{"id":105010,"date":"2018-01-15T12:00:14","date_gmt":"2018-01-15T12:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=105010"},"modified":"2018-01-15T10:49:42","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T10:49:42","slug":"wrongs-of-rights-activism-around-rohingyas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/01\/wrongs-of-rights-activism-around-rohingyas\/","title":{"rendered":"Wrongs of Rights Activism around Rohingyas"},"content":{"rendered":"

13 Jan 2018 – <\/em>Rights campaigns and humanitarian NGOs get an easy pass when it comes to their own moral failings, notwithstanding a few largely ignored academic studies that attempt to shed light on the wrongs of the rights campaign. This is in large part owing to the fact that these campaigns are anchored in the discourses of virtues and humanity, and get the needed wind from the mass media where a handful of compassionate journos work hard to call the world\u2019s attention to the plight of Fanon\u2019s \u201cwretched of the earth\u201d.<\/p>\n

This is how Myanmar\u2019s genocide of Rohingyas climbed to the top of the \u201cconflicts to watch\u201d list, if we take at face value the ranking by the International Crisis Group, whose sole mission is to integrate zones of conflicts and wars into the global economy, that is, strip malls, assembly lines, special economic zones, transport routes, pipelines, and so on.<\/p>\n

Of all these causes c\u00e9l\u00e8bre<\/em>, Myanmar human rights activism has far greater share of wrongs than others. Given that my country of birth has remained a world\u2019s infamous basket case, and our activism to promote the rights of all Myanmar peoples and safeguards their collective well-being is, by all indications, a lost cause, it is time to take a hard look at the human wrongs committed by human rights campaigners. Myanmar\u2019s on-going genocidal process against Rohingyas, the internal colonial war of \u201cpacification\u201d of Kachins, Ta\u2019ang, Arakanese resistance, the attacks on local journalists who would not toe the official genocidal line, the deadly assault on civil society activists, and the bigoted persecution of non-Buddhist activists, continue unabated.<\/p>\n

As I have warned repeatedly over the last 7 years, the \u2018Burmese Spring\u2019 has proved to be nothing more than the Burmese military\u2019s elaborate scheme of realigning its institutional interests with those of the external corporate and military players. The rights organisations themselves were among those who helped create the mirage of a \u201cdemocratic transition\u201d. I watched with deep dismay a plane-load of Human Rights Watch officers and board directors go to discuss human rights with the then ex-President Thein Sein while 120,000 Rohingyas were being interned in barb-wired IDP camps from where they have never been allowed to leave.\u00a0 Harvard human rights researchers who documented the Burmese military\u2019s war crimes met with mid-level commanders with decent command of English to talk about these international crimes over a cup of Burmese tea.<\/p>\n

The landscape of the \u2018Burmese Spring\u2019 – the budding of democracy and the flowering of reforms – has turned into ghostly mass graves, charred villages and bulldozed mosques. The iconic Aung San Suu Kyi\u2019s colonial era villa in Yangon, a symbolic Burmese Robin Island minus the famed prisoner, breaking rocks under scorching heat, is no longer the Mecca for human rights promoters, \u201cworld leaders\u201d and celebrities from the world of writers, academia, finance, Hollywood and INGOs. The Lord of the villa herself stands, alongside the Burmese military partners, accused rightly of genocidal culpability and criminal responsibility even by the likes of former Milosevic prosecutor Sir Geoffrey Nice of Grey\u2019s Inn and UN Human Rights Chief Zeid Ra\u2019ad al Hussein.<\/p>\n

Today it is Bangladesh, across from Western Myanmar, where nearly one million Rohingya survivors are lumped together in less than human conditions, where the same crowds would undertake their new pilgrimage of human rights.<\/p>\n

Human rights activism has failed when we human rights campaigners fail to make the UN system of territorially-bounded states led by the war-making Security Council, to issue a single non-binding resolution on the genocide. This body discharging its binding responsibility to protect the sizable human population of Rohingyas is the only viable means to end Myanmar genocide and protect the survivors. This desperately needed intervention remains a pipedream.<\/p>\n

Painfully for the victims, the buck stops at the Security Council, and the Security Council has long been in a coma from which it will not come back to life. Having grown in the Burmese culture where I witnessed as a child many a funeral dances and processions particularly around the corpses of famed Buddhists monks, lobbying \u201ckey\u201d UN member states, compiling and disseminating the documentation of Myanmar\u2019s human wrongs, do have a feel of a necrophilic mass ritual, with the dead council as the symbolic corpse.<\/p>\n

Five independent examinations of Myanmar\u2019s persecution of Rohingyas over the last three years – published by the University of Washington School of Law, Yale Law School Human Rights Clinic, Queen Mary University of London International State Crimes Initiative, the Permanent Peoples Tribunal on Myanmar and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum – have reached a common conclusion about the UN member state of Myanmar, that has ratified the inter-state treaty known as the UN Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).\u00a0 OIC has its own human rights documentation mission; Canada has a special envoy who will make his lawyerly report on the 40 years of genocide after three whirlwind visits to the survivors\u2019 camps; news organisations Reuters and AP have conducted their studies; the UN-mandated fact finding mission made up of three grey eminences, are gathering facts and a myriad of human rights and humanitarian NGOs are engaged in similar mission.\u00a0 Alas, all of us appear guided by the delusion of the vicarious salvation for the victims, that \u201cThou shall know the Truth and Truth shall set you free.\u201d<\/p>\n

While social science and legal interpretations are not rocket science, you can\u2019t get any more objective or scientific than this. Myanmar is committing 4 out of 5 genocidal acts legally coded in the Genocide Convention of 1948, and yet the United Nations is failing the victims of yet another genocide under its watch.<\/p>\n

The Security Council\u2019s failure to issue a single non-binding statement as the survivors of Myanmar genocide – the majority of whom were women and children – filed at the rate of 100,000 per week across the Bangladesh borders with their terror-struck faces – may be attributed to the two bad guys, Russia and China.\u00a0 These illiberal states have consistently undermined, through their two vetoes, any attempt to pressurise Myanmar to end the genocide. But the other three veto-wielders have never shied<\/p>\n

away from taking decisive action without the Security Council endorsement, when it is in their geo-political and concomitant commercial interests. There are the examples of Iraq, Libya, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bosnia, and so on.<\/p>\n

But for the victims of mass atrocities, the Security Council is dead.<\/p>\n

No member state will deem genocide prevention and protection a policy priority for their nations.\u00a0 Admittedly, the human rights activism around Myanmar genocide that is being led globally by the two western INGOs, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, operates within the institutional arrangements that are definitely not conducive to the advancement of human rights as a global norm or ending large scale mass atrocities such as genocides.<\/p>\n

To make matters worse, human rights as a UN-driven set of new civilisational norms were born with untreatable ideological defects at birth, immediately following the end of the holocaust and World War II. The victorious nations of USA, UK, France and Russia had their own skeletons in their respective closets:\u00a0 Britain and France with their \u2018colonial possessions\u2019; USA with its institutionalised racial injustices against the blacks and the native Americans; Stalinist Russia with its gulags and China with its Maoist totalitarianism.<\/p>\n

In fact, in the ensuing 25 years since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1945, all the veto-wielding members of the Security Council simply shelved the document.\u00a0 The entire post-WWII generation was not really exposed to the ceremonially adopted global norms of human rights as the self-styled \u2018peace and human rights promoters\u2019 at the august body were themselves engaged in the Cold War.<\/p>\n

Recently the Canadian Ambassador to Indonesia, Peter MacArthur, made news with his rather stupid tweet, bragging about how \u201cpleasing\u201d Myanmar\u2019s pristine beaches were where he and his lovely family vacationed – while his bosses in the Canadian foreign ministry have officially accused Myanmar of \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d.\u00a0 Irwin Cotler, the country\u2019s highly regarded former Justice Minister and counsel to the likes of Nelson Mandela and Natan Sharansky, has gone public with his observation that Myanmar is committing genocide against Rohingyas.<\/p>\n

Mr MacArthur\u2019s genocidal insensitivity is only symptomatic of the inter-state system which has failed to \u201cinternalise\u201d the humanist norms of human rights.\u00a0 When a senior diplomat from a liberal democratic regime thinks Myanmar\u2019s \u2018pleasing beaches\u2019 are worthier of his tweets than the country\u2019s genocide, we know how hopeless the status of human rights as a global norm really is.<\/p>\n

The sad truth is even a social democratic country like Sweden, which promotes its \u201cfeminist foreign policy\u201d under a woman foreign minister, did not make any appreciable efforts during its rotating presidency of the Security Council, to mobilise the other 14-members, even when the reports of mass sexual violence against Rohingya women and girls began pouring in.<\/p>\n

The irony is the minister had previously served as UN special envoy on sexual violence.\u00a0\u00a0 I know it\u2019s not fair to single the Swede for her failing to use her feminist ministerial power to stand with thousands of Myanmar genocidal rape victims when the issue did not make much splash in the collective gendered consciousness of much-publicised #MeToo Twitter campaigners against sexual harassment.<\/p>\n

So, what chance is there then for meaningful human – or even gender – solidarity for Rohingya survivors and victims of genocide? Despite the world\u2019s \u201cawareness\u201d of Myanmar\u2019s Facebook-ed Live genocide, human solidarity has proven to be \u2018a lie\u2019, as the Yemenese journalist Tawakkol Karman put it.\u00a0 As the famed author of A bed for the night<\/em> David Rieff quipped, \u201cNever again!\u201d really means Germany will never slaughter the Jews in Europe.\u00a0\u00a0 Enter the Chinese in Indonesia, Bangladeshis, Cambodians, Sudanese, Rwandans, Bosnians, Kurds and now Rohingyas.<\/p>\n

________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>A Buddhist humanist from Burma, Maung Zarni is <\/em>a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>, <\/em>former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center \u2013 Cambodia.\u00a0 His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the <\/em>New York Times, The Guardian and<\/em> the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are <\/em>The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar\u2019s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), <\/em>An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and <\/em>Myanmar\u2019s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal, forthcoming). He holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education) , National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015).<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 prothomalo.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I do not believe in Knights in shining armour or the White Saviours. The survivors have no rescuers. They need to struggle for their own survival and beyond. I am only a supporter who offers them my uncompromising solidarity as a fellow human. This piece, I wrote based on my 30-years of non-stop activism since I joined proudly the Amnesty International campus chapter at the University of California as a youngish graduate student in early 20’s. Now I am almost 54.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":103964,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-105010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105010"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105010\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103964"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}