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s the world is witnessing blatant atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza, it also bore witness to hundreds of displaced Rohingya children, women, and men being returned to sea just hours after disembarking from a boat in Aceh, Indonesia on December 27. It is widely known that the Rohingya are victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. In a new escalation in 2017, 6,700 were killed while 740,000 were displaced.

The local population in Aceh is becoming increasingly weary of the burden of hosting refugees. According to media reports and records from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), Aceh has received more than 4,000 Rohingya since 2008. A surge in the number of arrivals was recorded during the pandemic in 2020-2022, reaching 1,155 people.

The influx of refugees from Myanmar to Indonesia has constantly increased in 2023. Since February 2023, MFA records show an increase of the number of refugees from Myanmar to Indonesia. The number has reached almost 2,000 refugees, as November and December 2023 marked the peak of arrivals with 1,534 Rohingya making their way to Indonesia. As of January 2024, there are already 170 new arrivals.

The Rohingya refugee influx over the past two months was not the only factor contributing to hundreds of students swarming the refugee shelter in the capital Banda Aceh on December 27. This led to the hasty military-backed expulsion of hundreds of Rohingya back to the sea. The complexity of the problem lies in the geopolitical buck-passing solutions that promote an anti-migrant atmosphere and narratives of refugees posing a national threat to Indonesia in the future. The problem is intensified by accumulated obscure government policies, the ineffectiveness of humanitarian organizations’ capacity programs, misinformation and propaganda on the internet, and the insecurities of higher-ups about the increasing cases of illegal human trafficking.

Coercion and mobilization

Many Acehnese condemned the action and suspected a systematic choreography. In a telephone conversation, local residents expressed their disappointment. “It has never been seen before (that) students’ anarchic protest would be able to convince the military to push the refugees back into the sea,” said a local resident in Banda Aceh who chose to keep his identity secret. “It seemed that only this morning they had the chance to put on green attire to chase the refugees out,” said another villager in an angry, cynical tone, indicating the use of university green attire to symbolize the force behind the act. Although the students have apologized, the damage has been done and the message of rejection has been sent.

An investigation by the state was launched a few days after the incident. It shows a series of efforts to systematically mobilize masses for expulsion, involving military personnel from Aceh. The students were promised a sum of 100-200 million rupiah ($6,500 to $13,000) for holding a demonstration against the Rohingya. No suspects have been named, other than the leader of the student demonstration. Scholars have suggested a pattern of top-down strategic anti-migration missions.

The use of coercion and money has exposed not only the accumulation of prejudices within the Acehnese people but also Indonesians at large. Strong changes were particularly clear in 2021 and 2022, where fear and hatred were manufactured through social media. Indonesians and Acehnese spread false information about the future plans of the Rohingya once their status improved. Such claims included, that those arriving in Aceh would steal land?, comparable to “Israel’s theft of Palestinian land”; that sharing the burden of state finances would displace the priority of the natives; that the Rohingya’ demand for a free and sustainable life with secure jobs and protection; the “lack of a culture of cleanness”  among the Rohingya; and allegations of involvement in rape cases, drug abuse, and “being ungrateful.”

The South China Morning Post interviewed the protesters whose response was in sync with the spread of false information online. The Ministry of Communication and Information and the NGO Masyarakat Anti Fitnah Indonesia or Anti-defamation Society verified that the above accusations are false and exaggerated.

Social media, including several unverified accounts on YouTube, have spread misinformation by defaming powerful elites in Indonesia as encouraging the expulsion. The fake news had been circulating on social media for months before the incident. The untimely and insensitive public statement by elite society members about Indonesia being a non-signatory to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention and therefore deserving leeway in the blame game was greatly influential.

On December 20, Foreign Ministry spokesman Lalu Muhammad Iqbal claimed that Indonesia’s non-signatory status exempted the country from any responsibility for the lives of the Rohingya. He also blamed the illegal human trafficking in Indonesian waters and demanded the signatory countries of the 1951 Convention take responsibility.

Although emphasizing the moral burden of the plight of the Rohingya, Iqbal’s statement led to condemnation from various parties and helped a hoax gain momentum as his statement partly played a role in the student march on December 27.

Triggered buck-passing

Looking at the geopolitical buck-passing attitude towards the Rohingya in recent years, perhaps part of Iqbal’s statement could be applauded or at least arise some empathy. His stance was triggered by the increasing phenomenon of illegal human trafficking and the high probability that Bangladesh organizes the remigration of Rohingya refugees out of its country to evade responsibility.

This assumption is corroborated by a recent investigation, published on December 15, based on the testimonies of several arrested suspects. It reveals that the Bangladesh Security Camp and its navy captain were involved in human trafficking. They lured the Rohingya with promises of a better life and a safe destination with a fee ranging from 3 to 15 million rupiah ($193 to $965) per person. The money was then used to purchase boat engines, fuel, and food supplies for the journey. The profit was shared between the ship’s captain and the boat crew in Bangladesh’s Cox Bazaar. Prior to departure, the refugees’ names were listed on a paper with country destinations that included Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Due to Indonesia’s weak maritime security, most of the refugees landed and sheltered in Aceh. There several cases of runaways were reported and linked to trafficking to various areas with better economic prospects in Sumatra, such as Tanjung Balai in North Sumatra, Dumai, and Riau. The Indonesian traffickers demanded 5-10 million rupiah ($321 to $643) for each refugee. Since 2015, there have been 23 cases related to human trafficking. Coordinating Minister for Political, Legal, and Security Affairs of Indonesia Mahfud MD has stated that people from the country are involved in the illegal Rohingya human trafficking around Indonesia.

The situation of the Rohingya in undeniably a complex and multidimensional problem. However, Indonesia holds a moral responsibility to actively engage in humanitarian rescue efforts, to prevent further anti-refugee discourse in social media, and to improve its maritime security through non-traditional security measures.

On March 21, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced a (Rohingya) “genocide determination.” The U.S. decision was largely welcomed by Rohingya survivors.

Myanmar is a signatory to the interstate treaty Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) or Genocide Convention. Since it launched its first genocidal purge against Rohingyas in February 1978, two successive generations of Rohingya rights activists—some, lawyers—have named the crime their group has endured as genocide and campaigned for international recognition.

As evidenced from numerous “welcoming statements” from refugee camps in Bangladesh and diaspora campaign groups, the Rohingya rightly feel vindicated now that one of the world’s most powerful states has officially called the crimes against them a genocide, albeit after years of strategic avoidance. Within their reasoning for avoidance, was not wanting to rock the country’s Washington-brokered, neo-liberal “democratic transition,” with Aung San Suu Kyi eventually taking the helm as Myanmar state counsellor in 2016.

Washington’s strategic calculation, namely that by not calling crimes against the Rohingya a genocide, the United States would in due course steer Myanmar’s most powerful stakeholder, the military, away from Washington’s number one imperial rival, China, also proved patently false.

Moreover, I would venture a guess that the divestment of the California-headquartered Chevron corporation from its three-decades of highly controversial natural gas production in Myanmar removed a significant corporate barrier in declaring that Myanmar has committed the crime of genocide. The construction of the gas pipeline was associated with the use of forced labor and other crimes against humanity.

Predictably, Myanmar’s coup regime dismissed Blinken’s announcement as “politically motivated.”  Likewise, led by Myanmar’s military-patronized Buddhist, Islamic, and Hindu leaders and cronies, the newly formed Interfaith Peace and Harmony Council joined the military regime in dismissing and denouncing Blinken’s “determination” as a fantastical announcement, falsely claiming that there was no corroborating evidence.

The painful truth is that this religious council’s statement and the regime’s dismissal most likely would have been endorsed by Aung San Suu Kyi, had she not been imprisoned after the coup. She was the council’s original patron and the regime’s most significant civilian collaborator.

The Burmese Nobel Peace laureate has lost her moral authority and international stature after years of studied silence and evasions over her country’s well-documented genocide. Her old friends and loyal supporters, including the late Desmond Tutu, have publicly called her out on her culpability.

In December 2019, in her capacity as Myanmar state counsellor, the de facto head of state, Suu Kyi traveled to The Hague where she served as the agent or official state representative in The Gambia v. Myanmar case and denied Gambia’s genocide allegations lodged at the UN’s highest court of states, the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Blinken’s “genocide determination” pinned the genocide label exclusively on the country’s military leaders. In fact, genocides are institutional crimes typically planned, organized, managed, executed, and denied by various organs of a state and those who were in charge.

During the two genocidal purges of 2016 and 2017, which were the sole focus of the U.S. State Department’s forensic investigation completed in 2018 involving interviews with 1,000 survivors in refugee camps in Bangladesh, Aung San Suu Kyi was Myanmar’s state counsellor, foreign minister, and the autocratic chair of the then ruling National League for Democracy.

Her official denial of genocide at the ICJ  and her public acts of denial on numerous occasions removed any doubt as to where she stood and what her official and public roles were in the crime which the United States has now officially called a genocide.

On my part, as a Burmese scholar and activist who blew the genocide whistle, I should also share the joy of vindication with my fellow Myanmar people, namely the Rohingya.

In 2014, following a three-year study, I co-authored The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingya, the first academic study of Rohingya persecution using the genocide framework, jointly conducted with my researcher colleague and wife Natalie Brinham (pseudonym Alice Cowley).

But I do not add my voice to the international chorus of welcomes to Blinken’s genocide determination for several reasons.

First, Blinken’s genocide determination was not accompanied by any indication whatsoever that the United States is determined to mobilize its enormous financial, military, and diplomatic clout in the right direction—that is to help the current post-Aung San Suu Kyi wave of popular resistance, armed and non-violent, that seek to delegitimize, weaken, and eventually force the military to relinquish its monopoly over Myanmar’s state institutions, the very institutions and structures which served as the instruments of genocide.

Washington is capable of such acts as has been amply demonstrated in its response to Russia’s crimes of aggression against Ukraine. Since February 24, when the Russian tanks rolled across the Ukrainian borders, not a day has gone by, without the United States announcing some kind of concrete punitive measures or threats against Russia.

In my FORSEA Dialogue on Democratic Struggles across Asia on March 21, Ei Thinzar Maung, this year’s Burmese recipient of the U.S. Secretary of State’s International Women of Courage Award, and Padoh Saw Taw Nee, head of the Foreign Affairs Department of the Karen National Union, Myanmar’s oldest resistance organization, publicly urged the United States government to release the $1 billion Myanmar sovereign fund frozen by Blinken’s boss, President Biden, following the coup in Myanmar so that the money could be used to fund Myanmar’s rightful resistance against the “terrorist”-like occupying military.

I am painfully aware that Myanmar people’s armed resistance against the genocidal military is not deemed support-worthy, unlike the Ukrainian resistance that is fighting the West’s proxy war against Putin’s Russia.

I have long shared the widespread dismay towards Washington’s foot-dragging regarding the gravest crimes in international law that has occurred irrespective of the political party in the White House. It’s an entirely different matter when groups such as DAESH, the “Islamic State,” or adversarial state actors (such as China)—then, the U.S. springs into action. After all, these battles advance American strategic agendas.

Undeniably some genocides are accorded more importance than others, explaining the wealth of material on the Second World War compared to other genocides. Funding and scholarships are more easily available for activities related to research and dissemination in the context of the most ‘popular’ genocides, and academic conferences tend to set themes and titles alluding more directly to them.

By now, the rational of this bias is widely explained by the following: first, that the Great White-Northern Powers had and have ongoing connections, in terms of family, religion, culture, or otherwise, to the genocide that took place between 1939-1945—it was after all a genocide committed by Europeans on Europeans in Europe.

Second, by the fact that purely charitable actions are rare, and that if the Great White-Northern Powers are to direct time, energy and other resources into halting genocide, they should have vested interests therein.

Third (another way of phrasing the second) that the Bismarckian concept of realpolitik, that is of adopting strategic interests over moral and ideological ones, aptly explains the conduct of the super powers so far, especially in their decisions to intervene (or not to) in countries plagued by genocide.

All of this may also expound the outright neglect of ongoing genocides (currently the Uyghurs in China and Rohingyas in Myanmar) because tackling them more directly wouldn’t benefit the interests of the Great White-Northern Powers. Interfering with the internal affairs of another state by prodding it to stop persecuting its people may make an enemy of it for instance.

The Doctrine of (State) Sovereignty signifies that neither a state, nor an entity, not even an international one may have an upper-hand over a state in ‘telling it what to do’, preventing even the powerful from intervening—often alluded to as the ‘sovereignty problem’. This often likens the international legal system to a toothless tiger.

History has shown that a state must be thoroughly broken, its government quasi absent for another to intervene and set it in order. Moreover reticence over intervention is explained by the fact that pointing fingers at one state may cause it in turn, if comparably powerful, to point fingers back.

For these reasons, attaching the label of genocide on the conduct of a government is treated with caution. Understanding these dynamics at work is not hard if a parallel is drawn with the way people act towards one another in the upkeep of their relationships.

In lieu of affixing the label of ‘genocide’, euphemisms such as ‘cleansing’, ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘mass killings’, ‘mass atrocity’ are resorted to.

The atrocities in Srebrenica were also denied the label by the UN, despite recognition by the ICTY and ICJ; instead Kofi Annan referred to it as a ‘massacre’. Rewind a few decades, this was equally a disaster for Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge regime, an ally of China, and hence not of the US, was given recognition in the UN General Assembly soon after its horrendous perpetrations between 1975-1979, despite appeals by other governments decrying its actions.

Equally noteworthy is how the label of genocide is never associated with the acts of the United States, and usually with those of its enemy.

The bias of international courts and organisations towards the superpowers, in particular the United States, cannot be denied.

Equally noteworthy is how the label of genocide is never associated with the acts of the United States, and usually with those of its enemy (or the enemy of another superpower), indicative of how biased the perception is of who is ‘evil’ and who is not. Thus all the principal international bodies have by now labelled the perpetrations of the Khmer Rouge regime as genocide, while sparing the United States of all accusations despite their perpetrations in Cambodia when they waged war against neighbouring Vietnam.

A similar approach was adopted in relation to Iraq under the governance of Saddam Hussein, while the US escaped punishment despite perpetrations that led to the killing of civilians in the country.

Without a doubt, many of the criminal and condemnable actions of the superpowers are left unpunished, and the politics of genocide are such that these states continue to exert influence over international decision-making, and indirectly, over international courts of law (ICC, ICJ, ICTY).

The recent elaborate rhetoric on the ‘responsibility (of states or other organisations) to protect (others)’ does not seem to have the intended effect on the superpowers which firstly, are still immune when they operate as perpetrators, and secondly have enough leeway to pick and choose when and where they will intervene in fulfilling their responsibility to protect.

The contrast in the treatment of the uprisings in Libya and Sri Lanka as an illustration of the above, is on point. (The United States’ long-standing animosity towards the Middle East is also all the more evident in this case.) Despite the Sri Lankan government’s assault on the Tamil civilians between 2008-2009, Ban Ki-Moon failed to mobilise the UN, attracting criticism by Amnesty International.

In fact the UN Panel of Experts did not make a recommendation to the ICC to launch an investigation for the mass killings even as ‘no-fire zones’ were turned into ‘free-fire’ ones. In contrast, in the case of Libya, Ban Ki-Moon as well as the High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned the Gaddafi regime within days, and an investigation was quickly carried out by the ICC, including the issuance of arrest warrants for Gaddafi, his son, and brother-in-law.

As to the decision on the intervention in Libya, Obama conveniently played his trump card by evoking the desire of the United States to protect states in need of help, saying: ‘Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. United States of America is different. And as President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.’

As a reminder of the directive power of realpolitik, and that no actions are completely charitable as mentioned above, in the same statement Obama went on to mention America’s strategic interests in intervening in Libya.

He highlighted how war in Libya would drive refugees out into neighbouring countries and put a strain over the fragile transitions in Egypt and Tunisia. (It is doubtful that the strategic interests spelled out would be limited to just that.) Such are the dynamics that summarise the treatment of the label of genocide, and the politics involved therein.

So far the main tactic in avoiding the label of genocide in court settings has been to prove the absence of genocidal intent: this has been done by showing that acts of murder were a ‘war act’ rather than part of a larger programme to get rid of a group, an ethnicity, or a genus. As Samantha Power wrote in A Problem from Hell, promises resonating with the slogan ‘Never Again’ have been made by each incumbent President of the United States, but never held.