{"id":281529,"date":"2024-12-02T12:00:57","date_gmt":"2024-12-02T12:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=281529"},"modified":"2024-11-29T05:26:44","modified_gmt":"2024-11-29T05:26:44","slug":"understanding-iccs-arrest-warrant-application-for-myanmar-military-leader-anti-genocide-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/12\/understanding-iccs-arrest-warrant-application-for-myanmar-military-leader-anti-genocide-perspective\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding ICC\u2019s Arrest Warrant Application for Myanmar Military Leader: Anti-Genocide Perspective"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The Hague, Netherlands: The International Criminal Court-ICC has jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war, and aggression.
Photo: SARATSTOCK, Shutterstock<\/p><\/div>\n

28 Nov 2024 – Without the willing executioners and cheerleaders, no state is capable of large-scale crimes against humanity of which genocide is one, from the Nazi genocide to Rwanda, to Indonesia\u2019s CIA-facilitated genocide of ethnic Chinese and communists, to the ongoing Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza. Myanmar\u2019s genocide of Rohingya is no exception.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Myanmar\u2019s generally anti-military public including Burmese language journalists, armed fighters, exiles and members of the multiethnic and multifaith diaspora are jubilant upon hearing the news about the application made to the Pre-Trial Chamber judges today (27 November) by the International Criminal Court Prosecutor and British barrister Karim Khan, seeking the judges\u2019 arrest warrant for the Myanmar military leader Min Aung Hlaing, the commander-in-chief of Myanmar\u2019s national armed forces, known as Tatmadaw and the leader of the 2021 military coup, which ousted Aung San Suu Kyi\u2019s populist civilian government.<\/p>\n

The prosecutor Khan stated that Min Aung Hlaing bears the command responsibility for the crimes against humanity of deportation and persecution of the Rohingya people \u2013 predominantly Muslims \u2013 within Myanmar\u2019s national boundaries, and on Bangladesh\u2019s soil, which were perpetrated by Myanmar\u2019s national military with the support of Myanmar police, border guard forces and non-Rohingya civilians of Myanmar.<\/p>\n

For the millions of Rohingya survivors of Myanmar\u2019s international crimes \u2013 in refugee camps, in diaspora, in limbo as \u201cstateless\u201d people in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Thailand \u2013 the court and the prosecutor\u2019s office have come to be seen as lacking any real political will to establish accountability for them since the ICC first embarked on an investigation into the crimes against humanity in November 2019. It is indeed a clich\u00e9 now to say justice delayed is justice denied.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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

I find it curious the timing of the Prosecutor\u2019s publicised quest for the judges\u2019 issuance of the first ever arrest warrant for Myanmar military leader, in the history of the country\u2019s slow-burning genocide since it was launched and institutionalized under the bogus pretext of cracking down on \u201cillegal immigration\u201d of Bangali Muslims.<\/p>\n

The prosecutor filed his Myanmar application in less than a week after the same UN court issued the 21-November-dated arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant<\/a>, and a senior Hamas official, alleging them of committing war crimes during the 7 October attack on Israel and Israel\u2019s subsequent devastating attack on 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza.<\/p>\n

In the face of vicious, arrogant and racist attacks by the United States\u2019 political leaders from both parties over the Court for daring to go after Washington\u2019s two mass-murderous Israeli \u201cbastards\u201d\u2013 Netanyahu and Gallant \u2013 the court and prosecutor\u2019s office are obviously standing up for themselves \u2013 for the integrity of the court, the instrument of international law and the United Nations itself.<\/p>\n

So, whatever the triggers behind the Prosecutor\u2019s application for the issuance of the arrest warrant for Senior General Min Aung Hlaing Khan\u2019s quest is to be welcome by all of us rights activists, campaigners against genocides and other crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n

But as my dear friend Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak said pointedly at the International Conference on the Rohingya genocide at Wolfson College, Oxford in May 2016, \u201cthe United Nations is not the end of the road and law is not justice.\u201d<\/p>\n

We must approach genocides and other crimes against humanity beyond legal accountability. Locking up, if at all, a handful of Myanmar generals and a few others who incited the genocidal deportation of more than 50% of the Rohingya people from their ancestral homeland of Northern Rakhine state will not be justice for Rohingya people. Rohingyas will need their own homeland \u2013 that is, literally LAND \u2013 where they are not subordinated to or subject to the constant racist domination, murderous and violent Islamophobia and military control by the Arakan Army, which is nothing but the embodiment of ethno-nationalist Rakhine Buddhists.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In that connection, I take as most significant Karim Khan\u2019s deliberate inclusion of \u201cnon-Rohingya civilians\u201d as, in effect, executioners, cheerleaders, supporters, supporters, inciters and collaborators in Senior General Min Aung Hlaing\u2019s genocide. In the midst of the mass-deportation, mass-slaughter and wholesale destruction of thousands of homes and places of religious warship \u2013 all belonging to Rohingyas in the fall of 2017 \u2013 Min Aung Hlaing had ordered his troops to finish \u201cthe unfinished business\u201d of Rohingya presence on Myanmar\u2019s soil.<\/p>\n

This, Myanmar troops attempted to do at the expense of 1 million genocidally deported Rohingya people of all ages, professions and sexes.<\/p>\n

The world must not forget that this level of state-organized crime could not have been accomplished by a single institution of the military \u2013 without the cheer-leading, active support and collaboration by the non-Rohingya civilians, inside Rakhine state (that is, majority Rakhine Buddhists) and the Myanmar civil society at large, multi-ethnic political parties, the flagship ruling party of the National League for Democracy, and above all leading Buddhist monks and the Mother of Myanmar, namely the 1991 Nobel Peace Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.<\/p>\n

Without the willing executioners and cheerleaders, no state is capable of large-scale crimes against humanity of which genocide is one, from the Nazi genocide to Rwanda to Indonesia\u2019s CIA-facilitated genocide of ethnic Chinese and communists to the ongoing Israel\u2019s genocide in Gaza. Myanmar\u2019s genocide of Rohingya is no exception.<\/p>\n

Genocidal states are usually anchored in genocidally racist civil societies. This, neither Karim Kham\u2019s ICC or the International Court of Justice where the Gambia vs Myanmar genocide case is in its merit phase, can fix or repair.<\/p>\n

It is absolutely crucial for all non-Rohingya civilians of Myanmar \u2013 including those in the diaspora, that they must search their soul. Their names will be forever inscribed in the annals of world\u2019s genocide as \u201csupporters\u201d of international crimes.<\/p>\n

They \u2013 not me who has renounced my \u201cBurmese identity\u201d in the midst of Burmese genocide \u2013 have failed to speak out or lift a finger when Rohingyas were subjected to crimes of mass deportation and persecution.<\/p>\n

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

\"\"<\/a> A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, 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 is 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":"

28 Nov 2024 – Without the willing executioners and cheerleaders, no state is capable of large-scale crimes against humanity of which genocide is one, from the Nazis to Rwanda, to Indonesia\u2019s CIA-facilitated, to Israel\u2019s in Gaza. Myanmar\u2019s genocide of Rohingya is no exception.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":170241,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[526,133,1854,1044,1782,87,865,1643,2959,88,2552,1147,527,1412,70,965,481],"class_list":["post-281529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-burma-myanmar","tag-cia","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-east-asia","tag-free-rohingya-coalition","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-genocide-convention","tag-indonesia","tag-israel","tag-jews","tag-nazism","tag-rohingya","tag-rwanda","tag-usa","tag-war-crimes","tag-warfare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281529","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=281529"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281529\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":281534,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281529\/revisions\/281534"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/170241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}