{"id":151896,"date":"2020-01-20T12:00:12","date_gmt":"2020-01-20T12:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=151896"},"modified":"2020-11-14T03:58:29","modified_gmt":"2020-11-14T03:58:29","slug":"why-myanmars-genocide-denial-will-come-back-to-haunt-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2020\/01\/why-myanmars-genocide-denial-will-come-back-to-haunt-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Myanmar\u2019s Genocide Denial Will Come Back to Haunt It"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

FRC<\/p><\/div>\n

17 Jan 2020 – <\/em>Last month, Myanmar\u2019s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi\u00a0took the stand<\/a>\u00a0at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague to rebut allegations that her country\u2019s systematic persecution of its Rohingya population amounts to genocide. Aung San Suu Kyi, once lionized for her stand against an oppressive military dictatorship,\u00a0strenuously denied<\/a>\u00a0the charges \u2014 despite reams of evidence and the presence of nearly 1 million Rohingyas in refugee camps in Bangladesh. They ended up there after fleeing a so-called counterterrorism campaign by the Myanmar military in 2017 that left uncounted thousands dead.<\/p>\n

The ICJ has\u00a0announced<\/a>\u00a0that it will issue a preliminary judgment in the case on Jan. 23. Yet one outcome is already clear: Aung San Suu Kyi\u2019s defiant genocide denial\u00a0generated an outpouring of approval<\/a>\u00a0back home, bolstering support for her as well as for anti-Muslim nationalism. This is chilling not only for the Rohingya and other Muslims inside the country. It is also extremely dangerous for the multiethnic and multi-religious state of Myanmar as a whole.<\/p>\n

The case against Myanmar, which was\u00a0filed by Gambia<\/a>, draws on reports filed by United Nations investigators. They found that Myanmar\u00a0has committed<\/a>\u00a0\u201cgravest crimes under international law.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pending a final decision in the case, Gambia\u2019s legal representatives have asked the judges to issue binding provisional measures in order to ensure the protection of\u00a0600,000<\/a>\u00a0Rohingya who remain trapped in Myanmar, given that the head U.N. investigator\u00a0warned<\/a>\u00a0of \u201ca serious risk of genocide recurring.\u201d Aung San Suu Kyi urged the court to dismiss the case, arguing that the U.N. investigators\u2019 investigations are not credible and that Myanmar should be left to investigate its own wrongdoing.<\/p>\n

As I attended the hearing, I found Aung San Suu Kyi\u2019s defense of the military disconcerting enough. But the real shock came during\u00a0her televised address to the nation<\/a>\u00a0on her return from The Hague.<\/p>\n

Aung San Suu Kyi used her speech to play to Buddhist nationalist sensibilities. Many in Myanmar believe that Western powers, following instructions from the oil-rich nations of the Islamic world, are ganging up on a poor little Buddhist country. Aung San Suu Kyi tried to capitalize on these attitudes by assuring her listeners that \u201cwe will overcome every challenge with our seamless unity, solidarity and bonds of blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Since Myanmar won its independence from Britain 72 years ago, nationalist sentiments among the ruling elite\u00a0have proved to be<\/a>\u00a0one of the greatest obstacles in building a peaceful post-colonial nation out of a rich diversity of ethnicities, religions, cultures and political histories.<\/p>\n

Successive generations of politicians and generals, most of them from the country\u2019s overwhelmingly Buddhist Burmese majority, have used nationalism to bolster their rule. From almost the moment it achieved independence in 1948, Myanmar has confronted a long series of armed rebellions waged by the country\u2019s national minorities.<\/p>\n

These groups \u2014 often inhabiting resource-rich regions along the country\u2019s periphery \u2014 have commonly experienced Myanmar independence as another form of alien rule, even more repressive than British colonialism.<\/p>\n

After a landslide victory in the 2015 general election, Aung San Suu Kyi\u00a0took office as state counselor<\/a>, making her the country\u2019s de facto leader. She promised nationwide peace and genuine reconciliation but has signally failed to deliver. The cease-fire process\u00a0has stalled<\/a>. This bodes ill for the future of the entire country \u2014 including the Burmese majority, which remains far too complacent about the desperate need for peace.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Aung San Suu Kyi\u2019s government has failed to create a \u201cconducive environment\u201d for the repatriation of the exiled Rohingyas. Violent clashes continue to plague Rakhine state, the home of most of the Rohingya. No wonder only 415 of them \u2014 out of the nearly 1 million living in the camps in Bangladesh \u2014 have returned to Myanmar.<\/p>\n

In 2012, just a few weeks after a widely reported bout of organized violence against the Rohingya, I took part\u00a0in a roundtable<\/a>\u00a0with Aung San Suu Kyi and Sir Geoffrey Nice, who\u00a0led the prosecution of former Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic<\/a>. At the time, Aung San Suu Kyi maintained a conspicuous silence on the subject. Nice subsequently\u00a0wrote<\/a>, \u201cSuu Kyi should know that inactivity in the face of genocidal actions can carry moral, legal, and even criminal responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those words were printed one year before the military embarked on its 2017 ethnic cleansing campaign. Its genocidal purge included\u00a0the physical destruction<\/a>\u00a0of at least 390 villages, including thousands of mosques, schools, clinics, warehouses, shops, village halls and homes.<\/p>\n

Aung San Suu Kyi has now publicly flung open the floodgates of militant nationalism \u2014 a version as virulent as the anti-British nationalism of her father\u2019s formative era in the 1930s and 1940s. This resistance to foreign rule often led to communal violence, since some ethnic nationalists viewed other groups as the beneficiaries of colonization.<\/p>\n

As the International Criminal Court proceeds\u00a0with its own separate investigation<\/a>\u00a0 into Myanmar\u2019s crimes against the Rohingya, it is imperative that the prosecutor name Aung San Suu Kyi, along with the generals, as partners in crime. The international community must stand firm in holding her to account.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>A Buddhist humanist from Burma, Maung Zarni is 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.\u00a0Zarni is coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge, UK.<\/strong><\/em> 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). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, <\/em>Essays on Myanmar Genocide. Zarni 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 – freerohingyacoalition.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

17 Jan 2020 – As the International Criminal Court proceeds with its own separate investigation into Myanmar\u2019s crimes against the Rohingya, it is imperative that the prosecutor name Aung San Suu Kyi, along with the generals, as partners in crime. The international community must stand firm in holding her to account.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":121061,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,677],"tags":[240,1692,1688,1198,526,101,100,1199,1782,865,260,487,1644,651,1417,103,107,527,985,99,124],"class_list":["post-151896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","category-asia-updates-on-myanmar-rohingya-genocide","tag-asia","tag-aung-san-suu-kyi","tag-bangladesh","tag-buddhism","tag-burma-myanmar","tag-cultural-violence","tag-direct-violence","tag-ethnic-cleansing","tag-free-rohingya-coalition","tag-genocide","tag-history","tag-human-rights","tag-international-court-of-justice-icj","tag-justice","tag-maung-zarni","tag-racism","tag-religion","tag-rohingya","tag-social-justice","tag-structural-violence","tag-united-nations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151896","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=151896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}