhi, “until they are proved innocent.” There is no evidence of innocence when it comes to Aung San Suu Kyi and her treatment of the Rohingya — only complicity and collusion in unspeakable crimes. This supposed saint is now an open sinner. The former political prisoner and democracy activist has turned into a genocide-denying, rape-excusing, Muslim-bashing Buddhist nationalist. Forget the house arrest and the Nobel Prize. This is how history will remember The Lady of Myanmar.

By Michael Sullivan and Ashley Westerman

NPR

April 13, 2017

With her 8-year-old son's head resting in her lap, Zubaida was sitting at home with some other women from her village in western Myanmar's Rakhine state when the military came — and the gunfire started.

"All the men from the village started running away, and my son ran with them," Zubaida, 25, says. He didn't get far: Myanmar soldiers shot him dead — in the back.

That evening, the soldiers came back.

"They didn't say anything," she says. "They just came with their guns into my house."

They raped her for almost an hour that time, Zubaida says. Two days later, the military returned and rounded up all the villagers. She says they separated the men from the women, beat the men and raped the women.

"Some tried to resist and got stabbed," she says. "That's why the rest of the women didn't hesitate, they didn't want to die."

Zubaida was one of those picked.

Her distraught father pleaded with the soldiers: "Why are you doing this?"

"We are not doing as much to you as we have been ordered to do in Oula Para," they replied, referring to a nearby village.

Both Zubaida's village, Naiyongsong, and Oula Para are in far west Rakhine near the border with Bangladesh.

The villagers in this story have chosen to use pseudonyms to protect family members in Myanmar from possible retribution.

The latest crackdown

Zubaida and her neighbors are Rohingya — a group the U.N. has described as one of the world's most persecuted people. The Muslim minority Rohingya have lived in mainly Buddhist Myanmar for centuries.

Even so, Myanmar's government doesn't consider the Rohingya to be citizens; it says they are immigrants from Bangladesh who are living in Myanmar illegally. About 1 million Rohingya live in Rakhine state, and they are almost entirely disenfranchised and need permission, for instance, to travel outside their own villages or to marry. Many are restricted to living in internment camps, segregated from the local Buddhist population.

In October, a new Rohingya militant group attacked several border guard posts and killed nearly a dozen policemen. The militants led another series of attacks in November that left a Myanmar army officer dead.

The attacks shocked and infuriated Myanmar's military. And its response has been a brutal form of collective punishment that has not spared villagers, who are accused of aiding and abetting the militants.

What followed, witnesses and survivors say, was a campaign of murder, rape and arson. In the past six months, more than 70,000 Rohingya fled in terror across the border into neighboring Bangladesh — a Muslim-majority nation that has provided those who fled with refuge, but not acceptance.

This isn't the first time the Rohingya have made that journey. In the late 1970s and early '90s, hundreds of thousands fled violence in Myanmar. By some estimates, there are more than 500,000 Rohingya now living in Bangladesh — and more in Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries.

In Bangladesh, about 35,000 Rohingya live officially in two camps run by the government in tandem with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Hundreds of thousands more live, unofficially, in squatter camps like Balukali, where Zubaida lives now.

Home to some 17,000 people, Balukali is bleak. Small huts have been scraped out of the hillsides, with blue plastic sheeting for walls and roofs, held together by thin strips of bamboo. The homes sit amid pools of fetid water in a hilly area with little shade and lots of sand.

Zubaida's tiny hut is barely big enough to stand in. At midday, it is stiflingly hot.

She recalls how the soldiers burned down a number of houses, as well as the mosque next to her house. After she was raped the second time, Zubaida says, she fled with her then-5-year-old daughter, her parents and a couple of siblings, furtively making their way through the jungle until they reached what they thought was a place of safety near the river.

They were wrong.

The military came there, too.

"The last rape took place in a school," Zubaida says. "The women were separated after the men were taken away," and then it all began again.

She and her family finally made it across the river about a week after starting their journey.

Six years earlier, Zubaida's husband, Mohammad, fled Myanmar by boat for Malaysia. The idea was to earn enough money to bring his family, too. Many others do the same, paying traffickers to make the often harrowing boat journey south to Thailand or Malaysia.

But Mohammad's boat broke down and now he is at a U.N. facility in Indonesia waiting to be processed to a third country.

We reached him by phone at that facility in Medan, Indonesia. He was feeling guilty and powerless.

"I keep thinking if I had brought my wife and my son, I would not have lost my son and my wife would not have been raped," Mohammad says. Now he is stuck in Indonesia, and Zubaida is stuck in Bangladesh. It's not likely they'll be reunited anytime soon.

Rape as a tool of war

NPR could not independently verify Zubaida's story, as the Myanmar government has restricted access to northern Rakhine state. But we talked to a dozen other women from other villages whose stories were depressingly similar, as have the U.N., Human Rights Watch and others. These stories suggest the Myanmar military was following a familiar playbook when it launched its "counterinsurgency" operation in October.

"This is not something that has happened by rogue soldiers ... a crime that was committed spontaneously," says Matthew Smith, CEO of the advocacy group Fortify Rights, which focuses on Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia.

"It's very clear to us at this point that state security forces set out to systematically rape Rohingya women and girls," he says.

Rape as a tool of war is not new: The Myanmar military has used it as a tactic against ethnic women, in particular, in other parts of the country for many years.

But what is different about the past six months, he says, is the scale of rape that took place within a relatively short period of time.

"There has been widespread and systematic rape in other ethnic states," says Smith. "But there was an outburst of it, and particularly in November, that was unusual even by the Myanmar military's brutal standards."

The Myanmar military continues to deny the systematic attacks against the Rohingya — despite the testimony of dozens of witnesses, satellite photos showing hundreds of homes burned to the ground and disturbing videos uploaded to YouTube that show the military rounding up and beating Rohingya men. The Myanmar government did not respond to NPR's requests for comment on these stories.

The silence of Aung San Suu Kyi

As for Myanmar's de facto leader, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi has seemed oddly indifferent in her rare public comments on the violence against the Rohingya. In a recent interview with Singapore's Channel News Asia, Suu Kyi told her interviewer: "I'm not saying there's no difficulties. But it helps if people recognize the difficulties and focus on resolving instead of exaggerating them so that everything seems worse than it really is."

And last week, she denied that the military's action against the Rohingya amounted to ethnic cleansing.

"I don't think there is ethnic cleansing going on. I think ethnic cleansing is too strong an expression to use for what is happening," Suu Kyi told the BBC. "It is not just a matter of ethnic cleansing as you put it — it is a matter of people on different sides of the divide, and this divide we are trying to close up."

If this sounds odd coming from a Nobel laureate and onetime human rights champion, it shouldn't. The general's daughter has described herself as a politician long before she was a human rights champion. And in overwhelmingly Buddhist Myanmar, speaking out for the rights of a much-maligned Muslim minority doesn't win votes.

But there's another explanation, too: Suu Kyi has no control over the military. The country's Constitution cements the military's role and power indefinitely. Matthew Smith of Fortify Rights accepts this, but what he doesn't accept is what Suu Kyi could have done but hasn't.

"We've seen terrible language coming out of state-run media referring to Rohingya as 'thorns that need to be removed' and referring to Rohingya as 'human fleas,' " says Smith. "This is a shameful discourse that she has failed to change."

Last month, the U.N.'s Human Rights Council said it would send a team to Myanmar to investigate the allegations of atrocities. Myanmar's ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, U Htin Lynn, called the resolution "not acceptable."

That response and Suu Kyi's recent denials don't surprise Phil Robertson, deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch.

"She's claiming that there is no ethnic cleansing in this area," says Robertson. "Our response to her would be that if there wasn't such a big problem then why not allow the U.N. Human Rights Council fact-finding mission into those areas, provide them with unfettered access."

Robertson says it's time to stop talking.

"It's time to get the investigators in there and actually do a professional independent investigation and get to the bottom of what happened," he says.

There's no indication Myanmar's government will allow the fact-finding team into Rakhine state.

In the meantime, Myanmar has set up its own commission of inquiry, which is led by Vice President Myint Swe — a former army general.

With additional reporting by Bangladeshi journalist Muktadir Rashid.

By Erin Murphy

The Diplomat

April 11, 2017

Though the NLD and Aung San Suu Kyi have had a disappointing year, there are some steps they can take to get back on track.

The reviews (and votes) are in for Myanmar’s National League for Democracy (NLD) government and its leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and they are not positive. The NLD’s grace period to show progress is short and it will be unable to lean on excuses (however justified) of inheriting a dilapidated economy, infrastructure, and a nation ravaged by civil war. The government must show action toward building a sound foundation for the country and demonstrate that it is, as the party has often said, for the people.

Many of these challenges are difficult to address for even mature democracies. However, there are initial steps Aung San Suu Kyi and the NLD-led government can take to help rebuild its connection to supporters and get back on its path.

A Disappointing First Year

The litany of first year post-mortems reflect disappointment and deep frustration. Some things will take time, including the role of the military, national reconciliation, and racial and sectarian sentiment and policies. The military holds 25 percent of all parliamentary seats, three important ministerial posts, and is a key player in Myanmar’s defining challenge: national reconciliation, a ceasefire and political dialogue aimed to end decades of armed resistance.

Peace will not easily be achieved particularly as the armed (and non-armed) ethnic nationalities not only mistrust the military, but the majority ethnic Bamar (of which Aung San Suu Kyi and the majority of the NLD belong). Peace talks have stalled and the NLD’s pro-democracy and non-military background credentials did not convince groups to sign an accord. The military has asserted its authority in the process, resulting in heightened tensions and ongoing clashes. The government must walk a fine line with the military to ensure trust building and the continuation of democratization but also to push for a lasting peace.

The government is also failing with regard to Rohingya and anti-Muslim violence — at its core, a racial issue — and its inaction and bigoted comments continue to shock the international community. Though the NLD should not be given a free pass (particularly as the West clearly struggles with race and anti-Muslim sentiment), it should be understood these issues will not be resolved overnight.

Despite this, the government has authority to enact its agenda but has undermined itself and its success. The party selected ministers who were unqualified, had little capacity or related experience, and were left without decision-making authority. Aung San Suu Kyi herself took four ministerial portfolios, but whittled this down to two and created a new, all-encompassing role of State Counselor. Her micromanaging leadership style is stifling decision-making, creating serious bottlenecks and driving ministers and deputies to inaction.

More disturbing has been the government’s stance on human rights and political freedoms, which has not only undermined support from prodemocracy and civil society groups, but also from the international community that has lavished praise for years. In short, the NLD-led government has had a difficult first year governing.

Getting Back on Track

That said, it can take a series of steps to get back on track.

Mend Fences and Be More Inclusive: This is where the NLD has done itself the most unnecessary harm. The party enjoyed goodwill from pro-democracy groups, ethnic nationalities, and civil society and rather than capitalize on it, the NLD shunned inclusivity, and in some cases, purposefully cut out groups like the 88 Generation Students and Shan and Rakhine States-based parties. Myanmar is plagued by political fractiousness, something that voters in 2015 recognized and sought to eliminate by getting a parliamentary majority, and not a messy coalition government. But voters expect the NLD to listen to the various ethnic nationalities and other pro-democracy leaders. Though relationships are strained, it is not too late to undo the damage.

Provide More Frequent Policy Status Updates: The lack of policy statements and updates is resulting in decreased confidence and confusion (foreign investment is set to drop 30 percent this year) among the local and international communities. The release of its economic policy last year fell flat and there has been little discernible movement on improving the document. The NLD must demonstrate efforts are underway and provide consistent updates, even if there is nothing to say or progress is not as visible, to allay fears.

Establish a Clear Civilian Hierarchy: In a political system that mixes military officials with civilian bureaucrats, establishing a ranking system providing an equivalent military status to a civil servant may ease decision-making challenges and get both sides to speak the same language. The United States has such a system that provides clear authority without questions. A rank can be based on experience, years of service, and job title with requirements for a particular rank publicly available.

Curb Micromanaging and Build Capacity: Micromanaging will undo this government and this party should work as a team, not as competitors or puppets. Aung San Suu Kyi and her ministers must be self-reflective and delineate decisions critical for the State Counselor or for the responsible ministry and respective chains of command. They must commit to provide resources to build each minister’s capacity where needed coupled with explicit guidance on professional accountability. This not only boosts confidence among the electorate and investors, but it would start fixing the government’s tattered legacy.

Look to the Party’s Future: A constant concern revolves around future NLD leadership. Initial steps to cultivate and infuse fresh ideas into party faltered, leaving younger members frustrated and former political prisoners unsure of their place. The NLD not only should recruit new members, but ensure it fosters and builds capacity among current members, assuring disappointed members, ensuring future stability, and building a clear leadership path to halt fractiousness and foster unity.

Remember the Mandate and the People: The NLD was the voice of the people and was expected to use its authority to remedy the atrocities of the past and pave the way for a democratic future. The NLD-led government’s stance on freedoms of the press and speech and lack of progress on core economic issues have many wondering who the government speaks for. Yes, the NLD must be wary of flash points with the military, but this party was elected to start sweeping away draconian laws, not enforce them, bring about peace, not stifle it, and brings jobs, education opportunities, and a stronger economy, not suppress them. The party still has the faith of the people, it must now earn their respect.

Acceptance of a difficult first year should be viewed as an opportunity. This is a time to stop making excuses, be clear and transparent with goals, work with long-time supporters, and demonstrate governing that will bring the country back to and beyond its past prominence. Myanmar cannot do that by wallowing in its own mistakes and giving into the fractiousness and mistrust that has percolated for decades.

As for the international community, we must stop viewing Myanmar as a mature democracy; it is still at the beginning and is dealing with issues that even mature governments consistently mishandle. We must be constructive, continue to highlight and bring truth to serious issues, and find a way to help all sides find stability, safety, and growth.

Erin Murphy is the Principal and Founder of Inle Advisory Group, a Myanmar and emerging market-centric business advisory firm. She was previously the Special Assistant to the U.S. State Department’s Special Representative and Policy Coordinator for Burma and a political analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Myanmar National Security Advisor Thaung Tun meets heads of diplomatic missions and UN agencies in Myanmar in Yangon on the Rohingya crackdown, in Yangon, Myanmar April 11, 2017. REUTERS/Stringer

By Reuters
April 11, 2017

A senior Myanmar government official on Tuesday denied there was ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in the troubled northwestern state of Rakhine, where a military operation aimed at the minority has forced 75,000 people to flee to Bangladesh.

Attacks on Myanmar border guard posts in October last year by a Rohingya insurgent group ignited the biggest crisis of country leader Aung San Suu Kyi's year in power.

A UN report in February said Myanmar's security forces had committed mass killings and gang rapes against Rohingya during their campaign against the insurgents, which may amount to crimes against humanity.

The military has denied the accusations, saying it was engaged in a legitimate counter-insurgency operation.

Thaung Tun, a recently appointed National Security Adviser, reiterated the claim made by Nobel Peace Prize winner Suu Kyi during a recent interview when she said "ethnic cleansing is too strong an expression to use for what is happening".

"There is no ethnic cleansing of Muslim minority in Rakhine," Thaung Tun told a group of diplomats in Myanmar's largest city, Yangon. "It is a matter of people on different sides of the divide and the government is striving to overcome the situation and to close the gap."

His comments come amid several ongoing investigations into the allegations, including one mandated by Suu Kyi's government and chaired by the vice-president and former head of military intelligence, Myint Swe.

Last month, the top UN human rights body agreed to send an international fact-finding mission to investigate the allegations - a move that Myanmar has opposed.

While the UN February report stopped short of explicitly labeling the actions of the security forces as ethnic cleansing, it said the violence committed against the Rohingya "has been described in other contexts" as ethnic cleansing.

It also expressed "serious concerns" that the attacks were a result of 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".

Thaung Tun said the government needed time and space to address the issues and "where there is clear evidence of wrongdoing, we will take firm action in accordance with the law".

He added the government had initiated the process of closing down some of the camps where tens of thousands of Rohingya internally displaced people have lived since clashes with ethnic Rakhine Buddhists in 2012, but did not provide any specifics of what is likely to be an extremely complex process.

(Reporting by Antoni Slodkowski; Editing by Nick Macfie)

UNHCR

April 10, 2017

Asif, 8, and Suleman, 12, say their parents were killed in the violence near Maungdaw, Myanmar. © UNHCR

By Shashank Bengali

Los Angeles Times

April 9, 2017

Sittwe, Myanmar -- It is just an ID card, sky blue and gently creased, but it is Mohammad Siddique’s greatest source of shame.

The indignity arises not from its routine details — his name, date of birth, photo, thumbprint — but from what it omits. Unlike documents held by citizens of Myanmar, there is no mention of Siddique’s race or religion.

To him it is an identity card that erases his identity.

Siddique, 25, is a Rohingya Muslim, a stateless minority of more than 1 million people who live in apartheid-like conditions in the overwhelmingly Buddhist nation of 53 million previously known as Burma.

Stripped of their citizenship by the country’s former military rulers, many are effectively trapped in villages and internment camps without the right to travel, work or marry freely within the country where they were born.

After a half-century of military rule, human rights activists and Myanmar’s international allies hoped that Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi would loosen the restrictions when her civilian government took office a year ago. But she has refused to restore citizenship to the Rohingya or recognize them as an ethnic group — a sign of the army’s enduring influence as well as the deep antipathy that many Myanmar Buddhists, including leaders of Suu Kyi’s own party, feel toward Muslims.

In a limited step, Suu Kyi has adopted a plan to issue the Rohingya ID cards that acknowledge they are residents and start a process to consider their citizenship claims, with no assurances.

But many Rohingya oppose the cards, saying the omission of ethnicity is part of a continuing effort to eradicate any record of their existence here.

“This government doesn’t want to accept us as citizens of Myanmar,” Siddique said at his home in U Yin Thar, a Rohingya village of tidy wooden shacks outside the coastal town of Sittwe. As a downpour lashed the tin roofs, children scurried barefoot through muddy lanes and Siddique’s voice grew faint.

“They just want to kick us out of this country,” he said.

The ID push comes as the United Nations’ Human Rights Council prepares to investigate reports that the Myanmar army indiscriminately killed, raped and abused Rohingya civilians during a crackdown that began last October in northern Rakhine state, 60 miles from Sittwe.

“Trust has been eroded for decades” between the Rohingya and the government, said Matthew Smith, co-founder of Fortify Rights, an advocacy group in Southeast Asia. “It’s lunacy to think that soldiers could commit atrocity crimes with impunity on Monday and have civilians happily cooperate with the [ID] scheme on Tuesday.”

“There is no meaningful difference between the previous and current regimes on this issue,” he said.

Myanmar has long viewed the Rohingya — who share physical, cultural and linguistic similarities with South Asian ethnic groups — as foreigners from neighboring Bangladesh, even though many families have lived here for generations.

In 1982, the army enacted a law that dialed back full citizenship to include only members of 135 “national races” that purportedly existed in Burma before British colonialists invaded in 1824. The Rohingya were not included.

Under the law, the best they could hope for was naturalization and a limited set of rights granted through a verification process that has proved slow and opaque.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere on the planet that privileges particular ethnicities the way Myanmar does,” said Ronan Lee, a researcher at Australia’s Deakin University who has studied the Rohingya.

In 2014, when the former government introduced the ID cards, it ordered the Rohingya to identify themselves as “Bengali,” a label they oppose. Last year, Suu Kyi relaunched the effort, but tried to skirt the issue of ethnicity by eliminating race and religion from the document.

By early February, officials said they had issued 6,202 cards in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state, home to most of the Rohingya population. Rohingya leaders say many of those were the result of coercion.

Siddique said he was tricked into accepting the card as a condition of his release last month from jail.

He had served 17 months for violating travel restrictions that have been strictly enforced since clashes erupted between Buddhists and Muslims in 2012 and the government confined more than 120,000 Rohingya to swampy displacement camps at the edge of Sittwe.

Unable to work or study freely, thousands have attempted to escape on overcrowded fishing boats bound for Thailand and Malaysia.

In October 2015, Siddique took his chances by slipping into the back of a car headed south toward the city of Yangon, but was quickly intercepted by police and arrested.

The day before he was freed, he was brought to a room where a prison guard took his picture and told him to sign and leave a thumbprint on one side of what Siddique thought was a prisoner release form.

When he folded the card over, his heart fell. “Identity Card for National Verification” was printed in bold letters.

At home, he reluctantly showed his family the document, holding it by the edges, as if it were soiled. Although officials said the card would give him freedom of movement, police at the checkpoint that seals off his village wouldn’t let him leave.

“Why did you take it?” his mother asked.

He told her he had no choice, that guards had kicked him with their boots and called him kalar, a slur for dark-skinned.

“I worry that the card will be used to persecute him,” said his aunt, Zurah Khatu.

Siddique was born in the same village as his father, who once worked for the army. No one in the family has held a job since 2015, when authorities bowed to the demands of Buddhist nationalists and revoked the temporary IDs that had allowed the Rohingya one of their last basic rights: to vote.

Unlike other controversial provisions enacted under military rule — such as blocking Suu Kyi from the presidency because she had a foreign spouse, or reserving one-quarter of parliamentary seats for the military — there is little support in Myanmar for changing the citizenship law. With Buddhist nationalists and extremist monks fanning anti-Muslim sentiment, Suu Kyi has remained largely silent on the Rohingya question.

U Nyan Win, a spokesman for Suu Kyi’s party, said the government supported expanding citizenship criteria — to a point.

“We want to see citizens, not ethnic groups,” he said. “But there is no such ethnic group as the Rohingya in our history.”

Even Suu Kyi’s modest step has triggered protests in Rakhine state among hard-line Buddhists who complain that making Rohingya eligible for citizenship risks “Islamizing” the country — even though it’s more than 90% Buddhist.

“The government should be conscious of the security of the country,” said U Aung Htay, leader of a Buddhist civil society group in Sittwe. He pointed to the deaths of nine police officers in northern Rakhine last October at the hands of alleged Rohingya militants, a series of attacks that prompted the army crackdown.

“If that kind of attack happens again, people will suffer,” he said. “And you can assume the Bengali people are responsible.”

Rohingya say that even if they accepted the new ID, many would have little chance of meeting the law’s onerous requirements for regaining citizenship, including “conclusive evidence” of lineage in Myanmar.

In the Maw Thi Nya displacement camp outside Sittwe, 63-year-old Abdul Shafi held out his battered old citizenship card — nullified by the 1982 law — that he rescued from the 2012 clashes.

Shafi said officials had visited the camp multiple times in recent months to promote the new card, and he worried the government would use their refusal as a pretext to expel Rohingya from the country. As a group of men around him nodded vigorously, he remained defiant.

“We will not take this card,” he said. “Even if they kill us, we will not accept it.”

By AFP

April 9, 2017

The UN children's agency UNICEF has called on Myanmar's government to release Rohingya children detained as part of a sweeping military campaign in Rakhine state.

More than 600 people were arrested in an army crackdown on Rohingya Muslims in the north of the restive state. The operation was launched after deadly attacks by militants on police posts in October.

Rohingya escapees in neighbouring Bangladesh, where more than 70,000 have fled, gave UN investigators accounts of beatings, torture and food deprivation inside the jails.

Minors are among those detained.

UNICEF's deputy executive director Justin Forsyth said he had given the country's de facto civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi details of around a dozen youngsters being held in Buthidaung prison.

"There are some children that are detained in prison, so those are the cases that we're raising," he told AFP late on Saturday at the end of a brief trip to Myanmar.

"Any child that's detained is an issue for us."

Nobel Laureate Suu Kyi and Myanmar's army chief both recognised "that there's an issue here" but made no firm committment for their release, he added.

Government spokesman Zaw Htay declined to comment when contacted by AFP on Sunday.

The UN Human Rights Council has agreed to send a mission to Myanmar to probe allegations that troops and police raped, killed and tortured Rohingya in their months-long campaign.

Myanmar has rejected the accounts collected by UN investigators in the Bangladesh refugee camps, who said the crimes could amount to ethnic cleansing.

"I think ethnic cleansing is too strong an expression to use for what is happening," Suu Kyi said in an interview with the BBC last week.

Myanmar's police and the military have both launched separate probes to investigate the deaths of at least eight people in custody in northern Rakhine.

UN rights envoy for Myanmar Yanghee Lee said some 450 people were being held in Buthidaung prison when she visited in January, most without access to lawyers or their families.

Myanmar has long faced criticism for its treatment of more than one million Rohingya, who are vilified as illegal "Bengali" immigrants and forced to live in apartheid-like conditions even though many have lived in the country for generations.

A group calling itself the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army has claimed the October attacks, which it said were intended to defend the rights of the persecuted minority after years of worsening conditions.

Forsyth said there was a growing recognition among both Myanmar's civilian government and army that depriving Rohingya children of opportunities had bred militancy.

"The reality is if you don't address these issues particularly for these communities then it will come back to haunt them, which is partly what has happened," he said.

By Sajeeb Wazed

The Diplomat

April 7, 2017

But the government needs international support to deal with the humanitarian crisis.

The plight of the Rohingya – the stateless Muslim people fleeing persecution and violence in the Rakhine state of Myanmar – has become well known. The Rakhine state borders the Bay of Bengal and the southeastern tip of Bangladesh. Recurrent violence and torture has forced hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to flee Myanmar. Owing to its proximity, more than 300,000 displaced Rohingya have entered Bangladesh in recent years and nearly 70,000 more since late last year.

Having faced its own humanitarian and refugee situation during its war of liberation against Pakistan in 1971, Bangladesh is sensitive to people seeking protection from torture and exclusion. That is why Bangladesh, which only two years ago climbed into lower-middle-income status in the World Bank rankings, has been expending significant government resources to help the displaced Rohingya in Bangladesh.

Bangladesh strongly supports the recommendations of a June 2016 report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Rohingya situation in Myanmar, which include: an abolition of discriminatory local orders against the Rohingya in Rakhine State, the lifting of restrictive bureaucratic requirements for emergency medical referrals and the establishment of guidelines that will eventually eliminate all freedom-of-movement restrictions on the Rohingya.

Bangladesh has successfully repatriated more than 236,500 Myanmar refugees through an agreement negotiated between the two nations in 1991-92 – until the process was halted by Myanmar in 2005. The remaining Myanmar refugees, numbering more than 33,000 now, are living in two camps in Cox’s Bazar, a coastal district near the border of Myanmar’s Rakhine State. But the Rohingya, having been denied citizenship in Myanmar, were forced to leave their homeland. Over the last decade, nearly 300,000 have entered Bangladesh and taken shelter in makeshift settlements in and around Cox’s Bazar.

The Cox’s Bazar settlements are not an ideal or tenable solution. Although the Bangladesh government has done its best, the sheer number of Rohingya living there has posed socio-economic, demographic, environmental, political, humanitarian and security challenges. It’s difficult for the government and NGOs to distribute assistance to the Rohingya in the settlement camps.

The Rohingya population is extremely vulnerable and its size is well beyond the capacity of the local administration to manage. Criminal networks have emerged that are engaging in narcotics smuggling and human trafficking. Adding more settlements to the Cox’s Bazar area, loading more onto an already over-strained system, is not feasible.

As an alternative, the government of Bangladesh has crafted a plan that would relocate the Rohingya population to Thengar Char, an island in the northern Bay of Bengal at the mouth of the Meghna River, north of Cox’s Bazar and south of the capital of Dhaka.

Conditions in this new settlement will be far better than what the Rohingya have in Cox’s Bazar. The government will build housing, schools, hospitals and health centers, mosques and roads.

Some news reports have falsely claimed that Thengar Char is completely submerged for part of the year, a baseless allegation that subjected the government to unwarranted criticism. Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina dispatched a team of researchers to Thengar Char to closely examine its condition. The truth is that, as in any tidal region, waters rise and fall daily. As a result, a small percentage of Thengar Char – the coastline – is under water half of each day, at high tide, then exposed again at low tide. The vast majority of Thengar Char is never submerged.

The Bangladesh government will not build Rohingya settlement facilities in those areas of Thengar Char that are subject to tidal fluctuations. It is also doing its best to handle the influx of Rohingya people in the most humanitarian way.

During a recent hearing of the Tom Lantos Commission on Human Rights in the U.S. House of Representatives, Matthew Smith, CEO of Fortify Rights, who has visited the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh, said he is sympathetic with the challenges the Bangladesh government faces from the crush of refugees.

Another witness at the hearing, Andrea Gittleman, program manager of the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, also recently visited Rohingya population living in Bangladesh and said that the Bangladesh government believes that the root of the Rohingya crisis must be solved in Myanmar.

Correct. The solution to the Rohingya crisis must be based in Myanmar and it will take many international hands. Bangladesh asks its international friends for help in developing Thengar Char and transporting the refugees there. It also seeks support for the sustainable return of the Rohingya to their homeland in Myanmar, in safety, security and dignity. 

Sajeeb Wazed is the information technology adviser to Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.