{"id":65795,"date":"2015-11-02T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2015-11-02T12:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=65795"},"modified":"2015-10-31T19:06:27","modified_gmt":"2015-10-31T19:06:27","slug":"british-research-institute-report-says-rohingya-face-genocide-comparable-to-nazi-era","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/11\/british-research-institute-report-says-rohingya-face-genocide-comparable-to-nazi-era\/","title":{"rendered":"British Research Institute Report Says Rohingya Face Genocide Comparable to Nazi Era"},"content":{"rendered":"

29 Oct 2015 – Updated |<\/em>\u00a0Myanmar\u2019s Rohingya minority population is in \u201cthe final stages of a genocidal process\u201d comparable to that in Nazi Germany in the 1930s\u00a0and Rwanda in the 1990s, and attacks against them are planned at the highest levels of government, according to a new report from a British research institute.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>

A Rohingya woman who arrived by boat cries at the port of Julok village in Indonesia on May 20. Beawiharta\/Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

With just weeks until the country holds its landmark elections<\/a>, the report, the result of an 18-month investigation by the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) at Queen Mary University of London, found \u201ccompelling evidence\u201d that Rohingya face \u201cmass annihilation\u201d by the government of Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) and that a genocide has been taking place for three decades.<\/p>\n

The 106-page report includes evidence from leaked government documents and detailed accounts from witnesses about the\u00a0severe lack of food and employment opportunities;\u00a0difficulties trying to obtain health care; and discrimination and violence from Buddhist monks and non-Muslim villagers.<\/p>\n

The Rohingya, a roughly 1.1 million-strong Muslim minority group living in Myanmar<\/a>, are denied basic human rights in the country, where officials are working to remove their presence from the country\u2019s history, according to the report. Human rights violations against the Rohingya include rape, torture, killings, arbitrary detention and confiscation of land, while ghettoization, sporadic massacres and limits against their freedom of movement amount \u201cto a longer-term strategy by the state to isolate, weaken and eliminate the group,\u201d the report says. The Rohingya are not recognized as a minority group in Myanmar, Rohingya babies are not issued birth certificates, and the Rohingya won\u2019t be able to vote<\/a> or stand for office in next month\u2019s elections.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really important to construct genocide as a social process, because if we don\u2019t, we can never intervene before mass killing takes place,\u201d Penny Green, a professor of law and globalization at Queen Mary University of London and lead researcher of the report, tells Newsweek<\/em>. She added that the elections \u201creinforce the elimination of the Rohingya from the political realm of responsibility of Myanmar.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Myanmar mission to the U.N. did not respond to a request for comment from Newsweek<\/em>. The government of Myanmar did not review a copy of the report before it was published, according to Green.<\/p>\n

\"Monks<\/a>

Monks and protesters shout during a march to denounce foreign criticism of the country’s treatment of stateless Rohingya Muslims, in Yangon, Myanmar, on May 27. Aubrey Belford\/Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

Green says it\u2019s not a stretch to make a comparison between Myanmar and Nazi\u00a0Germany in the 1930s, or Rwanda in the early 1990s, when around 800,0000 people, mostly Tutsi, were killed in a matter of weeks. She added that \u201cthe apartheid system in Myanmar is worse than that in South Africa\u201d in the 20th century. The Rohingya are portrayed as illegal immigrants and terrorists, and they face \u201ccampaigns of race and religious hatred\u201d from nationalists in Rakhine state\u2014the western region where most Rohingya live\u2014and Islamophobic monks, according to the report.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou don\u2019t need to engage in mass killing to obliterate an ethnic group. You can do it by other means,\u201d says Green, who spent four months on the ground in Rakhine as part of her research. Green and her team of researchers were denied access to northern Rakhine state by the government. \u201cYou can make life so intolerable that they leave, and those remaining have no agency and are effectively in detention camps,\u201d says Green. \u201cYou create a very fragmented diaspora around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Attacks against the Rohingya intensified in 2012<\/a>, partly triggered by the rape and murder of a Buddhist Rakhine woman that was blamed on Rohingya men. The violence killed hundreds of Rohingya and displaced tens of thousands more to detention camps, ghettos or prison villages, says Green. Muslim businesses and mosques were torched in Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine state, and Muslim\u00a0students were banned from attending schools or universities in the city. Green says she saw evidence of malnutrition among children in the camps, where people are dying from treatable conditions like diarrhea and cannot access emergency health care.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is complicated, and I\u2019m not sure we wholly understand why this has happened now and why 2012 marked such a turning point, but it did mark a turning point,\u201d says Green. \u201cAn intensification of the genocide has taken place [since 2012], but it was well underway before.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Rohingya are now two steps away from all-out genocide, having already been subjected to four stages: stigmatization, harassment, isolation and systematic weakening, according to the ISCI. There is evidence that the remaining two stages\u2014extermination and \u201csymbolic enactment,\u201d or erasing the group from Myanmar\u2019s history\u2014are already well underway, says Green. The systematic weakening of the group has been so successful that the\u00a0Rohingya\u2019s rights have been \u201ceffectively destroyed\u201d and \u201cthose who can, flee, while those who remain endure the barest of lives,\u201d the report says.<\/p>\n

The exact number of Rohingya in Myanmar is unknown because the term Rohingya<\/em> is not featured in the census. They have the option to call themselves Bengali\u2014the government believes the Rohingya to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh\u2014but few do so, according to the report. The government of Myanmar refuses to recognize the term Rohingya<\/em>\u00a0and will not attend any conferences that include the name, therefore turning them into a non-people, says Green.<\/p>\n

The report also criticizes the international community for its lack of action. In a letter included in the report, Tom\u00e1s Ojea Quintana, U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar from 2008 to 2014, says it \u201chas been embarrassing for the international community to express the idea of genocide.\u201d Green says such embarrassment\u00a0is due to a reluctance to act once the word\u00a0genocide <\/em>is used: If one country accepts that another is committing genocide, there\u2019s \u201can obligation on those states who recognize the genocide to act on it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

The Rohingya stand to gain little from the upcoming elections. Instead, they face a new human rights crisis at sea<\/a>, as the sailing season resumes later this year and thousands take to rickety boats to escape poverty and persecution.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

Before joining<\/em> Newsweek, Lucy Westcott was an editorial fellow at <\/em>The Wire. Previously a United Nations correspondent for the <\/em>Inter Press Service, she has also written for the <\/em>Guardian, Bustle, <\/em>American Journalism Review, and the <\/em>Capital News Service, and interned at the <\/em>BBC\u2019s Washington bureau. Lucy received her Masters of Journalism degree from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park, and got her start in journalism writing copy for a police station. She was born and raised in Swindon, U.K.<\/em><\/p>\n

Correction: This story originally described the\u00a0International State Crime Initiative as an NGO. It is a research institute.<\/em><\/p>\n

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

29 Oct 2015 – Updated | Myanmar\u2019s Rohingya minority population is in \u201cthe final stages of a genocidal process\u201d comparable to that in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and Rwanda in the 1990s, and attacks against them are planned at the highest levels of government, according to a new report from a British research institute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65795","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=65795"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65795\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}