Never Again? — How The Rohingya Crisis Became A Genocide
The world’s failure to prevent ethnic cleansing in Burma
On ensuring accountability for gross violations of human rights and serious violations of international humanitarian law in Myanmar, we must admit that so far the United Nations and the international community have failed — once again.
Those are the words of Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Burma — also known as Myanmar — delivered to the U.N. Human Rights Council on June 27. She was referring to the international community’s inaction in the face of Burma’s ethnic cleansing of its Rohingya population over the last year.
On August 25, 2017, members of the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), a militant Rohingya group, attacked police and border outposts in Burma’s Rakhine state. Armed with primitive weapons — mostly knives and farm implements — ARSA fighters killed fourteen security personnel, according to the Burmese government, while losing over 100 of their own.
Support for ARSA among Burmese Rohingya appears limited (at least so far), but its attack provided Burma’s military authorities with a pretext to purge the nation of an unwanted minority group that has been persecuted and reviled for decades. More than 725,000 Rohingya have been forced to flee to neighboring Bangladesh by Burmese security forces’ “clearance operations” against ARSA over the past year. Most of these refugees are women and children. Smaller numbers have escaped to other countries such as Thailand and India.
International estimates indicate that at least 10,000 Rohingya civilians have been killed, although the real number is probably far higher. At least 100,000 Rohingya have been internally displaced in northern Rakhine — a Burmese state — unable to escape the country and forced to live in squalid concentration camps. Burmese security forces have also engaged in a systematic campaign of rape and sexual assault against Rohingya women and girls.
As Lee’s U.N. report indicates, the rest of the world has done little to address what amounts to a massive ongoing crime against humanity by the Burmese government.
There were ample warning signs in recent years that the Rohingya were at great risk of ethnic cleansing, and human rights groups repeatedly sought to draw international attention to the growing persecution they faced. However, the United States and other Western powers have been reluctant to reimpose sanctions on Burma that had just recently been removed as a reward for the government’s democratic reforms.
At this point, Burma’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya is largely a fait accompli, and it is unclear what the United States and other major powers can or should do to resolve this situation in a morally satisfactory way.
Discrimination and Persecution
The Rohingya are among the most persecuted minorities in the world today. Ethnically and linguistically distinct from other groups in Burma, the Rohingya are overwhelmingly Muslim and have been concentrated in the northern part of Rakhine in the western part of the country. Reliable demographic data about Burma is hard to come by, but prior to 2012 most estimates put the nation’s Rohingya population somewhere between 800,000 and 1.3 million. Burma’s total population is believed to be approximately 55 million, nearly 90 percent of whom are Buddhist.
Burma is an extremely diverse country that features a patchwork of more than 130 distinct ethnic groups. Of these, the Bamar make up around two-thirds of the population and are located primarily in the central part of the country. The remainder is composed of ethnic minorities situated along the nation’s periphery, many of whom have faced persecution at the hands of the Burmese government throughout the nation’s history. However, no other ethnic group in Burma has been treated as harshly as the Rohingya.
For most of the post-World War II era, Burma was an isolated nation governed by an authoritarian regime. Its military, the Tatmadaw, seized power in a coup in 1962, overthrowing the parliamentary government that had been in place. Prior to that, Rohingya were recognized as Burmese citizens, and many served in the government and the military. Upon taking power, the new regime sought to enhance its legitimacy among the Bamar majority by promoting Burmese nationalism at the expense of ethnic minorities. It soon began to disband Rohingya civil society organizations and took other steps to marginalize their role in public life.
Things got worse the following decade. In 1977, the government initiated Operation Dragon King, a nationwide effort it claimed was intended to identify populations that were living in Burma illegally. In Rakhine, the operation resulted in widespread attacks against the Rohingya by Burmese security forces. Over 200,000 Rohingya were forced to flee, most of them to Bangladesh. Under international pressure, Burma ultimately permitted most of the refugees to return, but conditions for them continued to worsen.
In 1991, the Tatmadaw again deployed large numbers of troops into Rakhine in a new crackdown on the Rohingya that involved mass arrests, widespread sexual violence, murder, destruction of homes and mosques, and other forms of state-sanctioned brutality. This time 250,000 Rohingya fled. As in the late 1970s, most were eventually repatriated to Burma, though many had little desire to return to a nation where they were oppressed and persecuted.
Even outside of the 1977 and 1991 pogroms, life for Rohingya in Burma has been brutal. The military junta stripped them of their citizenship in 1982, rendering them a stateless people.
According to the Burmese government, the Rohingya do not exist. They are officially referred to as “Bengalis,” a term meant to suggest (inaccurately) that they are foreign immigrants who have entered the country illegally. In recent decades they have also been subjected to increasing government restrictions on how they live their daily lives. They are prohibited from traveling outside Rakhine, and subject to significant restrictions on their ability to work, seek education, and own land.
A law passed in 1994 bars Rohingya couples from having more than two children.
By the beginning of 2012, there were already more than 250,000 Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh, and many more had escaped to other countries. In June, communal violence erupted in Rakhine following the rape and murder of a Buddhist woman, reportedly by three Muslim men. Nearly 100 people were killed and 100,000 were forced to flee their homes, most of them Rohingya. Four months later, ethnic Rakhine and local security forces carried out a wave of coordinated revenge attacks against Muslims living in Rakhine, both Rohingya and non-Rohingya. Another 35,000 Muslims were displaced as a result.
Buddhist Nationalism
Burma’s move toward political liberalization in the early 2010s led many Rohingya to hope that the nation’s democratic transformation would result in better living conditions, perhaps even official recognition as citizens.
Regrettably, the opposite occurred. The withdrawal of government restrictions on freedom of speech and freedom of religion beginning in 2011 revealed that the Buddhist majority strongly supports the Tatmadaw’s persecution of the Rohingya. In the years since, a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment has swept across Burma, propagated by extremist monks who claim that Muslims — who constitute only about 5 percent of the nation’s population — represent an existential threat to Burma’s Buddhist identity.
A Buddhist nationalist movement began to emerge in Burma in 2012. While loosely organized, it generated a widespread following with its alarmist message that Buddhism is under siege. Outrageous claims about Muslims and the supposed threat they represent to Buddhists have been widely disseminated via Facebook and mass-produced DVDs.
Many aspects of the intolerance towards Burmese Muslims call to mind the kinds of anti-Semitic tropes historically used to demonize Jews. Many allege that Muslims secretly exercise undue influence within the government and the media. And a great number of Burmese Buddhists believe Muslims’ ultimate goal is to turn Burma into a Muslim nation.
Among the movement’s most prominent leaders is Ashin Wirathu, a hardline Buddhist monk who has a “rock star following,” according to the New York Times.
Wirathu calls himself the “Burmese bin Laden” and has expressed his admiration for Donald Trump due to the U.S. president’s hostility toward Islam. In Wirathu’s words, “Most Muslims destroy our country, our people and the Buddhist religion.” He claims that all rapes that occur in Burma are committed by Muslim men against Buddhist women.
When Yanghee Lee, the U.N. Special Rapporteur, visited the country in 2015 and publicly criticized the treatment of the Rohingya, Wirathu responded by publicly calling her a “whore.” Many moderate Burmese Buddhists — including members of the clergy — are reluctant to speak out against him and his fellow hardliners for fear of reprisals.
Anti-Muslim Democrats
The reality that Buddhists are capable of violent extremism has come as a shock to many Western elites who saw Buddhism as an inherently tolerant and peaceful faith. Human rights advocates and other international observers have also been appalled to find that anti-Muslim bigotry is pervasive among members of Burma’s long-admired pro-democracy movement and its political arm, the National League for Democracy.
Ko Ko Gyi, a prominent democracy activist who was held as a political prisoner by the military regime for 18 years, described the Rohingya as “terrorists” who are “invading our country.” Nyan Win, a spokesman for the NLD, has echoed this view, stating that “the Rohingya are not our citizens.”
Jennifer Quigley, executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Burma, explained to journalist Graeme Wood in 2014 that she and other international human rights advocates “were just shocked that people we looked up to and championed, leaders of the democracy movement, turned out to be racist.”
One of the most dispiriting aspects of this situation has been the failure of Burma’s famous democratic leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, to speak out. Until relatively recently, she was viewed by Western elites and others around the world with great reverence after spending 15 years under house arrest by Burma’s military junta. Her commitment to non-violent democratic reform earned her many accolades, including the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize and the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom.
However, Aung San Suu Kyi’s unwillingness to condemn the Rohingya’s persecution has tarnished her international reputation. She has refused to call the Rohingya by their name, referring to them instead only as “Muslims.” Disturbingly, she has sought to legitimize their mistreatment by depicting it as simply one aspect of broader international concerns about Islam, stating that “there is a perception that Muslim power, global Muslim power, is very great, and certainly that’s a perception in many parts of the world and in our country, too.” In her words, Rohingya “terrorists” are responsible for “a huge iceberg of misinformation” that has distorted international opinion about what is going on in Burma.
Even Aung San Suu Kyi’s harshest critics acknowledge that her ability to directly influence the facts on the ground in Rakhine is limited. She became the de facto head of Burma’s NLD-led civilian government following Burma’s landmark 2015 elections, but under the nation’s 2008 constitution the Tatmadaw controls the Ministries of Interior, Defense and Border Affairs, so Aung San Suu Kyi has no control over the nation’s security forces.
But she is widely admired by her countrymen, and if there were one voice in all of Burma who might be able to effectively challenge the widespread hatred of the Rohingya, it would be hers.
The International Response
This current round of anti-Rohingya ethnic cleansing, which began in August 2017, dwarfs all of the previous episodes combined. The Burmese government claims that its “clearance operations” in Rakhine are a legitimate response to the ARSA attacks, but it is increasingly clear that the Tatmadaw planned its offensive against the Rohingya well in advance.
Fortify Rights, a human rights organization in Southeast Asia, issued a report in July documenting the Tatmadaw’s methodical preparations for a massive ethnic cleansing operation. These preparations included confiscation of household items that the Rohingya could use to defend themselves, military training for anti-Rohingya militia groups, expulsion of international aid organizations from Rohingyan communities, and the steady buildup of Burmese security forces in northern Rakhine state during the weeks leading up to the offensive.
The ethnic cleansing operation should have come as a surprise to no one. In 2013, Human Rights Watch issued a 153-page report that concluded that the 2012 pogroms “amount to crimes against humanity carried out as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing.” The following year, an investigation by the non-profit United to End Genocide found that “nowhere in the world are there more known precursors to genocide than in Burma today.” In a May 2015 article in Foreign Policy, Cameron Hudson, director of the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, wrote a prescient assessment of the dangers facing the Rohingya:
One thing is for certain: if violence does erupt and Burma’s leaders and people do decide to seek a “final solution” for the Rohingya, it will be impossible for anyone to revive the tired refrain of past generations of genocide apologists — “we didn’t know.”
In August, the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar released the results of its 17-month investigation into human rights atrocities committed by Burma’s security forces. Its conclusions are damning.
The report states unequivocally that the Tatmadaw-led offensive into northern Rakhine state constitutes “a human rights catastrophe” that was “foreseeable and pre-planned” and “characterized by systematic attacks directed at civilians and civilian objects, and indiscriminate attacks.” It also notes that “the root causes of the [Rohingya] exodus, including State-sanctioned oppression and an exclusionary and divisive rhetoric, are denied [by Burmese authorities] and continue unabated.”
Notably, the report suggests that the Tatmadaw, led by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, has acted with “genocidal intent” and that he and other high-ranking security officials should be investigated and prosecuted by an international tribunal for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
While they acknowledge that Burma’s civilian government has no authority over the nation’s security forces, the report’s authors lament the fact that Aung San Suu Kyi “has not used her de facto position as Head of Government, nor her moral authority, to stem or prevent the unfolding events.” On the contrary, her administration has emphatically denied that the Tatmadaw has committed atrocities, propagated hateful rhetoric against the Rohingya, and obstructed independent investigations into the situation in northern Rakhine state.
What Can Be Done?
The international community’s immediate priority should be adequately funding humanitarian relief efforts for Rohingya refugees. To date, only about a third of the $950 million requested by the U.N. to assist Rohingya refugees has been provided. International pressure should also be brought to bear on Burma to fully reopen northern Rakhine to humanitarian relief groups so that they may provide much needed assistance to the more than 100,000 internally displaced Rohingya there.
Beyond that, the United States and other responsible members of the international community must take steps to hold Burmese security officials accountable for their crimes and make it clear that there are real consequences for engaging in ethnic cleansing.
Many governments have publicly condemned Burma’s actions against the Rohingya, but taken few concrete steps to punish those responsible. In recent months, the U.S., Canada, and the European Union have imposed sanctions on a handful of Burmese security officials involved with the ethnic cleansing campaign, but so far no action has been taken against General Min Aung Hlaing and those in his inner circle.
This past spring, the U.S. State Department sent a team of investigators to Rohingya refugee settlements in Bangladesh to document the human rights atrocities perpetrated by Burmese security forces. The results of the investigation were expected to be released at the end of August, but the report remains unfinished due to an internal debate within the State Department as to how to frame its conclusions.
There is disagreement among the department’s bureaus over whether or not to describe the situation as “genocide,” a designation which could put unwanted political pressure on the United States to take more decisive steps than it has so far. State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert recently told reporters that no decision has been made as to when — or even if — its findings will be made public.
U.S. President Donald Trump has yet to make any public statement about the Rohingya crisis since it began last year. As the leader of a nation that has long considered itself a moral beacon to the world, his silence in the face of what is arguably the biggest human rights crisis in the world today is extremely regrettable, but not surprising. He is indifferent to human rights in a way that no American president has been since the Nixon administration, and he would probably struggle to locate Burma on a map unaided. He has also expressed animosity toward Muslims on a number of occasions, and two of his key foreign policy advisors, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, appear to share those sentiments.
Any meaningful steps by the United States to address the Rohingya crisis are therefore more likely to originate with Congress rather than the White House, either through indirect pressure or through the passage of legislation.
In May 2018, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a Burma-related amendment with some teeth to its version of the 2019 defense authorization bill. Among its provisions:
- Ban all U.S. security assistance to the Tatmadaw until it implements significant human rights reforms, increases transparency, and holds human rights abusers within its ranks accountable.
- Impose financial sanctions on Burmese military leaders who ordered or carried out atrocities, including those at the highest levels of command.
Similar legislation had been approved by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and enjoyed strong bipartisan support, as well as the backing of human rights groups. Unfortunately, these provisions were stripped from the final version of the bill at the behest of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who fears that imposing sanctions on the Tatmadaw would politically hurt Aung San Suu Kyi.
There will probably be a renewed push to pass this legislation when the next U.S. Congress convenes in 2019. If enacted, it would represent an important initial step toward holding accountable those responsible for the crimes against the Rohingya, particularly if other Western nations adopted similar measures.
However, it would not by itself be enough to compel Burma to take the steps necessary to resolve the Rohingya crisis — namely, allowing the Rohingya to safely return to Rakhine state and granting them citizenship. If they’re serious, the United States and like-minded nations will need to consider taking stronger measures.
Dim Prospects
To date, there have been few calls for reimposing the kind of broad-based economic sanctions that were in place when Burma was ruled by the military junta, even among human rights advocates. The primary fear is that doing so would undermine the democratically elected civilian government, perhaps fatally. It would also likely inflame anti-Western sentiment and could prompt Burma to rekindle the close relationship it had with China under the military regime. Observers also widely recognize that the reimposition of economic sanctions would hurt everyday Burmese citizens whose country is already one of the poorest in the world.
These are understandable concerns. However, it is worth asking if the people of Burma, who overwhelmingly support the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, do not bear some collective responsibility — however indirect — for what has happened there. This is an aspect of the Rohingya crisis that too few international observers have been willing to discuss.
Realistically, it is unlikely that the Rohingya refugees will return to Burma any time in the foreseeable future. The townships in Rakhine from which they fled have been razed to the ground and replaced with new structures to house ethnic Rakhine.
Few Rohingya want to return to Burma unless conditions there for them improve and they are recognized as citizens. Barring a massive change in attitudes across Burma, the chances of this happening are virtually nil.
