{"id":193603,"date":"2021-08-30T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2021-08-30T11:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=193603"},"modified":"2023-09-14T08:32:02","modified_gmt":"2023-09-14T07:32:02","slug":"us-and-uk-usurp-rohingya-voices-while-missframing-myanmar-genocide-as-ethnic-cleansing-slobodan-milosevics-euphemism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/08\/us-and-uk-usurp-rohingya-voices-while-missframing-myanmar-genocide-as-ethnic-cleansing-slobodan-milosevics-euphemism\/","title":{"rendered":"US and UK Usurp Rohingya Voices while (Miss)Framing Myanmar Genocide as \u201cEthnic Cleansing,\u201d Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107\u2019s Euphemism"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s one thing for the United States and its British poodle to abandon dissidents worldwide during their hours of needs, yet it is a moral low for the British and American officials and leaders to coordinate acts of genocidal denial as they have done with their official statements on the 4th anniversary of \u201cEthnic Cleansing\u201d in Rakhine State.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Burned Rohingya village in Rakhine state, Burma\/Myanmar<\/p><\/div>\n

28 Aug 2021 – <\/em>I was shocked and deeply repulsed, beyond words, to witness the apparent, coordinated attempts by the administrations of Boris John and Joe Biden at bleaching Myanmar\u2019s international legal crime of genocide \u2013 no less \u2013 on the very day Rohingya survivors around the world have come to recognize as Genocide Remembrance Day.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Event to mark Genocide Remembrance Day<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\"\"While the British Embassy @UK-in-Myanmar was busy tweeting \u201cToday marks the 4th anniversary since the military\u2019s committed ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya \u2026.\u201d\u00a0 the US State Department issued a press statement, entitled \u201cMarking the 4th Anniversary of Ethnic Cleansing in Rakhine State\u201d.\u00a0 The American version of spin begins with the opening sentence, \u201c(f)our years ago, Burma\u2019s military launched a horrific ethnic cleansing against Rohingya in northern Rakhine State.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a different moral universe where rights activists such as myself and two-dozen scholars and activists firmly anchor ourselves, human rights are lived principles and international crime codes such as the Genocide Convention are lived principles.<\/p>\n

To belabour the obvious, the West\u2019s liberal democratic regimes \u2013 in this case, the Anglo-American governments \u2013 manipulate the principles of human rights and inter-state treaties such as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in order to suit their undeclared geopolitical and corporate interests.<\/p>\n

For the Americans, Myanmar genocide is viewed through its prism of paranoia<\/a> about Beijing dislodging USA as the global hegemon.<\/p>\n

The post-Brexit Britain is chiefly concerned about maintaining its market access<\/a> and shoring up corporate profits in emerging markets, however heinous their business partners may be.<\/p>\n

\"\"But even my 30-years of international human rights activism, at times in corridors of power, did not prepare me for the level of usurpation and moral depravity that the American and British policy-makers are prepared to sink. Washington and London in effect deny and dismiss the crime of genocide on the day Rohingya mourned their mass-deads and destruction while throwing humanitarian crumbs at the survivor community in sub-human conditions in Bangladesh and Myanmar.<\/p>\n

By mis-naming and mis-framing the genocide as \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d, alas, that favourite euphemism by the now dead Serbian genocidal leader Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107, Johnson and Biden regimes have added insult to the collective injury of several million Rohingya survivors, in refugee and IDP camps, in the diaspora and in boats fleeing from secondary persecution at the hands of the hostile host governments of Bangladesh, India and so on.<\/p>\n

It is expected that unprincipled US leaders<\/a>, democrats and republicans, would routinely attempt<\/a> to use the morally loaded term \u201cgenocide,\u201d both Lemkinian conception and the inter-state treaty Genocide Convention, to score cheap points against other rogue regimes such as China, Libya, or Syria. But it is yet another low for Washington and London to coordinate their Milosevicesque statements, in effect, dismissing Rohingya demand for calling a spade a spade.<\/p>\n

The Biden Administration\u2019s politically motivated refusal to officially acknowledge the institutionalized physical destruction of Rohingyas, declared a protected group under the Genocide Convention by the International Court of Justice, stands in sharp contrast with the overwhelming recognition and condemnations of Myanmar\u2019s crime of genocide by US Congress.\u00a0 The two leading lawmakers, who chair US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and (lower) House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee\u00a0 publicly pressed<\/a> US President Joe Biden \u201cto make a formal determination that these crimes (against Rohingya) constitute genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Gregory Stanton, former State Department official and the world\u2019s foremost legal and anthropological scholar of genocide \u2013 trained at Yale Law and the University of Chicago \u2013 was reading his poetry \u201cWhat is justice?\u201d, at the Free Rohingya Coalition Genocide Memorial Event on 25 August, having asked pointedly, \u201cWhat is justice for a lawyer who still won\u2019t call it genocide?\u201d.\u00a0 https:\/\/fb.watch\/7EiCy1kB-h\/<\/a><\/p>\n

In his forthcoming publication, entitled \u201c\u2018thnic Cleansing\u2019 is a Euphemism Used for Genocide Denial\u201d, Stanton argues persuasively that the use of Milosevic\u2019s euphemism \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d is tantamount to genocide denial.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Rohingyas at the Kutupalong refugee camp in Bangladesh, October 2017. Wikipedia Commons<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In Stanton\u2019s scathing words of indictment: \u201cThe UN, press, human rights groups, and many governments still call the Myanmar Army\u2019s aggression, genocidal massacres, and forced deportation against the Rohingya \u201cethnic cleansing.\u201d \u201cEthnic cleansing\u201d is a term invented by Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107 and Serbian propagandists as a euphemism for forced deportation and genocide.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cEthnic cleansing\u201d in common usage means forced deportation. But unlike the crime against humanity of deportation or forcible transfer of population, and the crime of genocide, it is not a term that appears in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. It has no legal meaning in international law. There is no treaty outlawing it.\u00a0 No national legal codes prohibit \u201cethnic cleansing.\u201d No prosecutor can charge anyone for committing it. The term is a license for impunity.<\/p>\n

As used by Milo\u0161evi\u0107, the press, the U.N., and many governmental policy makers, the term \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d is used to avoid using the word \u201cgenocide.\u201d \u201cEthnic cleansing\u201d has become a euphemism used for genocide denial. Because Article 1 of the Genocide Convention implies the obligation to act to prevent genocide, avoiding use of the term \u201cgenocide\u201d has the same practical outcome as genocide denial. Users of the term \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d \u2013 like genocide deniers \u2013 are freed from their duty to prevent or stop genocide.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

On the same FRC Genocide Memorial Event, Dr Katherine Southwick, another Yale-trained American legal scholar who warned of genocide against the Rohingya as early as 2014, vented her frustration<\/a>.\u00a0 Southwick said to the Facebook LIVE audience of 20,000+ viewers yesterday, \u201cso with frustration with the international community\u2019s own lack of accountability, yet with hope and gratitude, the international community must do nothing less than acknowledge genocide and renew our solidarity and support for the Rohingya and equal rights for all in Myanmar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taking a non-legal perspective, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the leading scholar of post-colonial studies and University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University in New York, was emphatic with her demand<\/a> for legal acknowledgment of genocide \u2013 which Rohingya have long been subjected to \u2013 when she invoked \u201ccommon sense\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Indian scholar told the worldwide audience at the FRC Genocide Memorial Facebook LIVE yesterday thus: \u201cI want to speak to my Rohingya brothers and sisters and talk to them about a possible future.\u00a0 It is the unacknowledged genocide that has made it impossible for me to do what I want to do today.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think our conscience needs to go to legal definitions to acknowledge that the Rohingya is killed simply because she is a Rohingya.\u00a0 By common sense, that is genocide.\u00a0 But we must have an international legal acknowledgment in order for the possibility of legal redress to begin.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Rohingya \u2013 and their international friends \u2013 worldwide mourned the mass-death and destruction of numerous victims raped, maimed, slaughtered, and otherwise genocidally purged \u2013 and lamented the absence of any effective acts by the \u201cabstract international community\u201d \u2013 to borrow Spivak\u2019s coinage \u2013 General Sadat, a US-trained commander in the Afghan National Army, was writing in the New York Times<\/a>, with (justified) anger towards the United States government for having abandoned <\/em>Afghan people.<\/p>\n

The general writes, \u201cI am exhausted. I am frustrated. And I am angry.<\/strong><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

President Biden said last week that \u201cAmerican troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that the Afghan Army lost its will to fight. But that\u2019s because of the growing sense of abandonment by our American partners and the disrespect and disloyalty reflected in Mr. Biden\u2019s tone and words over the past few months.\u201d<\/p>\n

The betrayal and a palpable sense of abandonment that the wretched of the earth who struggle for their right to life and liberty, have felt towards the liberal West in general and the United States in particular, with the latter\u2019s signature honey-tongued support for human rights and \u201cthe rule-based international order\u201d is nothing new.<\/p>\n

In the early years of the Cold War, after having made promises of solidarity which they never intended to keep, the United States (and western allies) abandoned thousands of Hungarian rights activists<\/a> in the wintery month of November 1956.<\/p>\n

Almost 20 years ago, Matthew Daley, the then serving as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of East Asian Affairs at the United States State Department, pointedly warned me against trusting and relying on his employer for the Burmese liberation struggle, in our one-on-one meeting in his office at Foggy Bottom in Washington, DC:<\/p>\n

\u201cMy government\u2019s Burma policy is unconscionable. We made empty promises to the Hungarian democrats in 1956. Then when they were slaughtered (by the Soviets), we did nothing. So, you Burmese must find your own solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But it\u2019s one thing for the United States and its British poodle across this side of the Atlantic to abandon dissidents worldwide against dodgy regimes during the latter\u2019s hours of needs, be they Hungarians, South Vietnamese or, presently, pro-human rights and anti-Taliban Afghan peoples.\u00a0 It is altogether another moral low for the British and American officials and leaders to coordinate acts of genocidal denial as they have done with their official statements on the 4th anniversary of \u201cEthnic Cleansing\u201d in Rakhine State.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ten years ago, my own research colleague and wife Natalie Brinham (pseudonym Alice Cowley) and I conducted a 3-year pathbreaking study based on Rohingya survivors in Malaysia, India, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and Myanmar, and we reached unequivocal conclusion that Myanmar has institutionalized the physical destruction of Rohingya minority, starting with the destruction of their group identity and history centuries before Burma or Myanmar came into existence in 1948. We published our findings as the commissioned peer-reviewed article in the Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journa<\/a>l of the University of Washington School of Law in the spring of 2014.<\/p>\n

As a matter of fact, even Public International Law and Policy Group (PILPG) the Washington law firm which US State Department hired to do the forensic investigation of the representative sample of 1,000 Rohingya survivors who took refuge in Bangladesh in 2017, went public with the genocide findings. The PILPG\u2019s Paul Williams told the press conference in Washington<\/a>, \u201c(i)t is clear from our intense legal review that there is, in fact, a legal basis to conclude that the Rohingya were the victims of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.\u201d For the Trump Administration decided to shelve its own commissioned report, when the findings did not suit US government\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n

On this side of the Atlantic, the British politicians were no more receptive of facts and findings of Myanmar genocide, according to Queen Mary University of London Professor Penny Green, whose International State Crime Initiative, documented the evidence of the genocide in Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar <\/em><\/a>(2015), who spoke on the FRC Genocide Memorial Event on Facebook LIVE this week.<\/p>\n

There is then no wonder that the Taliban, the Xis and the Putins of the world of rogue regimes pay scant attention to the Anglo-American joint barking of democracy, human rights, or rule of law.\u00a0\u00a0 Nor do these rogue regimes think twice before they commit mass atrocities.<\/p>\n

The ugly truth is these Western and Eastern birds of the same feather flock together on the Security Council, where they all take turns denying war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocides or flouting any inter-state treaty obligations, depending on their conflicting interests.<\/p>\n

Those in high offices who have been entrusted to ensure peace, security and well-being of humanity at large turn out to be the worst enemies of We the Peoples.<\/p>\n

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

\"\"<\/a>A Buddhist humanist from Burma, Maung Zarni is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>, 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 s the co-founder of <\/em>FORSEA<\/a>, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for <\/em>Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the <\/em>European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. <\/strong>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). 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.<\/p>\n

Go to Original – forsea.co<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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