{"id":68783,"date":"2016-01-11T12:04:06","date_gmt":"2016-01-11T12:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=68783"},"modified":"2016-01-11T12:09:23","modified_gmt":"2016-01-11T12:09:23","slug":"suu-kyi-govt-must-not-continue-state-persecution-of-rohingya","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/01\/suu-kyi-govt-must-not-continue-state-persecution-of-rohingya\/","title":{"rendered":"Suu Kyi Govt Must Not Continue State Persecution of Rohingya"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"maung<\/a>11 Jan 2016 – <\/em>On Tuesday [12 Jan], Burma\u2019s lame duck government led by President Thein Sein and backed by the country\u2019s military is holding a national conference ostensibly to foster peace. The dialogue will bring together the Burmese military and the representatives of the eight ethnic armed groups that agreed to the partial ceasefire agreement in October.<\/p>\n

The National League for Democracy (NLD) led by Aung San Suu Kyi \u2013 which will come to power at the end of March \u2013 has officially declared that \u201cestablishing peace with minorities will be the single most important goal\u201d for her government.<\/p>\n

However, neither the most powerful stakeholder, namely the military, nor Suu Kyi\u2019s NLD will address the need to end the systematic persecution of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority living in their own ancestral borderlands between Burma and Bangladesh, whose persecution has repeatedly hit international news headlines.<\/p>\n

\"Rohingya<\/a>

Rohingya children pose for the camera at the Kutupalong refugee camp May 31, 2015. PHOTO: REUTERS\/Rafiqur Rahman<\/p><\/div>\n

Already, her top deputy on the Central Executive Committee, the ex-army officer Win Htein, has made it clear that ending the suffering of the Rohingya \u2013 estimated at 1.33 million in western Arakan State and an equal number in diaspora \u2013 is not on the party\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n

By all indications so far Suu Kyi\u2019s government shares with the Burmese military a racist view towards the Rohingya Muslims. They will most likely continue the current policies of systematic persecution and discrimination.<\/p>\n

Their shared indifference is deeply disturbing in light of the growing consensus worldwide about the genocidal nature of Burma\u2019s abuse and persecution of the Rohingya.<\/p>\n

Over the last several years, academic and non-academic researchers have raised a very real possibility that Burma is, as a matter of national policy, engaged in initiatives designed to destroy the Rohingya as an ethnic people. Among the organisations that have sounded this alarm are Fortify Rights, Human Rights Watch, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, ASEAN Parliamentary Human Rights Caucus, Al Jazeera Investigative Unit, Yale University\u2019s Human Rights Law Clinic and the International State Crime Initiative at Queen Mary University of London.<\/p>\n

Suu Kyi\u2019s Studied Silence <\/strong><\/p>\n

Noteworthy is the fact that Suu Kyi\u2019s culpability in the state-directed persecution of the Rohingya goes beyond her silence, which has been roundly criticised. Suu Kyi routinely offers Islamophobia as an explanation, and denies any systematic wrong-doing while dismissing the genocide and ethnic cleansing accusation as simply \u201cexaggerations\u201d.<\/p>\n

Never mind that seven of her fellow Nobel Peace laureates including Mairead Maguire and Desmond Tutu, as well as her long-time supporters such as George Soros and Amartya Sen, have come to view Burma\u2019s treatment of the Rohingya as nothing less than a slow genocide.<\/p>\n

George Soros, who escaped the Nazi-occupied Budapest as a Jewish teenager in 1944, took the trouble of visiting a Rohingya neighbourhood in Arakan State a year ago. After having witnessed the conditions in which the Rohingya were forced to live, Soros was moved to draw what he called an \u201calarming\u201d parallel between the Nazi genocide and Burma\u2019s Rohingya persecution. Last year Ms Suu Kyi also travelled to Arakan State to gather Arakan votes for her party. She did not bother to pay a brief if unpopular visit, out of compassion, to the Rohingya refugee camps and \u201cRohingya ghettos\u201d, as Soros put it, in the vicinity. Her calculated avoidance goes back to the beginning of the anti-Rohingya mass violence in June 2012.<\/p>\n

As a Burmese researcher and activist I joined Suu Kyi on the Rule of Law Roundtable at the London School of Economics (LSE) on her first visit to UK in a quarter century. Britain\u2019s Foreign and Commonwealth Office, her visit\u2019s official sponsor, informed the panel chair Professor Kaldor that our guest of honour was \u201cin listening mood\u201d, that is, she wasn\u2019t willing to speak on the hottest topic of the day. Only a week or so before the LSE panel, the Rohingya had suffered violence perpetrated by the sword-wielding local Arakan mobs, organised and backed by the state. I was pre-assigned to handle any question about the persecution of the Rohingya as she maintained the studied silence on the grave and domestically unpopular subject.<\/p>\n

A year later, on her second visit to UK in 2013, Suu Kyi was put on the spot on Radio Four by the host Mishal Hussain who front loaded the violence against Muslim Rohingya. Suu Kyi actively denied that Burma was committing \u201cethnic cleansing\u201d against the Rohingya. In her own words: \u201cNo, no, it\u2019s not ethnic cleansing. It\u2019s a new problem\u2026these problems arose last year. This is due to fear of both sides (Buddhists and Muslims). I think you will accept that there is a perception that Muslim power, global Muslim power, is very great. Certainly, that\u2019s a perception in many parts of the world, and in our country too\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

On the eve of Burma\u2019s elections, which her party won a crushing landslide against the incumbent military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party, her position shifted decidedly from a calculated silence to an active dismissal of any systematic wrong-doing. Human Rights Watch refers to what is happening to the Rohingya as ethnic cleansing. The Queen Mary University and Yale Law school researchers call it genocide.<\/p>\n

In a rare press conference held at her residence in Rangoon on 5 November, Anthony Kuhn of US National Public Radio asked her about the accusations of mass atrocities. She responded by saying, \u201cDon\u2019t exaggerate the problems [of the Rohingya]\u201d while proceeding to echo the government\u2019s portrayal of the Rohingya as simply \u201cfrom Bangladesh\u201d.<\/p>\n

In her rhetoric and lack of action, Suu Kyi has has evidently chosen to ignore a mountain of irrefutable official and historical documentation which backs the Rohingya\u2019s claim to identity, history and citizenship in Burma.<\/p>\n

Deep Historical Ties<\/strong><\/p>\n

In sharp contrast to the official and popular portrayal of the Rohingya as merely the descendants of farm \u2018coolies\u2019 imported by the British Raj to develop the fertile wet rice land of Western Burma adjacent to the then East Bengal (or present day Bangladesh), ethno-linguistic fieldwork going back to AD1799 \u2013 a quarter century before the British annexation of Western Burma \u2013 establishes the Rohingya as an ethnic group of Islamic faith.<\/p>\n

The claim of the historical presence of the Rohingya is further reinforced by stone inscriptions from AD 1440 unearthed and interpreted by none other than two of the leading founders of the historical studies of pre-colonial Burma, namely the late Gordon H. Luce and his most distinguished pupil the late Professor Than Tun of Burma Historical Commission.<\/p>\n

During the period of British colonial rule (1826-1947), Burma\u2019s pre-colonial ethnic groups with their self-chosen identities were lumped under broad categories informed in part by anthropologists and in part necessitated by the administrative needs of the colonial bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

Following the country\u2019s independence from Britain in 1948, the Rohingya reasserted their ethnic identity and historical presence in the borderlands between the new nation-states of Muslim Bangladesh and Buddhist Burma successfully. By 1954, Burma\u2019s national leaders fully embraced them as an ethnic group of the Union of Burma. The Ministry of Defence was directly involved in negotiations with the Rohingya leaders in terms of the state granting the official recognition of Rohingya ethnicity as integral to the Union of Burma.<\/p>\n

In 1992, the late Brig. Aung Gyi, the second in command of the Burmese Armed Forces under General Ne Win, recorded in writing his first-hand knowledge of the emergence of the state-recognised official Rohingya ethnic identity.<\/p>\n

In those days, the War Office had to pay a very close attention to Buthidaung and Maungdaw townships, just like today\u2019s War Office is paying a close attention to the border regions with Thailand. Eventually, the Rohingya warriors (Mujahideens) gave up their armed rebellion. In the discussion that ensued during the Surrender Ceremony, they made a specific request to the army representatives: that we don\u2019t address or refer to their people in ways they consider racist and derogatory. Specifically, the Rohingya leaders asked us not to call the Rohingya [pejorative terms such as] \u2018Khaw Taw\u2019, nor \u2018Bengali\u2019, nor \u2018Chittagonian Kalar\u2019 nor \u2018Arakan Muslims\u2019. Instead they said their preferred and self-referential ethnic name was the Arabic word Rohingya (meaning the Easterners \u2013 east of the old Bengal). In terms of the administrative name of their region, they proposed a completely secular term devoid of any religious connotations, namely Mayu after the river Mayu. <\/em><\/p>\n

The War Office agreed to organise the two majority Rohingya towns \u2013 Buthidaung and Maungdaw \u2013 into a single administrative district which was to be directly commanded by the War office (Ministry of Defence) as part of the Tatmadaw\u2019s wider strategic border affairs paradigm (where \u2018development\u2019 was pursued as a tool to combat ethnic rebellions). This arrangement by the War Office was subsequently officially approved by the Cabinet, thus having given birth to the Administrative Region of Mayu and resulting in the official recognition of the Rohingya as an ethnic group and name.<\/em><\/p>\n

By May 1961, Burma government established a Rohingya language service on the country\u2019s sole national radio station and by 1964, the Rohingya were given an official entry in the government\u2019s Burma Encyclopedia, recognising the two Northern Arakan townships as the predominantly Rohingya ancestral pocket.<\/p>\n

Betrayed by the Junta<\/strong><\/p>\n

After the military coup in 1962, General Ne Win, the deceased founder of the country\u2019s former\u00a0junta, turned on the commercially successful segment of Burmese society made up of people of Indian sub-continental origin. Over 300,000 Burmese of Indian origin were effectively expelled from the country. Han Chinese too suffered.\u00a0The new military state confiscated their businesses, properties and bank accounts. Nothing was spared. A decade later, Uganda\u2019s Idi Amin replicated the Burmese military\u2019s model of dealing with successful \u2018foreigners\u2019 as he expelled the entire community of people with Indian sub-continent ancestry.<\/p>\n

This is what has been happening to the Rohingya of Burma albeit at an excruciating slow pace since the late 1970s, when the military leaders decided to frame the Rohingya \u2013 and Muslims \u2013 as a threat to national security, and proceeded to devise strategies of disenfranchising them and destroying their economic and legal foundations. Campaigns of physical violence, mass arrest and de-ethnicisation have been coupled with the enactment of laws and regulations which have encoded Rohingya and Muslim persecution.<\/p>\n

The Rohingya have borne the brunt of this racist campaign centrally developed and directed simply because all of the different types of Muslim communities, the Rohingya are the only one with a brief history of armed revolt against the newly independent state of Burma, having their own ancestral geographic pocket adjacent to one of the most populous Muslim countries \u2013 Bangladesh.<\/p>\n

In October 2012, the second bout of organised mass violence, arson and looting drove over 140,000 Rohingya from some of the most commercially lucrative neighbourhoods in Arakan State. While these Rohingya languish in internments surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by security troops, their old neighbourhoods \u2013 burned to ashes in a matter of days \u2013 have been marked for the development of Special Economic Zone. That joint venture between the Burmese military and a Chinese corporation is worth US$17 billion.<\/p>\n

The popular misperception manufactured and encouraged by the government views the Rohingya as greedy, desperate \u2018Bengali\u2019 economic migrants, or \u2018leeches\u2019 \u2018parasites\u2019 \u2018ogres\u2019, from across the western borders. The reality for the Rohingya is that the Burmese government has effectively completed the process of not only stripping them of official and historical ethnicity and legal citizenship but of successfully destroying the economic and social foundations to sustain life as a cohesive ethnic community. Burma\u2019s decades-long policy of targeted destruction of the essential conditions of life for the Rohingya as a group is the driving force behind the mass exodus of the group from the country\u2019s west. Those desperate waves of people then make easy prey for human traffickers and people smugglers.<\/p>\n

Suu Kyi Must Be Pressed<\/strong><\/p>\n

For Aung San Suu Kyi to be echoing her former captors\u2019 official portrayal of the Rohingya as \u2018Bengali\u2019 migrants assuming a false and non-existent identity is devastating to the Rohingya who had high hopes of the NLD government ending their sufferings.<\/p>\n

On the contrary, Suu Kyi should be paying close attention to Amartya Sen, her supporter and former teacher at Delhi University, who sounded the alarm on the plight of the Rohingya when he said in 2014:<\/p>\n

The term \u2018slow genocide\u2019 is an appropriate fit here because you deny people health care and nutritional opportunities. You deny people opportunities to work and earn an income and make a living to feed themselves and their family members. You deny people having medical care and expel the only organisation(s) providing health care like <\/em>M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res, and don\u2019t allow them to return. That is killing people. And in that sense it is a genocide. It is a slow genocide.<\/em><\/p>\n

As Aung San Suu Kyi prepares to take over the reins of the new government, the international community \u2013 of diplomats, world leaders, journalists, human rights researchers and world citizens \u2013 needs to press the Burmese leader to reflect critically on her stances on the Rohingya. There has been a talk of inter-faith and inter-communal reconciliation efforts at the grassroots level between the Rohingya and the Arakan Buddhists. However laudable, these communal efforts can go only so far in ending what effectively is a state crime.\u00a0As the incoming head of state, the moral and political responsibility to end the slow genocide in Burma will fall squarely on Suu Kyi\u2019s shoulders.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/p>\n

Dr. Maung Zarni <\/em>is a Burmese activist blogger<\/em>, Associate Fellow at the University of Malaya,<\/em> a <\/em>member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment<\/a>,<\/em> founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), a visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, London School of Economics, and<\/em> a nonresident scholar with the Sleuk Rith Institute in Cambodia. <\/em>His forthcoming book on Burma will be published by Yale University Press.<\/em> He was educated in the US where he lived and worked for 17 years.<\/em><\/p>\n

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As Aung San Suu Kyi prepares to take over the reins of the new government [Burma\/Myanmar], the international community \u2013 of diplomats, world leaders, journalists, human rights researchers and world citizens \u2013 needs to press the Burmese leader to reflect critically on her stances on the Rohingya.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68783","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=68783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68783\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}