{"id":128937,"date":"2019-03-11T12:00:49","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T12:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=128937"},"modified":"2019-03-05T14:07:18","modified_gmt":"2019-03-05T14:07:18","slug":"investment-whitewash-for-rohingya-bloodshed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/03\/investment-whitewash-for-rohingya-bloodshed\/","title":{"rendered":"Investment Whitewash for Rohingya Bloodshed"},"content":{"rendered":"

26 Feb 2019 – <\/em>Historic temples. Sandy beaches. Fishing grounds and farmland galore. This is the idyllic and profitable\u00a0picture<\/a>\u00a0that the government of Myanmar painted last week for potential investors in the country\u2019s troubled Rakhine state. The government sought to allure crowds of potential investors from countries including Japan and South Korea who attended the\u00a0Rakhine State Investment Fair<\/a>\u00a0in the town of Thandwe, with descriptions of Rakhine\u2019s\u00a0\u201cuntapped\u201d<\/a>\u00a0investment potential.<\/p>\n

What those potential investors didn\u2019t hear was any mention of Rakhine\u2019s Muslim Rohingya ethnic minority population. Or the brutal spree of state-backed violence targeted at Rakhine\u2019s Rohingya population in August 2017 that\u00a0killed thousands<\/a>\u00a0and prompted \u00a0720,000 Rohingya<\/a>\u00a0to flee to Bangladesh, where they remain to this day.<\/p>\n

That omission was no mistake. According to Aung Naing Oo, director general of Myanmar\u2019s Directorate of Investment and Company Administration, the failure to mention the humanitarian catastrophe inflicted on the Rohingya in Rakhine and the Myanmar government\u2019s singular failure to take any meaningful steps toward accountability for those outrages reflect the government\u2019s position that \u201cinvestment is not political<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elsewhere at the fair, Myanmar\u2019s minister for investment and foreign economic relations, Thaung Tun,\u00a0sought to negate decades of well-documented systematic abuses<\/a>\u00a0against the country\u2019s ethnic minorities by\u00a0touting ethnic diversity<\/a>\u00a0as Myanmar\u2019s \u201cgreat potential\u201d for investors.<\/p>\n

That cravenly self-serving government propaganda is as sinister as it is dishonest. And it reflects the role of the Rakhine State Investment Fair as part of a wider government campaign to attempt to\u00a0paper over the monstrous crimes<\/a>\u00a0perpetrated in Rakhine with a veneer of business-as-usual normalcy.<\/p>\n

The Myanmar government\u2019s apparent gambit is that if it turns a deaf ear long enough to the international opprobrium about the slaughter of the Rohingya and the humanitarian crisis of the refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh, foreign investor interest in Rakhine\u2019s\u00a0oil and gas, agriculture, and fishing sectors\u00a0will inevitably help mute the calls for accountability.<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Myanmar government\u2019s apparent gambit is that if it turns a deaf ear long enough to the international opprobrium about the slaughter of the Rohingya and the humanitarian crisis of the refugee camps in neighboring Bangladesh, foreign investor interest in Rakhine\u2019s\u00a0oil and gas, agriculture, and fishing sectors\u00a0will inevitably help mute the calls for accountability.<\/p>\n

Indeed, while Myanmar has rolled out the red carpet for foreign investors to Rakhine, it has forbidden international organizations seeking to investigate the slaughter of 2017 from accessing the area. Most notably, the government has blocked UN Special Rapporteur to Myanmar Yanghee Lee, who is tasked with assessing the human-rights situation in Myanmar.<\/p>\n

In 2017, the government placed\u00a0restrictions<\/a>\u00a0on an official fact-finding mission led by Lee that she described as an \u201caffront to the independence of my mandate as Special Rapporteur.\u201d That December, it announced it was\u00a0denying her access<\/a>\u00a0to the country, including to Rakhine state.<\/p>\n

In June last year, the government announced the creation of an \u201cindependent commission of inquiry\u201d to investigate further allegations of human-rights abuses in Rakhine state. Given Myanmar\u2019s limited past efforts on justice and accountability, there are reasonable grounds for concern about whether these investigations will be carried out effectively or in accordance with credible international standards.<\/p>\n

Those efforts dovetail with moves by the Myanmar government and security forces to erase the sites of mass slaughter of Rohingya in Rakhine. Over the past two years, satellite images have revealed that the locations of former Rohingya villages in Rakhine have been \u201cflattened and scraped by bulldozers<\/a>.\u201d In what appears to be a blatant form of post-conflict elimination of physical remnants left behind by the dead or fled Rohingya,\u00a0 those villages have been replaced by facilities for the security forces as well as hundreds of new homes built for mostly Buddhist residents from other areas of Rakhine.<\/p>\n

Potential foreign investors who attended the Rakhine State Investment Fair should be under no illusions about the grim recent history of Rakhine state and the horrors that the Myanmar military inflicted on its Rohingya population. UN-appointed investigators\u00a0concluded<\/a>\u00a0last August that Myanmar\u2019s state-backed violence against the Rohingya constituted the \u201cgravest\u201d crimes against civilians under international law, including genocide.<\/p>\n

Investigations by Physicians for Human Rights over the past two years put a tragic human face to that UN assessment and provide scientific objectivity in refuting the government\u2019s repeated denials. In 2018, PHR surveyed leaders from 604 Rohingya hamlets in Rakhine state encompassing more than 916,000 people. The\u00a0findings<\/a>, coupled with in-depth interviews and forensic medical examinations of Rohingya survivors, point to a widespread and systematic pattern of targeted violence \u2013 including rapes and killings of women, men and children.<\/p>\n

The Rakhine State Investment Fair reflects the Myanmar government\u2019s desperation to change the narrative of its security forces\u2019 well-documented role in the targeted killings of the Rohingya and their harrowing journey to safety in Bangladesh. It is a cynical official attempt to parry international demands for accountability with the prospect of financial profit.<\/p>\n

Foreign governments and foreign investors alike should dismiss such craven cover-up efforts by the Myanmar government and make clear that normal diplomatic and economic relations hinge on respecting human rights and ensuring accountability in Rakhine, not undermining it.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Phelim Kine is the director of research and investigations at Physicians for Human Rights and a former deputy director in Human Rights Watch\u2019s Asia Division. He is also an adjunct professor in the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in New York. A former news wire bureau chief in Jakarta, Kine worked as a journalist for more than a decade in China, Indonesia, Cambodia and Taiwan prior to becoming a human rights researcher and activist in 2007.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

According to Aung Naing Oo, director general of Myanmar\u2019s Directorate of Investment and Company Administration, the failure to mention the humanitarian catastrophe inflicted on the Rohingya in Rakhine reflect the government\u2019s position that \u201cinvestment is not political.\u201d This as sinister as it is dishonest reflecting the role of the Rakhine State Investment Fair as part of a wider government campaign to attempt to paper over the monstrous crimes with a veneer of business-as-usual normalcy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":128938,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[677],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-128937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia-updates-on-myanmar-rohingya-genocide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128937","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=128937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}