Rohingya Archives - Politics Today https://politicstoday.org/tag/rohingya/ Sat, 13 Jan 2024 19:34:50 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.8 The Rohingya and Indonesia’s Buck-Passing https://politicstoday.org/the-rohingya-and-indonesia/ Fri, 12 Jan 2024 16:17:57 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/?p=28935

The influx of refugees from Myanmar to Indonesia has constantly increased in 2023, which caused local unease and protest in Aceh.

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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.

Read: Myanmar’s Once Nationalist Military Has Just Lost the Nation

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.”

Read: American Political Opportunism and the Long Overdue Rohingya Genocide Determination

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.

Read: Genocide on Trial: The Rohingya Plight and Gambia’s Moral Foreign Policy

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.

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]]> American Political Opportunism and the Long Overdue Rohingya Genocide Determination https://politicstoday.org/united-states-rohingya-genocide-determination/ Wed, 30 Mar 2022 18:24:57 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/united-states-rohingya-genocide-determination/

By not calling crimes against the Rohingya a genocide, the US falsely though it would steer Myanmar’s military away from Washington’s imperial rival, China.

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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.

Read: An Axis of Evil: Why Russia and China Protect Myanmar’s Military Regime

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.

Read: Myanmar’s Once Nationalist Military Has Just Lost the Nation

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).

Read: Why Some Genocides Are More Equal Than Others

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.

Read: Genocide on Trial: The Rohingya Plight and Gambia’s Moral Foreign Policy

Using the Genocide Convention only when it serves the U.S. strategic and political interests cheapens the term “genocide” and undermines the gravity of the crimes. The political instrumentalization adds insult to the injuries of many—not only the Rohingyas, but also all other preceding victim groups.

By not calling genocides by their legal name, Washington follows a decades-old pattern of failing to prevent genocide and failing to punish genocidal perpetrators and criminal states. According to Dr. Gregory Stanton, former U.S. diplomat and renowned genocide scholar at Genocide Watch, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Warren Christopher was known to have instructed all U.S. missions not to use the word “genocide,” only “acts of genocide” in the midst of Rwanda’s mass killings, while Kofi Annan, under the heavy influence of the Cold War-victorious Americans and in his capacity as head of the UN Peacekeeping Operations at the New York headquarters, ordered the UN Peacekeeping Forces in Kigali, Rwanda to stand down as the genocide was visibly underway.

Samantha Power, Obama’s U.S. representative to the United Nations and now Biden’s head of the United States Agency for International Aid (USAID), won a Pulitzer with her book entitled A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide which indignantly detailed a long history of U.S. failures to do good in cases of genocides. Three successive U.S. presidents, Obama, Trump, and the incumbent Biden, have all been fully aware of the genocidal nature of Myanmar’s persecution of the Rohingya. Painfully, until this week, the United States held its nose.

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Rather ironically, Power who, as a former Balkan War journalist, asked, “Why do American leaders who vow ‘never again’ repeatedly fail to stop genocide?” chose to toe Washington’s line when she joined the U.S. government. Wai Wai Nu, a prominent Rohingya campaigner and former trainee in my genocide-sensitivity workshops at the Documentation Centre, Cambodia, recounted to me her meeting with then U.S. representative Madam Power in her office in New York where she was gifted a copy of A Problem from Hell, with an autographic note, which clearly indicated that the best-selling author of U.S. policy failures in genocides KNEW what the Rohingyas were subjected to genocide. Still, Power chose silence.

The historical fact is this: Myanmar’s genocidal purges of the Rohingya Muslims have been on Washington’s radar ever since the late U.S. senator Edward Kennedy, made his first visit to Bangladesh in 1978— the year of the first wave of the Rohingya genocidal violence into the then newly independent republic of Bangladesh. Kennedy was instrumental in the U.S. decision to contribute $250,000 to humanitarian relief for “Muslims from Burma” as the victims were then referred to in various regional news outlets such as the Far Eastern Economic Review, Bangkok Post, and Pakistan’s Dawn.

Beyond stating that Washington has made a $1 million contribution to the United Nations’ Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar based in Geneva and Blinken’s “genocide determination” speech, flowery and emotive, at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, no U.S. commitments have been made on specific actions by the Biden administration to support the reversal of the genocidal policies and practices against 600,000 Rohingya trapped inside Myanmar in the Internally displaced persons (IDPs) camps and open-air prisons of Western Myanmar.

Nor does Blinken’s act of determination offer any concrete support for Myanmar’s nationwide resistance aimed at dismantling Myanmar’s repressive and murderous structures, also being weaponized against the public at large by the same regime.

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]]> An Axis of Evil: Why Russia and China Protect Myanmar’s Military Regime https://politicstoday.org/an-axis-of-evil-why-russia-and-china-protect-myanmars-military-regime/ Fri, 14 May 2021 13:53:08 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/an-axis-of-evil-why-russia-and-china-protect-myanmars-military-regime/

China and Russia are enabling and protecting the criminal regime in Myanmar that resorts to terrorism against its own people.

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Ha… Truly! Truly! The Burmese fighter just got shot down!” exclaimed a young village woman as she videotaped an attack aircraft which flew high above her wooden house in the ethnic Kachin State on the morning of May 3. Her 41-second clip, which captured the very moment the Russian-made Mi-35 Phoenix transport/attack helicopter got hit by a rocket fired by the Kachin Independence Army ground troops and went down, has since gone viral on Burmese social media platforms where it is widely and wildly celebrated by anti-coup protesters.

The attack helicopter was hit by what must have been a surface-to-air shoulder-launched rocket fired by the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) troops. To the wild delight of eyewitnesses in Eastern Myanmar and Burmese social media users alike,  the Russian attack helicopter went down very fast without any sign of the pilots having been able to eject from their cockpit.

To generations of politically conscious Burmese, the initial shine of the classless, raceless utopia of the USSR of the 1930s has long worn off, decades before the collapse of what the late Ronald Reagan memorably dubbed the “Evil Empire.” In the early years of the first military dictatorship under General Ne Win, the word “Moscow” was the popular Burmese slang for the country’s notorious jails where thousands of dissidents were locked up in appalling conditions.

Read: Myanmar’s Once Nationalist Military Has Just Lost the Nation

Ever since the Myanmar Tatmadaw, the country’s armed forces, acquired sophisticated, Russian-made attack helicopters, ethnic armed resistance organizations have been known to entertain the need for military hardware which could protect their ethnic minority communities – and the troops which usually control the country’s highlands – from airstrikes by these “beasts.”  The morale and combat capacities of Naypyidaw’s ground troops are extremely low, despite the observations to the contrary by foreign armchair experts on Myanmar.

Even many lay persons among the Burmese public with rudimentary understanding of military affairs are acutely aware of the game-changing role Stinger shoulder-fired, anti-aircraft, surface-to-air rockets played in turning the tide of war in Afghanistan. Stingers were used by fighters who attempted to repel the occupying Soviet troops.

Ever since the Myanmar Tatmadaw, the country’s armed forces, acquired sophisticated, Russian-made attack helicopters, ethnic armed resistance organizations have been known to entertain the need for military hardware which could protect their ethnic minority communities.

I don’t know the exact weapon that the KIA fired to bring down the first Russian attack helicopter since the resumption of the intensifying civil war in Northern Myanmar. In the country’s eastern region along the Thai-Myanmar borders, where the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) troops have been battling the coup regime’s troops, the Myanmar military has been launching airstrikes against ethnic villages of Karen resistance fighters, using sophisticated attack aircraft – fighter jets and helicopters – capable of carrying out radar-guided night attacks.

Since the coup of February 1, 2021, much has been written about China’s role in the military’s coup, while Russian support for the coup regime of Min Aung Hlaing has been covered or discussed less.

The Burmese public opinion has categorically turned anti-China as a result of Beijing’s unmistakable backing of the coup regime. But Russian support has been no less consequential, in terms of the supply of military hardware, veto-protection at the Security Council, and the training of Burmese military officers in weapons engineering, information technology, and other military sciences.

Read: Genocide on Trial: The Rohingya Plight and Gambia’s Moral Foreign Policy

Ten years ago, the significant Russian – and N. Korean – involvement in Myanmar military’s arms procurement and military training hit world news headlines, and specifically the Burmese’s quest for nuclear and missile technologies. One of the major Myanmar policy concerns on the part of the Obama administration was the resumption of Myanmar – N. Korea ties towards this unsavory tech-acquisition.

But neither the Burmese military regime’s collaboration with Pyongyang nor the attempts to acquire advanced Russian technology produced any yield in terms of nukes and advanced weapons systems.  In spite of this failure, over the last 20 years, the Myanmar military has kept up its military-to-military ties with Moscow.

Around 2010, I interviewed several Myanmar army defectors in temporary hiding in Thailand and the Philippines, who, as weapons engineers, were sent in the early 2000s to Moscow and St. Petersburg for PhDs and other advanced training in military engineering. The Myanmar Ministry of Defence Department of Military Training has established a Russian language department at the country’s military academies – the Defence Services Academy (DSA) and the Defence Services Technological Academy (DSTA) – where thousands of young Burmese men between the ages of 16 and 21 undergo 4-year-long officer training. Over at least the last 20 years, hundreds of graduates every year have been sent to the Russian Federation for further studies.

Members of human rights organizations gather to show solidarity for human rights, freedom and democracy in Asia in Tokyo, Japan on May 09, 2021. Protesters carrying East Turkestan, Myanmar, Cambodia and Mongolia flags, shout "Stop the Uighur massacre", "Freedom to East Turkistan", "Release Suu Kyi", "Help Southern Mongolia" slogans. Demonstration Japan protest Tokyo Turkmenistan Uighur Photo by David Mareuil. Anadolu Agency.

Some Myanmar observers have already pointed out how Russia has been a major arms supplier for the regime in Naypyidaw.  According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Russia and China account for 31.6% and 56.34% respectively in Myanmar’s arms imports over the last decade (2010-19).

Alongside China, Putin’s Russia has also proven to be a fully reliable veto-protector at the United Nations Security Council when it comes even to non-binding resolutions around the egregious and pervasive human rights crimes of the Myanmar military, from war crimes and crimes against humanity in the ethnic minority regions of Northern and Eastern Myanmar to the full-blown genocide against Rohingyas in Western Myanmar. Even in the midst of the genocidal killings of Rohingyas, the Russian representatives at the United Nations typically echoed and amplified the justificatory polemic of Myanmar’s military, falsely framing Rohingya Muslims as a security threat to the country.

Even in the midst of the genocidal killings of Rohingyas, the Russian representatives at the United Nations typically echoed and amplified the justificatory polemic of Myanmar’s military, falsely framing Rohingya Muslims as a security threat to the country.

Ideologically, Putin’s Russia operates from this antiterrorism space. Moscow used the same rhetoric against the independence-minded breakaway majority-Muslim republic of Chechnya, where the Russian military used its overwhelming might to crush popular independence aspirations and armed revolt against Russian rule.

In addition, the fact that former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev (2008-2012), a Putin ally who is considered more liberal and outward-looking than the ex-KGB killer, failed in his attempts to adopt democratic reforms and create a high tech-based, and a diversified modern economy has forced Russia to fall back on its economic dependence on selling off natural gas and arms.
Geostrategically, Russia has few allies in Asia as India, its former ally, is now increasingly tied to the United States via the Indo-Pacific (military) alliance known as  The Quad, or the US-led Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, an informal strategic alliance of USA, Japan, India and Australia  Therefore, protecting the Myanmar military unconditionally is protecting both Moscow’s pocket and its strategic toehold in mainland Southeast Asia.

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Even the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), not known for defending human rights or promoting democratization, apparently found the Myanmar military’s post-coup slaughter of unarmed peaceful protesters and its terroristic methods in quelling the nationwide uprisings indefensible.

Alas, Moscow viewed these barbaric acts of its Southeast Asian arms customer differently: Russian Deputy Defence Minister General Alexander Fomin was the only high-ranking foreign representative to attend Myanmar military’s Armed Forces Day on March 27 – all the others were low-level officials from seven Asian neighbors. The day before, Fomin received the highest military honors from Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing, the coup leader, accused of committing genocide against Rohingyas. A report by the Financial Times on April 2 reminded readers that Fomin’s presence “echoed (Moscow’s) 2015 decision to lend military support to President Bashar al-Assad’s pariah regime in Syria, helping turn the tide of the civil war in the dictator’s favor.”

For increasingly expansionist China, Myanmar with its 1,400-miles Sino-Burmese borders, is geopolitically too important to let any domestic actor friendly to the United States, and conversely hostile to Beijing’s core interests, come to power. In an unprecedented manner, Chairman- for-Life Xi officially invited Myanmar’s iconic political leader Aung San Suu Kyi to Beijing in 2014 and feted her as the country’s leader even though at the time she was only the leader of the opposition party National League for Democracy (NLD).

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As both the Myanmar military leadership and Suu Kyi received international condemnation for their respective roles in the Rohingya genocide by Western governments – particularly the United States – China was not wrong to deem either party, be it the generals or Suu Kyi and her once pro-human rights NLD, as acceptable.

Suu Kyi’s presidential predecessor, ex-general Thein Sein, cancelled the largest Sino-Burmese hydropower project in Northern Myanmar, the mega-dam project at Myitsone, the confluence of the two riverlets which form the country’s main artery, Irrawaddy River. This was done in part to cement his attempts at renormalizing the Burmese military’s ties with the West, in general, and the Obama White House with its (anti-China) “ Pivot to Asia” or “Rebalancing” towards Asia and, in part, to register the unhappiness of the Myanmar military with regard to Beijing’s tacit support for anti-Burmese ethnic armed resistance organizations along the Sino-Myanmar borders such as the Kachin Independence Organization, the ethnically Han Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) of Kokang and, most substantively, the Mandarin-speaking United Wa State Army, Beijing’s local proxy in Eastern Myanmar.

Ironically, once considered as “pro-American” by Beijing Suu Kyi inked the bilateral Sino-Myanmar agreement to allow Beijing to build its single most important geo-economic project in Myanmar: the 800-kilometer-long gas and oil twin pipeline which originates at Ma Dae, the Western Myanmar coastline of Rakhine State and snakes through Burma until it reaches the southern Chinese province of Yunnan.

Read: Genocide as a Label of Choice: Why Some Genocides Are More Equal Than Others

Additionally, China has gained Myanmar’s official concessions to build a deep-water port on the same Rakhine coast of western Myanmar, which serves as one of only two major access points to the Indian Ocean for Beijing – the other is Gwadar in Pakistan, China’s key strategic ally. In addition, Beijing also pursues the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor project, which is in turn an integral part of its Belt and Road Initiative, increasingly seen as an economically colonialist project throughout Asia.

Of these projects, the Chinese pipeline is the single most strategically important project for Beijing in its quest for energy security. Until this overland pipeline’s completion, China was exclusively dependent on Middle Eastern gas and the oil transported through the narrow Straits of Malacca in the South China Sea. The latter was already volatile and tension-filled, thanks to Beijing’s unlawful projection of its sovereignty beyond its exclusive economic zone (200 nautical miles from the baseline shores) in contravention of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea of 1982.

Emphatically speaking, China views this 800-kilometer-long twin pipeline as its “sovereign asset” which is integral to its long-term “Grand Strategy” to remake its fairy-tale “Middle Kingdom” as the “Center of the New World Order” wherein China replaces, it is fervently hoped, the USA as the global hegemon.

Against the backdrop of the early slaughter of unarmed, peaceful protesters by the Myanmar coup regime of General Min Aung Hlaing, according to the secret memo (dated February 24) leaked by anti-coup diplomats inside Myanmar’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Naypyidaw, Beijing’s top foreign policy planners held a 45-minute confidential Zoom meeting with Myanmar police chief and other senior bureaucrats in Myanmar’s Foreign Ministry. The sole focus of the discussion was how best to protect China’s pipeline and, to a lesser extent, other economic projects such as the notorious Letpadaung Copper Mine and some Chinese-owned factories in the old capital Yangon.

Read: Russia’s Changing Relationship with India: Arms Talk

Against the widely shared images of the anti-coup protesters in Myanmar burning effigies of Chairman Xi and the Chinese flag, China’s official English-language mouthpiece, The Global Times, has run editorials unveiling the open threat that China could send troops across the borders to protect its assets and interests. The same Global Times editorial board also attacked well-known Myanmar cyberactivists such as Nay San Lwin of the Free Rohingya Coalition for spreading anti-China sentiments in social media.

China has always spun its Myanmar policy as “non-interference” in the sovereign affairs of its southern neighbor despite the fact that it consistently protects the military perpetrators in power in Naypyidaw. The Burmese publicly and openly mock China’s indefensible rhetoric of treating the slaughter of unarmed Myanmar protesters – and the genocide of Rohingya in 2017 – by its client Burmese regime as an “internal affair” by presenting the popular desire and strident calls for blowing up the Chinese pipeline as an “internal affair” of Myanmar.

Over the last three months since the  coup there have been documented accounts of Chinese security personnel physically stationed in Myanmar providing advisory and technical assistance to the coup perpetrators as they commit crimes against humanity such as forced disappearances, summary executions, murder by snipers, night raids and abductions, the detention of over 4,000 activists, and the slaughter of 750 unarmed Myanmar civilians and activists alike.

Of all the external players with varying degrees of concerns regarding the Southeast Asian country’s all-out civil war, Russia and China have the greatest leverage vis-à-vis India, ASEAN, the USA, the EU, and Japan. So far, Moscow and Beijing appear to think that their arms customer and/or geopolitical client, namely the Burmese military, will kill its way out of the corner which it has put itself in.

Nation states, and particularly the ones with expansionist projects, typically pursue their hardcore material and strategic interests. As perpetrators of international state crimes themselves, there is no sign that either Xi’s China or Putin’s Russian Federation will review and amend their shared anti-human rights and anti-democratic orientation, at home or globally. Bearing great pain for the 54 million Burmese of all ethnicities and faiths, these two global powers are an axis of evil, enabling and protecting the criminal regime that resorts to terrorism against its own people.

The post An Axis of Evil: Why Russia and China Protect Myanmar’s Military Regime appeared first on Politics Today.

]]> Myanmar’s Once Nationalist Military Has Just Lost the Nation https://politicstoday.org/myanmars-once-nationalist-military-has-just-lost-the-nation/ Mon, 15 Mar 2021 10:00:14 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/myanmars-once-nationalist-military-has-just-lost-the-nation/

Whatever the outcome of the violent confrontation between civil society and the military will be, one thing is certain: the Burmese military has lost the nation irretrievably.

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National armed forces typically do not use snipers, heavily armed infantry divisions, and fighter-bombers to quell all unarmed peaceful protests – and during peace time. But Myanmar’s Tatmadaw, or the defense services, do.

Consequently, as evidenced in the thousands of social media comments, the overwhelming majority of public opinion in Myanmar has irreversibly turned against the armed forces. The multiethnic public views the Tatmadaw as a ruthless occupying force at best – and a downright terrorist mafia at worst.

For the country’s non-Burmese ethnic nationalities or national minorities such as the Karen, Kachin, Shan, Chin, Mon, Rakhine, Rohingya, and so on, the Tatmadaw – primarily commanded by majoritarian Burmese and exclusively by Buddhists – has been an alien colonial occupier.

If these communities in distress self-organize armed resistance, the Tatmadaw typically resorts to a variation of the old British era “pacification” military campaigns. It has burned entire ethnic minority villages, forcibly relocated villagers into controllable areas, or simply violently deported them across the borders into neighboring Thailand, India, or China.

To date, Myanmar under the military’s dominance is home to possibly the longest low-intensity civil war in the world, which ensued after World War II ended. There are about two dozen ethnic armed organizations, with varying troops all across the border regions, which are the ancestral homelands of myriad of ethnic minorities. The Tatmadaw’s war crimes and crimes against humanity are well-documented, and include rape as a weapon of communal subjugation, forced labor, summary execution, torture, murder, and so on.

Read: Why Some Genocides Are More Equal Than Others

In Myanmar’s western region of Rakhine that is adjacent to Bangladesh, the army has been engaged in systematic and sustained campaigns of terror against the Rohingya ethnic minority for the last 40 years. One of the major reasons the United Nations General Assembly established the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar as early as 1993 was the credible news reports of crimes against humanity against this Muslim minority.

In 2016 and 2017, the Burmese army waged the largest genocidal attacks on this unarmed, destitute, and vulnerable Muslim population of roughly two million. The attacks made the international community stand up and pay attention to the situation.

According to the report of the UN International Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar, in the span of 10 months, the army destroyed about 39,000 homes, mosques, schools, rice warehouses, and businesses while killing an estimated 10,000 Rohingyas of all ages and mass-raping women. The two campaigns of genocidal terror triggered the survival flight of a total of 840,000 survivors into neighboring Bangladesh.

VIDEO: Myanmar activist speaks out while on the run from police

This large-scale systematic destruction of Rohingyas as a minority community and the crimes of deportation en masse have resulted in two major judicial and investigative processes. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague has a pending genocide case after Gambia launched a legal challenge against Myanmar, as a state party to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, on violating its treaty obligations to prevent genocide and punish perpetrators under the terms of the Genocide Convention.

Meanwhile, in the same city, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has launched a full investigation into Myanmar’s crimes of deportation and other grave international crimes that have led to the exodus of nearly one million Rohingyas from their ancestral land of Western Myanmar into Bangladesh. In both court cases, Myanmar’s Tatmadaw is the main instrument of the international crimes and the Burmese commanders are the principal architects behind the crimes.

Although possibly not widely and severely despised among the majoritarian Burmese society, in segments of the population the army (Tatmadaw) is deeply despised  for its bloody crackdown of chronic political unrests, particularly by politically conscious university students, socially engaged Buddhist monks, labor rights activists, and farmers for their vocal criticism and opposition to half a century of military control and dominance over society, political affairs, and the national economy.

People gather to protest against the military coup in Mandalay, Myanmar on February 28, 2021. Photo by Stringer via Anadolu Images

The Burmese army has built expansive prison complexes and interrogation or torture centers all across the country where human rights activists, journalists, pro-democracy dissidents, and all types of regime critics are forced to confess to crimes they did not commit.

The Burmese military leaders have long discarded the pledge of the founder of the Myanmar Armed Forces Aung San to build a democratic federated union of multiethnic nations.

Since the commercial opening which followed the collapse of the one-party military dictatorship of General Ne Win with its economically ruinous socialist economy, the military in Myanmar has become the most dominant economic player. The generals, their families, and cronies have raked in their ill-gotten gains to the tunes of billions of dollars while the public at large remained pauperized. Roughly five million working-age Burmese of all backgrounds have left the country as migrant workers for greener pastures across Southeast Asia’s middle-income countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Politically, the Burmese military leaders have long discarded the pledge of the founder of the Myanmar Armed Forces Aung San to build a democratic federated union of multiethnic nations who join voluntarily along the principle of ethnic group equality and the right to self-determination. Successive generations of military leaders since the first coup of 1958 have typically been scornful of liberal democratic principles. They view the federal, power-sharing arrangement as a formula for Balkanization.

Read: Genocide on Trial: The Rohingya Plight and Gambia’s Moral Foreign Policy

Against the founding principles extensively worked out and articulated well by Aung San, who is widely viewed as the primary architect of the country’s independence from Britain, the top military commanders, who have had a disproportionate share of power and influence over this nationalist institution, have built a radically different version of the armed forces.

The new incarnation of the Tatmadaw sees itself as the only cohesive national organization capable of keeping the fractious multiethnic country together. The military officer corps sees itself as ideologically “pure”- as a nationalist and selfless body of competent men vis-à-vis bickering, incompetent politicians and unruly activists.

Half a century of total control over society, politics, and the economy is long enough for this ruling and/or dominant institution to forge itself as a distinct social class, with its class, economic, and political interests. Typically, in military-controlled polities, the military is referred to as a state within the state. In the Burmese case, the military has become a separate society within the society at large.

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Historically, the Tatmadaw was founded as a local proxy against the British in Burma in December 1942 under the patronage of fascist Japan with the nationalist Aung San, Aung San Suu Kyi’s martyred father, as its first commander-in-chief.

Aung San’s vision of this force was that it would be a crucial instrument in the wider popular struggle for liberation to end a century of British colonial rule and, post-independence, to turn it into a professional military, in a federated democratic union of multiethnic peoples.

Suu Kyi herself has repeatedly identified herself with the armed forces – even while the troops have been engaged in vicious military operations – expressing her “genuine affection” for the generals whom she called “my siblings because they are my father’s sons.” She has defended the Tatmadaw against genocide allegations at numerous international fora – most shockingly at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). She has publicly praised this institution as it launched brutal military operations against other minorities such as Buddhist Rakhine on the western coast.

Since she was first elected MP in the 2012 by-elections, Suu Kyi has sought to help open the doors for the hermit-like army leaders, particularly with respect to the militaries in western democracies. Apparently, she was motivated by her desire to trigger some kind of re-professionalization of the Tatmadaw so that it will be a cooperative partner in her main project of democratic reforms. But her reforms were becoming a serious threat “the military elite’s institutional and personal interests – in terms of political influence, bureaucratic dominance, and financial interests.

Read: Pope Francis’s failure to say the word “Rohingya”

The top commanders of the Burmese army have come to fear the prospect of having to face justice as a result of the ICC’s full investigation into the military’s atrocities against Rohingyas. To make matters worse, the well-known personal animosities between the Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing, who was originally scheduled to retire this July, and Suu Kyi finally boiled over. Accordingly, the coup of February 1 was the military establishment’s attempt to re-assert its control in the most radical and direct ways.

However, the coup leaders in Myanmar were stung by the incredibly decisive popular opposition from society at large. Nor did they foresee that the ethnic armed organizations, which had signed nationwide ceasefire agreements with the generals, would throw in their lots with the millions of defiant protesters who have resorted to civil disobedience.

Perhaps the action that has had the most chilling and crippling impact on the coup leaders is the fact that the Civil Disobedience Movement enjoys tremendous support and participation by the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who serve in all non-security ministries including the important Foreign Ministry and other technical ministries such as Health, Transport, Construction, Mining, Forestry, Agriculture, Finance, Education, and so on.

On February 26, Myanmar’s Permanent Representative to the UN Kyaw Moe Tun made world news headlines when he officially briefed the UN General Assembly on the people’s revolt – which he openly endorsed – and urged the UN not to recognize the coup regime. In Myanmar’s capital, Naypyidaw, a senior foreign ministry official leaked six pages of damning classified minutes of the February 23 meeting between the Chinese and Myanmar security and diplomatic officials.

The result is that the coup leaders have found themselves with a completely non-functioning and hollowed out political state; a determined, sustained, and massive revolt on an unprecedented scale; and widespread global condemnation including the unanimous presidential statement by the Security Council that strongly condemned the violence against the peaceful protesters and voiced “deep concerns” over the coup’s restrictions.

Protesters pose for photos near an armored personnel carrier parked outside the Central Bank of Myanmar as they gather to protest against the military coup, in Yangon, Myanmar on February 15, 2021. Photo by Stringer via Anadolu Images

Shocked, angered, and globally friendless (save for Russia and China), the coup leaders in Myanmar responded to the protests at home in the only way they know: organized terror. Over the last 36 days, the Burmese military has gone on to commit widespread crimes against humanity against completely unarmed, peaceful protesters – estimated to be over 20 million across the country.

On March 4, 2021, Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, officially called on the Myanmar army to end the murder and enforced disappearances of civilian populations in over 570 locations throughout Myanmar. Over 50 civilians have been murdered – some by military snipers from roof tops of urban buildings – while over 1,750 have been detained. What is more, an unknown number of protesters and citizens alike have been forcibly disappeared by the Tatmadaw and other security units deployed by the State Administration Council (SAC), the military junta.

It is a great irony that the Tatmadaw, which was founded in December 1942 as a nationalist armed liberation force for the colonized, ethnically diverse peoples of colonial Burma by the revolutionary democrat Aung San, has categorically morphed into the country’s most universally hated and feared organization used as the primary instrument of repression and exploitation against humanity by criminals in generals’ uniforms.

This once venerable institution is now at war with the entire society, who now cheer gleefully at the latest news of a soldier being killed in the Rohingya area in a bomb blast, assumed to have been committed by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, dubbed as “Muslim terrorists.”

Whatever the immediate outcome of this violent confrontation between civil society and the military will be, one thing is certain: the Burmese military has lost the nation irretrievably. Without a nation that supports it the Tatmadaw once and for all has stopped being a national defense service. The overwhelming majority in Myanmar view and treat the Tatmadaw as terrorists that must be repelled by any means possible.

The post Myanmar’s Once Nationalist Military Has Just Lost the Nation appeared first on Politics Today.

]]> Genocide as a Label of Choice: Why Some Genocides Are More Equal Than Others https://politicstoday.org/genocide-as-a-label-of-choice-why-some-genocides-are-more-equal-than-others/ Wed, 03 Feb 2021 08:14:17 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/genocide-as-a-label-of-choice-why-some-genocides-are-more-equal-than-others/

Without a shadow of doubt, some genocides are accorded more importance than others. This has to do with international politics.

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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.

Read: Genocide on Trial: The Rohingya Plight and Gambia’s Moral Foreign Policy

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.

For long the Clinton administration refused to employ the term ‘genocide’ to qualify the Rwandan genocide (although this practice was endorsed by New Zealand, Czech Republic and the UN Security Council) purportedly as an excuse for non-intervention. Instead, the favoured term of the US government during that period was ‘acts of genocide’.

A relative of a Srebrenica Genocide victim mourns by a gravestone at the Srebrenica–Potocari Memorial, ahead of the burial of recently identified remains of 33 victims of Srebrenica Genocide in Srebrenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina on July 11, 2019. Photo by Samir Yordamovi, Anadolu Images

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.

Read: From Balfour to the Nakba: Zionist Settler Colonialism

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.

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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.

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]]> Genocide on Trial: The Rohingya Plight and Gambia’s Moral Foreign Policy https://politicstoday.org/genocide-on-trial-the-rohingya-plight-and-gambias-moral-foreign-policy/ Fri, 20 Dec 2019 10:56:51 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/genocide-on-trial-the-rohingya-plight-and-gambias-moral-foreign-policy/

Gambia became the first nation to bring charges of genocide against another state to the International Court of Justice, setting a new precedent in moral leadership, foreign policy, and the protection of human rights.

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Once again the global community’s attention was turned to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, the Netherlands. On Tuesday, the 10th and Wednesday 11th December, lawyers and legal experts representing Gambia and Myanmar made their presentations before the court with varying degrees of persuasion. Gambia, with the support of the members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation filed a case before the ICJ alleging that the Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, committed acts of genocide against the Rohingya. While the final ruling on the case can take some time, hearings related to Gambia’s request for provisional measures for the immediate protection of the Rohingya people were heard.

In attendance was Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s once highly esteemed civilian leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi has more recently been the recipient of global condemnation for her silence and complicity in the Rohingya persecutions and was now, in a twist many would not imagined, fronting the court to defend her country’s horrendous actions. Indeed, when the Gambia, a tiny West African nation took Myanmar to the ICJ on November 11, on charges of genocide against the Rohingya community, humanity at large was ethically and morally “absolved” of its inaction. Gambia’s moral foreign policy and sense of duty to the continuing suffering of the Rohingya ought to be commended and reverberate a globally as a warning against regimes that torture, massacre and maim their citizens at will.

The Rohingya Muslim genocide

The Rohingya, a minority ethnic group from Myanmar’s North-Western Rakhine state, and the nation’s only overwhelmingly Muslim community has faced a sporadic military suppression for years. However, in 2017 the world witnessed a coordinated and large-scale persecution and of the Rohingya from Rakhine state. Consequently, since 25 August 2017, approximately 742,000, fled to neighbouring Bangladesh seeking refuge.

Despite the censorship and cover up of Myanmar’s military regime, testimonies from survivors painted a horrific picture of what happened during the military crackdowns. Narratives of pain, trauma and anguish have been documented among Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. In their report Forced Migration of Rohingya: The Untold Experience (2018) the Ontario International Development Agency (OIDA) noted how nearly 24,000 Rohingya were killed by the military, 34,000 thrown and burnt in fires by vigilante groups aided by the military, and of the despicable mass gang rapes of Rohingya women and girls.

In addition to the genocide, a comprehensive ethnocide against the Rohingya was carried out, with mosques and other cultural sites razed and destroyed by vigilante youths led by extremist Buddhist monks. In his book Myanmar’s Enemy Within: Buddhist Violence and the Making of a Muslim Other (2017) Francis Wade illustrates how Buddhist nationalism coupled with Islamophobic rhetoric borrowed from India’s Hindu-Nationalists and far-right movements in the West fuelled and exacerbated the continuing persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar.

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The Rohingya have been massacred en-masse, their homes destroyed, and their history and material culture erased from Rakhine state, those in Bangladeshi refugee camps have been rendered stateless, while the few who remain in Myanmar live under an apartheid style regime.

Humanity is on trial at the ICJ

Never has a nation brought charges of genocide against another nation to the ICJ. Gambia’s effort to seek accountability and ultimately redress for the persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar set a new precedent in foreign policy, the moral leadership of nation states, and for global justice against the worst human rights violations.

The plight facing the Rohingya has been catastrophic. The violence and persecution by the Myanmar military and the resulting humanitarian crisis that it occasioned did not receive equal global outrage and immediate action. Hence, it is understandable that many are praising and appreciating Gambia’s legal initiative at the ICJ – a defence which is long overdue. In their presentations before the court, lawyers for Gambia laid out documented details of  “mass shootings, throat slitting, infanticide, torture, rape and burning down of villages, carried out systematically and together amounting to the destruction of the Rohingya as a group, in whole or part”. This was excruciating evidence presented before the court as many watched online and across social media platforms globally.

Despite this, Aung San Suu Kyi’s defence was one of total denial, with her presence at The Hague eliciting widespread criticism and daily protests outside the court. Interestingly, throughout her speech before the court, Aung San Suu Kyi decidedly avoided to use the term “Rohingya”. Indeed this is a reflection of Myanmar’s state policy: one predicated on denial and the non-recognition of Rohingya persecution, suffering and even their very identity and citizenship of  Myanmar.

To be clear, the trial of genocide at the ICJ will not immediately lessen the Rohingya’s plight and suffering in Myanmar, and in those in refugee camps; but it sends a clear message to the military regime: the world will hold them accountable for their actions now and in the future. What the Rohingya will need is comprehensive and long-term humanitarian support that will rebuild and stabilize their livelihoods, and more importantly, the political will which will one day enable them to return to a safe and secure homeland in Rakhine state.

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]]> Rohingya Refugees say ‘No’ to Repatriation: Is Turkish Aid the Reason? https://politicstoday.org/rohingya-refugees-say-no-to-repatriation-is-turkish-aid-the-reason/ Tue, 17 Sep 2019 07:08:02 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/rohingya-refugees-say-no-to-repatriation-is-turkish-aid-the-reason/

Turkish aid has nothing to do with the Rohingya refusal to repatriate. It is in fact Turkey’s commitment to the Rohingya people at the international and local level that provides an important source of hope.

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The first group of Rohingya came to Bangladesh as refugees in the 1970s. But after the 1982 Myanmar Citizenship Law was passed, which denied citizenship to the Rohingya even refusing to use the name “Rohingya”, instead referring to them “Bengali”, an irregular Rohingya diaspora began to grow. But the most horrible and tragic exodus of Rohingya refugees occurred in 2017 when the Myanmar Army and ultra-nationalist Buddhists began mass persecution of the Rohingya in Myanmar’s Rakhine State. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya walked hundreds of miles through jungle and bush to reach Bangladesh, a safe haven. Camps were put up for them in Cox’s Bazar, the border district with Myanmar. Local people along with the whole country received them warm-heartedly. Humanitarian aid both domestically and internationally came pouring. My family itself like many others, sent a truck load of daily necessities to the camps. But, when Turkey’s First Lady Emine Erdogan herself visited the camps with a retinue of high-ranking officials, a new door opened for humanitarian aid that transcended the efforts made by all other countries or their affiliated NGOs working in the Rohingya camps.

The Turkish first lady Emine Erdogan visited the Rohingya Camps on 7 September, 2017 amid heightened global attention on the Rohingya crisis. She promised ongoing humanitarian help and also advocated this issue to the UN. It was to fulfil her promise of ongoing commitment to the Rohingya that the then Turkish PM Binali Yildirim came to Bangladesh in December of that same year to visit the camps. From then, four Turkish charity organizations—AFAD, TİKA (Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency), Türk Kızılayı (Turkish Red Crescent) and TDV (Turkiye Diyanet Foundation) —have been working restlessly on the ground. A government report by Turkey published in 2018 stated that the amount expended by these four Turkish humanitarian agencies from 2017, outnumbered $11.260.000 (TL 42.788.000). They have built extensive accommodation such as the Emir Sultan village, and set up clinics to provide emergency medical treatment among other achievements. As a result of their tremendous work, they were able to provide assistance to almost 700,000 Rohingya Refugees, 63.64% of the total refugees.

It has been a little over two years since 2017. Talks about the repatriation of the Rohingya started around August, 2018 and moved slowly. The first group of 3,540 people selected for repatriation was to return this August, 2019, but it never happened. Days afterwards, there was a mass rally attended by hundreds of thousands of Rohingya to demonstrate their unwillingness to return. It was in this very rally that they published a list of demands to be met before considering a return to Myanmar. The list talks about Myanmar citizenship, security and also accountability for the crimes that were committed against them. But this move by the Rohingya was not well received by both the government and the local community.

Just after this huge protest, the Bangladeshi government proscribed the activities of 41 NGOs who financed and helped to organize the event. It immediately halted all transactions made by those NGOs. A further ban of two other NGO’s followed. It is clear that the government of Bangladesh now considers the Rohingya as a threat. Tensions are also rising in local communities about the long-term impact of the presence of Rohingya refugees. In an ordinance, the government asked phone operators to halt their services because of fears that criminal activity can occur inside the camp due to its limited surveillance. And some recent incidents of violence including murder strengthened this suspicion. Locals fear that one day the Rohingya will take over their jobs and kick them off their own lands. But this very idea of ‘being taken over’ is nothing but propaganda spread by some mainstream media. The most surprising part of this propaganda is that it also includes Turkish humanitarian aid as a reason for the Rohingya’s refusal to repatriate.

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However, Turkish aid has nothing to do with the Rohingya community saying no to repatriation. No one wants to live in a foreign land dependent on the goodwill of others. They only do so if their life is threatened at home. When the Rohingya fled Myanmar in 2017, most of them lost one or many family members to the violence perpetrated by the Myanmar’s military and Buddhists terrorists. Their homes were torched, so many left with literally nothing. When a country like Turkey provides humanitarian assistance to help refugees live with basic human rights and dignity, it is understandable if many wishes to stay when the alternative is much more frightening and uncertain. 

Turkey has already played a big role in the Rohingya issue. In November, 2018, it presented a resolution at the UN that spoke about the issue of repatriation and urged the UN to take action to end the Rohingya crisis. The resolution was approved by a vote of 142-10. Of the ten countries that voted against this resolution, China, a close ally of Myanmar, was one of them. Turkey has also been at the forefront when it comes to humanitarian aid at the Rohingya camps. It has built mosques, schools, clinics, wells for potable water and provided daily necessities. But, this was for the sake of meeting the immediate needs of Rohingya refugees and in no way, was aimed at encouraging them to stay in Bangladesh long term. Turkey has advocated for the right of the Rohingya to repatriate at the UN and in foreign platforms, and at senior level meetings with various foreign ministers.

A long-term solution to assist the Rohingya refugees is necessary as soon as possible. Bangladesh has very limited resources to help them if, in near future, the aid organizations working to support the Rohingya withdraw their resources. And with every passing day, the Rohingya population is increasing, meaning that they will need more land, and that means more forests would be cut to accommodate them. As deforestation is already rampant to meet the fuel needs of the Rohingya, deforestation issues should be prevented as a priority. There is also the rising tension between local Bangladeshi and Rohingya people who are competing for limited resources. So, it is better to have a long-term solution before the situation gets out of control. In this case, China has an important role to play. China currently stands with Myanmar in its role on the Rohingya issue. But China needs to force Myanmar to find a long-term solution. So, while it can be said with conviction that Turkish aid has nothing to do with the Rohingya refusal to repatriate. It is in fact Turkey’s commitment to the Rohingya people at the international and local level that provides an important source of hope.

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]]> Pope Francis’s failure to say the word “Rohingya” https://politicstoday.org/pope-franciss-failure-to-say-the-word-rohingya/ Wed, 29 Nov 2017 14:40:06 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/pope-franciss-failure-to-say-the-word-rohingya/

“The pope missed an opportunity to reinforce his previous messages that affirmed the rights of the Rohingya to self-identify and used the name that they had chosen for themselves.”

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The leader of the Roman Catholic church Pope Francis visited Myanmar, the majority-Buddhist country that the US, UN and UK has accused of “ethnic cleansing” against its Muslim Rohingya people.

The pope will also visit Bangladesh, where more than 620,000 Rohingya have fled to escape what Amnesty International has called “crimes against humanity.”

Before the visit, the Cardinal of Myanmar Charles Bo had advised the pope not to use the term “Rohingya.”

“If he doesn’t use it, the international community will say something,” Bo acknowledged. “If he does use it, then it could be very bad for the military, the government and the Buddhist community.”

The Pope was publicly urged to avoid using the word seemingly out of concern that it would have negative repercussions for the Catholic minority.

The pope’s visit to Myanmar had been shrouded in speculation over whether he would refer to Rohingya directly or not.

Pope Francis on Tuesday called for respect for the rights of all of Myanmar’s ethnic groups without mentioning persecuted Rohingya Muslims or what has been condemned by the UN and US as “ethnic cleansing” directly.

On Tuesday, speaking in the capital Nay Pyi Taw, the pope referred to the continued suffering of Myanmar’s people “from civil conflict and hostilities.”

Saying that they “have lasted all too long and created deep divisions,” the pope talked of the need to “respect the rights of all who call this land their home.”

“The future of Myanmar must be peace, a peace based on respect for the dignity and rights of each member of society, respect for each ethnic group and its identity, respect for the rule of law and respect for a democratic order that enables each individual and every group — none excluded — to offer its legitimate contribution to the common good,” Pope Francis said.

The pope has already used the word Rohingya in two appeals from the Vatican this year. Previously Francis has prayed for “our Rohingya brothers and sisters.” His avoidance of the term now was seen by many as a retreat from his earlier support for the oppressed and marginalized around the world.

Many in Myanmar refuse to identify the Muslims of Rakhine as Rohingya, claiming they are migrants from Bangladesh even though they have lived there for generations.

Missed opportunity

The pope praised Suu Kyi’s efforts towards reconciliation after decades of military rule.

Suu Kyi in turn referred to the “situation in the Rakhine” and thanked those who had supported the government.

Human Rights Watch’s regional deputy director Phil Robertson, said he hoped Pope Francis would use the term.

“The pope missed an opportunity to reinforce his previous messages that affirmed the rights of the Rohingya to self-identify and used the name that they had chosen for themselves,” he said.

“The Rohingya have been stripped of so many things, but their name should never be one of them,” Robertson added.

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“He risks either compromising his moral authority or putting in danger the Christians of that country,” said Father Thomas Reese, a prominent American author and analyst at Religion News Service.

Rohingya, described by the UN as the world’s most persecuted people, have faced heightened fears of attack since dozens were killed in communal violence in 2012.

Amnesty International said the Rohingya and Muslims generally in Rakhine State had been subjected to “systemic social and political exclusion” for decades and accused the military of “crimes against humanity” in the last two years including murder, rape torture and forcible displacement.

Speaking in September, Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Abul Hasan Mahmood Ali said around 3,000 Rohingya had been killed in the operation.

Rohingya have faced discrimination in the predominantly Buddhist country for decades. They are deprived of citizenship and unable to access basic services.

In a five-month security operation launched last year, the UN documented mass gang rapes, killings — including of infants and young children — brutal beatings and disappearances committed by security personnel.

The international community has called on the Myanmar government and military to immediately halt atrocities and allow Rohingya to return home safely.

Meanwhile in the UK, Oxford City Council on Monday evening stripped Suu Kyi of the Freedom of the City of Oxford, awarded to her in 1997.

Open-air Mass in Yangon

Pope Francis on Wednesday led an open-air Mass in Yangon for more than 200,000 Catholics from across Myanmar.

The flags of Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam in the crowd, indicated many had travelled from further afield.

From late Tuesday night, thousands of Catholics began gathering at the Kyaik Kasan stadium in Thingangyun Township to see Francis.

The pope called on Myanmar’s ethnic minorities – who have suffered decades of oppression at the hands of the military – not to give in to the desire for revenge.

“I know that many in Myanmar bear the wounds of violence, wounds both visible and invisible,” Francis said in Italian that was translated into Burmese, referring to the Karen, Kachin, Sha and Wa peoples, who make up around 40 percent of the population

He urged people to respond with “forgiveness and compassion” and added: “The way of revenge is not the way of Jesus.”

His message of forgiveness was his first public Mass in the predominantly Buddhist nation.

The pope said his priority in Myanmar was to minister to its 660,000-strong Roman Catholic community.

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]]> Love Army calls President Erdogan to help Rohingya Muslims https://politicstoday.org/love-army-calls-president-erdogan-to-help-rohingya-muslims/ Tue, 28 Nov 2017 15:14:41 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/love-army-calls-president-erdogan-to-help-rohingya-muslims/

The “Love Army,” led by Jerome Jarre (@jeromejarre), made a call to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the Muslims in Rohingya this time first with the hashtag #LoveArmyForRohingya and later #ErdoganHelpRohingya on Twitter.

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The “Love Army,” led by Jerome Jarre, made a call to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the Muslims in Rohingya this time first with the hashtag #LoveArmyForRohingya and later #ErdoganHelpRohingya on Twitter.

The Social media star tweeted;

WE NEED YOUR HELP!
WE ARE ASKING IF THE TURKISH PRESIDENT CAN HELP US WITH OUR ROHINGYA MISSION!
PLEASE EVERYONE RETWEET AND USE THE HASHTAG #ErdoganHelpRohingya

https://twitter.com/jeromejarre/status/935428275282763776

Within hours Jarre’s tweets got thousands of likes and retweets.

Many famous French actors, artists and YouTube and social media stars along with other twitter users supported the campaign by tweeting under the hashtag #ErdoganHelpRohingya, some even tweeting in Turkish to get the attention of the Turkish President and officials.

https://twitter.com/OmarSy/status/935419800494284802

President Erdogan responded shortly after via his official Twitter account.

He wrote, “Dear @jeromejarre,
We never turn down requests for assistance — wherever the people in need may be.

We will to support #LoveArmyforRohingya efforts through our aid agencies, @AFADTurkey @Tika_Turkey and @RedCrescentTR , along with @TurkishAirlines”.

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https://twitter.com/RT_Erdogan/status/935464831523721216

 

Jerome Jarre, the French social media phenomenon, initially known for his vines on social media is trying to draw attention on humanitarian crises all over the world with his followers and donators all together forming the Love Army as he calls it.

The Love Army has previously launched 2 other aid movements first in Somalia where 60 tons of food supplements in partnership with the Turkish Airlines were donated and second in Mexico to help the people after the earthquake.

Turkish authorities and aid agencies have been collecting donations for years in order to help Rohingya Muslims.

First lady Emine Erdogan had visited the Rohingya Muslims who fled the Myanmar genocide and took refuge in Bangladesh and distributed the most urgent nutrition, medicine and clothing materials from Turkey.

Then Prime Minister Erdogan urged the UN to take immediate action back in 2012.

*Written by Suna Nur Sarihan. 

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]]> A rare US talk on Rohingyas https://politicstoday.org/a-rare-us-talk-on-rohingyas/ Mon, 20 Nov 2017 10:21:06 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/a-rare-us-talk-on-rohingyas/

Germany, Sweden, Japan and the European Union offered their strong support to Bangladesh over the Rohingya issue.

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As Rohingyas face purge and mass massacres in their home country Myanmar at the hands of Buddhist mobs and the state military, in neighboring Bangladesh a US delegation is reported to have called the atrocities against Rohingyas as “war crimes.”

Jeff Merkley, leader of the delegation, told Prime Minister Sheik Hasina that the events in Myanmar are “like war crimes,” a day after the US lawmakers visited Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar.

He appreciated Bangladesh’s response to the challenge of Rohingyas who are fleeing Myanmar in droves to find shelter in Bangladesh. The US delegation claimed that they were ready to provide any assistance to resolve the crisis.

Bangladesh, even though with poor resources and a high poverty rate, is becoming the main host country to bear the burden of Rohingya refugees.

US Senator Richard Durbin, Congresswomen Betty McCollum and Jan Schakowsky, and Congressman David N. Cicilline were part of the delegation.

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Meanwhile, Germany, Sweden, Japan and the European Union also offered their strong support to Bangladesh over the Rohingya issue. German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallstrom, Japanese Foreign Minister Tara Kono and European Union High Representative and Vice President Federica Mogherin separately called on the prime minister at her official Ganabhaban residence Sunday evening.

An estimated 620,000 Rohingya have crossed from Myanmar’s western state of Rakhine into Bangladesh over the past three months, according to the UN.

The refugees are fleeing a military operation in which security forces and Buddhist mobs have killed men, women and children, looted homes and torched Rohingya villages. Around 3,000 Rohingya are reported to have been killed in the crackdown.

*Written by Waseem Ahad. 

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]]> Turkey-EU migration pact worthy of honor: IOM https://politicstoday.org/turkey-eu-migration-pact-worthy-of-honor-iom/ Thu, 02 Nov 2017 03:50:15 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/turkey-eu-migration-pact-worthy-of-honor-iom/

According to latest IOM figures, nearly 23,000 people passed to Greece from Turkey in the first 10 months of this year while the number was about 170,000 last year, and 780,000 in 2015.

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The International Organization for Migration (IOM), has urged all parties to meet their commitments on the European refugee crisis, stating that the EU-Turkey deal achieved significant success.

Speaking in Geneva, on Tuesday, IOM spokesperson Joel Millman said that the number of asylum seekers crossing into Greece had fallen sharply due to measures adopted by Turkey last year after the deal.

In March 2016, Turkey and the EU signed a refugee deal which aimed at discouraging irregular migration through the Aegean Sea by taking stricter measures against human traffickers and improving the conditions of the nearly three million Syrian refugees in Turkey.

According to latest IOM figures, nearly 23,000 people passed to Greece from Turkey in the first 10 months of this year while the number was about 170,000 last year, and 780,000 in 2015.

The deal also included a €6 billion ($6.8 billion) aid package to help Turkey care for the approximately 3.5 million refugees hosted in the country.

The EU promised to initially allocate €3 billion ($3.5 billion) in its first tranche for projects to support Syrian refugees. However, only €800 million ($930 million) has been transferred so far.

Ankara says it has spent more than €20 billion ($24.1 billion) from its own national resources on helping and sheltering refugees since the beginning of the Syrian civil war.

Rohingya crisis on the table in the UK

In parallel, an event attended by the Union of Turkish Democrats (UETD) and Burma Campaign UK held in the UK Parliament, was concerned about the intensifying atrocities against Rohingya Muslims.

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Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK, emphasized that thousands of children had lost their lives due to the restrictions on aid to Rakhine State.

Hosted by Lord Nazir Ahmed, the event “A Silent Ethnic Cleansing: the Rohingya Muslims” was and also attended by Turkey’s ruling AK Party MP Ziya Altunyaldiz.

During his speech, Farmaner describing the living standards of the Rohingya, stating that thousands of people live in squalid camps with almost no access to health care.

Giving examples of some horrific incidents that took place during the genocide against the Muslim minority in the region since August 25, Farmaner underlined that the Buddhist majority oppressed other minorities for decades.

“The current situation in Burma is the systematic failure by the international community to protect the Rohingya Muslims,” he said.

He called for the international community to reach a consensus in order to end the violence as soon as possible.

Until this day, the UN have reported 607,000 Rohingya Muslims that have crossed from Myanmar to Bangladesh since August 25, with arrivals still continuing.

The UN has documented mass gang rapes, killings – including those of infants and young children — brutal beatings and disappearances committed by security personnel.

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]]> Attacks against Rohingya continue in Myanmar https://politicstoday.org/attacks-against-rohingya-continue-in-myanmar/ Sat, 07 Oct 2017 22:06:57 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/attacks-against-rohingya-continue-in-myanmar/

“The patterns of attacks are evidently conducted systematically. The vigilante group torch Rohingya homes, the Rohingya families flee and police open fire at them.”

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According to a report published by the US-based Arakan Rohingya Union, attacks on the Rohingya in Myanmar are continuing despite the government declaring an end to Myanmar’s military operation in Rakhine state.

The Union made its observation in the “Narrative Report on Situation on the Ground in Northern Arakan/Rakhine State, Myanmar,” noting that Myanmar government officials reportedly met leaders of the Rohingya community and told them that the military had completed its operation and rooted out “insurgents.”

In comparison to this, the report states that “attacks on civilians and torching of homes by Buddhist Rakhine vigilantes under the cover of the police have dramatically increased since then.”

“The patterns of attacks are evidently conducted systematically. The vigilante group torch Rohingya homes, the Rohingya families flee and police open fire at them.”

The report included that information about the “continuous killing of Rohingya families by the vigilantes under the cover of police and increased sexual violence against Rohingya women” was still being received from refugees arriving in Bangladesh.

Appealing for global pressure on the Myanmar administration, the report emphasizes “If they [Rohingya Muslims] will be relocated from camps to permanent locations, it is possible that they will not be allowed to return to their original properties in their villages.”

While the Rohingya crisis was on the agenda during the UN General Assembly last month, the international community has failed to insert pressure on the de-facto leader of Myanmar, former Nobel Peace recipient, Aung San Suu Kyi.

In spite of recent developments and the lack of unity from the international community, the report urged to form a strong coalition “to pressure the Security Council for urgent and ambitious actions, including a resolution to address the crisis facing the Rohingya, and designate a safezone for all people in Northern Arakan state protected by multinational security forces.”

Since August 25, the UN has reported that over 500,000 Rohingya have crossed over to Bangladesh, and that during this crisis over 3,000 Rohingya have been killed.

http://thenewturkey.org/setting-an-example-turkeys-lead-on-humanitarian-aid/

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Rohingya crisis: a humanitarian approach

Kerem Divanlioglu, Turkey’s ambassador to Myanmar, was part of a 48-person team including UN officials and foreign diplomats based in the commercial capital, Yangon, who visited the Maungdaw area of Rakhine state on October 2.

Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Divanlioglu said that while Turkey doesn’t have any expectations, the country is helping Rohingya Muslims due to its “humanitarian stance.”

Adding that Turkey does not have a political agenda in Myanmar, he stated that “we’ve kept the dialogue channels open with Myanamar authorities, as we only want to help them in a humanistic way.”

He described how when flying over Arakan [Rakhine state], “I saw many villages that were completely destroyed,” adding that only five Muslim villages in the Rathidaung district were habitable.

Visiting a village, Ah Nauk Pyin, the diplomat spoke to the Muslim community, who he said only wants “safety and food.”

In addition to Divanlioglu’s comments, the Turkish Health Ministry has confirmed that it will send aid worth 196 million Turkish liras ($54 million) to Bangladesh for Rohingya Muslims who have crossed over from Rakhine state.

According to a source from the Ministry, the aid will be delivered through the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD).

Source: AA and other agencies

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]]> Rohingya crisis continues https://politicstoday.org/rohingya-crisis-continues/ Fri, 29 Sep 2017 08:49:43 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/rohingya-crisis-continues/

“We cannot be afraid to call the actions of the Burmese [Myanmar] authorities what they appear to be: a brutal, sustained campaign to cleanse the country of an ethnic minority.”

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On Thursday U.S. envoy to the UN, Nikki Haley, told the Security Council that violence against the Muslim Rohingya minority in Myanmar appears to be an ethnic cleansing.

“We cannot be afraid to call the actions of the Burmese [Myanmar] authorities what they appear to be: a brutal, sustained campaign to cleanse the country of an ethnic minority.”

Haley urged the Naypyidaw government to allow media and humanitarian access to Rakhine state, home to the Rohingya, if its claim of fighting terrorists is true.

The ongoing violence “should shame senior Burmese leaders who have sacrificed so much for an open democratic Burma,” Haley said.

The UN envoy also urged the Security Council to question arms sales to the Myanmar administration and called for a stop in those sales.

Training and providing the military with equipment has also been raised by the UK government, which announced that the trainings provided by the British army will be on hold.

Humanitarian assistance

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Talking to the Anadolu Agency, Wakar Uddin, head of the Arakan (Rakhine) Rohingya Union, called for the international community to protect the Rohingya Muslims.

“Turkey is pushing for a coalition of nations to address the issue in the UN, and hopefully, at the Security Council.”

Thanking the efforts of the Turkish government, which has led the role in humanitarian assistance, Uddin said “I express my gratitude on behalf of Rohingya people to President Erdogan, and the government and people of Turkey for voicing support for Rohingya people.”

He urged for the UN to pressure Myanmar’s government to return education, health, infrastructure and citizenship rights to the Rohingya Muslims.

In regards to humanitarian assistance from Turkey, Bayram Numan Koksal, coordinator of the Cansuyu Organization, stated that they will provide tents to 20,000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh.

He added that each tent will include a bathroom. A mosque and education and health center will also be constructed for the refugees.

Latest figures by the UN source that over half a million Rohingya Muslims have crossed into Bangladesh from Myanmar since August 25.

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]]> Rohingya: an embarrassment for humanity https://politicstoday.org/rohingya-an-embarrassment-for-humanity/ Wed, 27 Sep 2017 10:24:37 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/rohingya-an-embarrassment-for-humanity/

The leader of the Bangladesh National Human Rights Commission, Kazi Reazul Hoque, has called for Myanmar to face the UN court for crimes against humanity.

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The crimes committed against the Rohingya Muslims by Myanmar state security personnel and Buddhist mobs have re-emerged on the political agenda as an estimated 400,000 refugees escape violence and seek asylum in Bangladesh.

Crimes against the Rohingya include murder, looting homes and torture. According to Bangladeshi Foreign Minister Abul Hasan Mahmood Ali, around 3,000 Rohingya have been killed in the crackdown.

Latest developments pushed the UN into suggesting that the Myanmar treatment of Rohingya looks like “textbook ethnic cleansing.”

Speaking at the launch of the Burma Human Rights Network’s report on persecution of Rohingya Muslims, executive director Kyaw Yin suggested that the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar should be perceived as a humanitarian issue rather than a religious one.

Yin warned that the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Myanmar could possibly trigger greater influence of extremism among victims.

He told the forum that “the actions by the Rohingya people by joining extremist groups could undo all the work that the international community has put in to advocate for their plight.”

In addition to Kyaw Yin, speaking at the same forum, Association of Southeast Nations (ASEAN) Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights’ Malaysian Chairman Edmund Bon told the audience that the international community was still hopeful about the ASEAN in resolving the crisis in Myanmar.

He mentioned that the “Malaysian and international community still have hope on the ASEAN to step in and resolve the crisis. ASEAN has used its dialogue and diplomatic ties to ease many tensions around the world, and it would be unjust for them not to step in a crisis which happens at home.”

The Chairman also added that the government of Malaysia had engaged with Myanmar on multiple occasions before the crisis emerged on the international platform, adding that however, bilateral diplomacy had “certain limits.”

Myanmar to face UN court

While hosting up to 400,000 Rohingya refugees, the Bangladesh National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) called on the international community to take the government of Myanmar to the UN Court of Justice for committing crimes against humanity in Rakhine state.

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Speaking at the International Ombudsman Conference in Istanbul, head of the NHRC, Kazi Reazul Hoque said “we urged the OIC and the ASEAN member states and UN organs to consider referring the matter [or persecution of Rohingya Muslims] to the International Court of Justice or the International Human Court.”

He also urged for the UN Human Rights Commission and the international community to “mobilize political pressure on Myanmar’s government to find a durable solution” to the Rohingya crisis.

“The durable solution must include the right to return to their homelands in a safe, secure and dignified way,” Hoque added.

“All fundamental rights of the Rohingya should be respected in the process of resolving the current crisis.”

Hoque led a four-member delegation on an emergency fact-finding mission between September 9 and 11 and interviewed several Rohingya refugees currently in Bangladesh. The statements of the refugees, including stories of torture, rape and murder account to “extreme violation of human rights” and are “crimes against humanity” he mentioned.

Turkey continues to aid the Rohingya

Whilst the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) has maintained the lead in providing humanitarian assistance to the Rohingya living on camps in Bangladesh, Turkey-based Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH) said on Tuesday that it has delivered emergency food aid to 3,125 Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine State.

A press release by IHH informed that the aid was distributed on Monday and Tuesday to the villages of Depaing Thingying Bali, Dapaing South Bali IDP and camps near the Sittwe Township of southern Rakhine State.

The emergency food aid consisted of rice, oil, chickpeas, salt and pepper, and reportedly should be enough for one month.

IHH also plans to deliver basic life supplies to 125,000 Rohingya within the following days.

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]]> Elderly Rohingya miserably fail to escape death https://politicstoday.org/elderly-rohingya-miserably-fail-to-escape-death/ Sat, 23 Sep 2017 07:44:15 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/elderly-rohingya-miserably-fail-to-escape-death/

“Nearly 1 million Rohingya are being subjected to genocide and are fleeing to Bangladesh,” “we never said it was Buddhists who killed them..."

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The terror in Rakhine State has once again emerged on the political agenda. Since 25 August mass atrocities against the Rohingya Muslims have been noted by the UN, indicating that these crimes can amount to crimes against humanity.

Following the crimes committed by the Myanmar security forces and Buddhist mobs, including mass rape, murder and gang violence, Rohingya Muslims escaping violence have begun seeking refuge in Bangladesh.

According to the latest survey of Inter Sector Coordination Group (ISCG), an information hub for the agencies working with the Rohingya issue in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, 429,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh since the 25th of August. 145,000 have taken refuge in the camps while 196,000 Rohingya are still staying on hills and under tents. According to estimates, 88,000 are living with relatives who had left previously.

An issue that has been raised regarding the accommodation of the Rohingya in the refugee camps is the sanitary and living conditions. In fact, many elderly are noted to die on the way or arrive sick to the camps. Those that are currently living in the camps are close to death for lack of sanitary drinking water and muddy living conditions.

Hope for assistance: ASEAN fund may be used to help

The atrocities committed against the Rohingya Muslims have occupied the political agenda for a couple of weeks now, and has reached peak as many world leaders called for the international community to take action during the United Nations General Assembly this week.

While Turkey has maintained the lead in providing humanitarian assistance to the Rohingya in need, as the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA), accompanied by First Lady Emine Erdogan, delivered 1,000 tons of aid, lately the Philippines explained that the ASEAN trust fund may be used to help persecuted Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh.

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Secretary Catalino Cuy of the Interior and Local Government, who chairs the ASEAN Ministerial Meeting on Transnational Crime, announced the move after the closing session in Manila on Thursday.

According to the Minister, the mass exodus of the Rohingya from Myanmar to Bangladesh can be categorized as irregular movement and therefore can potentially benefit from the trust fund.

Buddhist terror?

In spit of discussions surrounding the Rohingya crisis, this matter has emerged on a different extension: it is not being labelled “Buddhist terror.”

The President of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, highlighted this matter during a speech made at an intercultural event in New York hosted by the Turkish American National Steering Committee (TASC).

While harshly criticizing the use of “Islamic terror” in world media and political discourse, the President stated that “nearly 1 million Rohingya are being subjected to genocide and are fleeing to Bangladesh,” “we never said it was Buddhists who killed them. This is indeed the case, but we never put it as such. Now I call on those who want to endear Buddhists to the world: What gives you the right to say ‘Islamic terror?”

In criticism of those labelling Daesh as an “Islamic terrorist group,” Erdogan highlighted a double standard between Islam and other faiths by asserting, “whoever kills a soul, it is as if they have killed entire humanity. This is among the principles of our faith. Nobody should dare associate Daesh with Islam or Muslims. It is a terrorist group.”

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]]> President Erdogan in New York ahead of UN General Assembly https://politicstoday.org/president-erdogan-in-new-york-ahead-of-un-general-assembly/ Tue, 19 Sep 2017 04:20:36 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/president-erdogan-in-new-york-ahead-of-un-general-assembly/

Ahead of the UN General Assembly, President Erdogan has called for reforms within the UN and is expected to raise concerns regarding Rohingya.

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Ahead of the 72nd session of the United Nations General Assembly, President Erdogan, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, Deputy Prime Minister Recep Akdag and Chief of the General Staff of the Turkish Armed Forces Hulusi Akar have begun their visits in New York.

Rohingya

In spite of crimes that are taking place in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, Turkey has led the effort in humanitarian aid. With delivering aid through the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA), assisted by First Lady Emine Erdogan, Turkey has delivered 1.000 ton of aid to the Rohingya Muslims.

While official figures are unknown, it has been reported that over 400,000 Rohingya have crossed the border to Bangladesh. While the de facto leader of Myanmar, a former Noble Peace recipient, Aung San Suu Kyi announced that she will miss the UN General Assembly as criticism on her handling of the Rohingya crisis grows, President Erdogan is expected to deliver a speech highlighting the attempt of ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, urging the international community to get to action.

Erdogan: UN in need of structural reform

During the groundbreaking ceremony for the building of new Turkevi (Turkish House) center in New York, President Erdogan highlighted in his speech that the UN needs “structural reform” in order to make it more inclusive and ensure that it is able to fulfill its mission towards world peace.

“Despite all it shortcomings, the UN remains the sole global umbrella organization where everyone can make their voices heard and seek solutions to their problems,” the President said. “However, the world is not the world during which the UN was founded.” Erdogan stated that the structure of what is arguably the most impactful UN organ, the Security Council, is unjust, resulting in a global organization that is unable to perform its duties as a vanguard of world peace.

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“The UN needs to be reformed so that it can adapt to a changing world,” Erdogan said. “Today, reforming the UN is on the agenda. However, that reform is not what we understand from the word ‘reform.’”

His speech at Turkevi was referring to a reform-themed meeting on Monday at the onset of the UN General Assembly attended by U.S. President Donald Trump.

Trump, who had promised UN reform as one of the goals of his four year tenure said during the meeting that the organization suffered from “bureaucracy and mismanagement.”

Erdogan has on numerous occasions said “the world is bigger than five”, a reference to the five permanent Security Council members: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

P5 countries have abused their veto power to defend national interests, rendering the UN dysfunctional in face of global crisis. The most recent example has been the Syrian war, which has continued for 7 years, and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the displacement of millions.

 

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]]> Protests in Support of Rohingya Muslims all over the World https://politicstoday.org/protests-in-support-of-rohingya-muslims-all-over-the-world/ Sat, 16 Sep 2017 10:59:22 +0000 https://politicstoday.org/protests-in-support-of-rohingya-muslims-all-over-the-world/

Following increasing violence against Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state, rallies have emerged across the world in protest of the humanitarian catastrophe.

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While the UN has described the Rohingya as the most executed peoples, increasing support from all over the world has raised political awareness of the crimes taking place.

Following the flee of approximately 300,000 Rohingya to Bangladesh, demonstrations took place in London, India, Chechnya, Indonesia and other countries in Asia, with the hope of increasing pressure on Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the de-facto leader of Myanmar.

While hundreds gathered outside the Myanmar embassy in London, Indonesia saw mass rallies in support of the Rohingya. In the capital Jakarta, the protesters prayed outside the Myanmar embassy and called on cutting diplomatic ties with Myanmar.

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Apart from mass protests and rallies over Asia and Europe, prominent individuals have also spoken against the perpetuated violence, calling for a diplomatic resolution. Education activist Malala Yousafzai has called for Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace recipient, to use her position to “stop the violence.”

Regardless of increasing international pressure however, the de-facto leader of Myanmar has cancelled plans to attend the UN General Assembly in which the Rohingya crisis is going to be discussed.

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