- Stars (0)
Genocide Achieved, Genocide Continues: Myanmar’s Annihilation of the Rohingya
By Penny Green / Thomas MacManus / Alicia de la Cour Venning
TIMELINE OF GENOCIDE
1977-78: Myanmar Rohingya branded ‘illegal Bengalis’ and a military offensive forces up to 200,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh. Most return the following year.
1982: Citizenship Act enacted.
1989: Burma renamed Myanmar; Arakan state renamed Rakhine state; new ‘citizenship scrutiny’ cards issued to Myanmar nationals – most Rohingya are excluded.
1990: National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Aung San Suu Kyi, wins elections. Aung San Suu Kyi placed under house arrest. Candidates from Rohingya parties elected to parliament.
1991-92: Military operation in northern Rakhine state forces up to 250,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh.
1992: Nasaka military/border security force established in northern Rakhine state, notorious for abuses. (October) UNHCR-led forced repatriations start: up to 230,000 Rohingya are repatriated by 1997.
1993: Border Region Immigration Control restricts marriages of Rohingya in Maungdaw township.
1994: Myanmar stops issuing birth certificates to Rohingya children.
1995: Rohingya given Temporary Registration Cards.
1997: Head of Sittwe Immigration Office restricts Rohingya travelling outside their township.
2001: Anti-Muslim riots across the country; many Rohingya displaced. Twenty-eight mosques and Islamic schools destroyed in and around Maungdaw township.
2005: Maungdaw Township Peace and Development Council restricts Rohingya marriages and birth rate.
2008: Rohingya granted Temporary Registration Cards and permitted to vote in widely discredited Myanmar Constitution referendum.
2010: Myanmar elections, Rohingya allowed to vote, Rohingya MP elected. Aung San Suu Kyi released after elections.
2012: (April) Aung San Suu Kyi elected MP. (June and October) Anti-Muslim violence in central and northern Rakhine, curfews imposed throughout Rakhine state. (July): President Thein Sein states the ‘solution’ to the violence is to expel ‘illegal’ Rohingya to other countries or camps administered by the UN’s refugee agency.
2013: Anti-Muslim violence in Meiktila in central Myanmar.
2014: (March) Rakhine nationalists attack international NGO offices in Sittwe. (April) Rohingya excluded from census. (July) President Thein Sein begins ‘citizenship verification’ process in Rakhine state, which is abandoned due to civil protests.
2015: (February) Parliament grants temporary white cardholders (mostly Rohingya) the right to vote. Days later the President reverses the decision. (May) Boat crisis in Andaman Sea; UNHCR estimates up to 150,000 Rohingya had fled Myanmar by boat since January 2012. (August) Rohingya representative in northern Rakhine state, U Shwe Maung, is barred from re-election. (November) NLD wins landslide victory in general election. NLD purged all Muslim candidates before election, and Rohingya were barred from voting or standing as candidates.
2016: (April) NLD-led government restarts ‘citizenship verification’ process in Rakhine state; Aung San Sui Kyi creates and assumes the position of State Councillor, the civilian head of state. (August) Government pays former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s foundation an undisclosed sum to run the Advisory Commission on Rakhine State. (9 October) The Arakan
Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) claim responsibility for attacks in northern Rakhine state; Myanmar army’s response forces up to 90,000 Rohingya to flee to Bangladesh.
2017: (March) The UN Human Rights Council establish Fact Finding Mission, which is subsequently barred from entering Myanmar. (24 August) The Kofi Annan Foundation presents its final report, which doesn’t use the term ‘Rohingya’; Myanmar government agrees to implement its recommendations. (25 August) Reported attacks by ARSA on border security posts sees the beginning of a sustained genocidal assault on Rohingya villages across northern Rakhine state, triggering a mass exodus of Rohingya to Bangladesh.
‘We openly declare that “absolutely, our country has no Rohingya race”.’– Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, Commander-in-Chief of Myanmar’s armed forces, 1 September 2017.
‘I never thought they would be able to remove that many people’ – Noor Amin, a village administrator in Kyuak Lagar, Maungdaw township, northern Rakhine state.
Over 800,000 women, men and children have streamed into Bangladesh from Myanmar (formerly Burma) since October 2016, the vast majority since late August 2017 – a staggering exodus in both number and speed. Having climbed mountains, waded across rivers, clambered along slippery paths carrying their young, their elderly, their disabled relatives and a few remaining possessions, they arrived exhausted and traumatized from the horrors they had survived.
From across the Naf river in the relative safety of Bangladesh, the world’s media live-streamed the red, smoke-filled sky of northern Rakhine state from where Myanmar’s Muslim minority, the Rohingya, were escaping brutal state-led violence in Maungdaw, Buthidaung and Rathedaung townships. Time and again survivors recounted how Myanmar’s army and Border Guard Police (BGP) had mercilessly attacked their communities, aided by armed Rakhine extremists , shooting and hacking to death relatives and friends, gang raping women and girls, pillaging property and torching villages. Their testimonies and satellite images left little doubt that their communities and livelihoods had been obliterated – the climax of a long-pursued and
state-orchestrated genocidal process.
Victims of numerous pogroms over the years, over 1 million Rohingya6 are now living in the sprawling, fetid, under-resourced, temporary camps in Bangladesh – the world’s most densely populated settlement of refugees. Here they are at risk of further physical and psychological annihilation through disease, malnourishment, lack of education and health care, human trafficking, mudslides, flooding, and cyclones.
However, genocide is a process with no clearly defined end – and the genocide of the Rohingya continues:
- death stalks the Rohingya trapped in Myanmar as a result of violent intimidation, enforced starvation and untreated illnesses;
- Rohingya are still fleeing terror and enforced destitution in Myanmar;
- the mass expulsion of Rohingya to makeshift camps in one of the world’s poorest countries, where the refugees face ongoing systematic weakening, including death, is part of Myanmar’s strategy of genocide;
- the Myanmar state is erasing historical evidence of Rohingya culture and identity as it reshapes Rakhine society.
The genocidal ‘clearance’ of Rohingya from Myanmar in 2017 was both predictable and predicted. In 2015, the authors of this report issued Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar, which showed that a genocidal process was well under way. The report presented evidence of ongoing genocidal processes, their historical genesis and the political, social and economic conditions in which genocide had emerged. ISCI researchers identified the architects of the genocide as Myanmar state officials and security forces, Rakhine nationalist civil society leaders and Buddhist monks, pointing to a significant degree of coordination between those agencies in the pursuit of eliminating the Rohingya from Myanmar’s political landscape.
Leading genocide scholar Daniel Feierstein identified six stages of genocide: stigmatisation (and dehumanisation); harassment, violence and terror; isolation and segregation; systematic weakening; mass annihilation; and finally symbolic enactment involving the removal of the victim group from the collective history. Countdown to Annihilation found the first four stages of genocide were already present in Rakhine state and warned that the Rohingya were facing the final two stages of genocide – mass annihilation and erasure of the group from Myanmar’s history. The world chose to ignore such warnings, as well as the mounting evidence from October 2016 onwards that the final stages of genocide were imminent.
Genocide Achieved, Genocide Continues analyses what the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI) believes to be evidence of the final two of the six stages outlined by Feierstein.
Many Rohingya were aware of the looming catastrophe for the simple reason that state security forces warned them it was coming. Noor Amin, for example, a Rohingya village administrator, said that soldiers told him in mid-2016 that security forces would soon launch co-ordinated attacks to annihilate the Rohingya:
They said, “You people will need to run away from this land very soon”. Some Border Guard Police I’m close to told me this secretly, but I didn’t believe them… because I trusted the government and the community, I never thought they would be able to remove that many people.
During the massacre some of the women fleeing were caught and raped, especially the beautiful ones. Children were also raped and killed. There were around 15 rapes in Chut Pyin – wherever the military operates, rape is a weapon.
The Myanmar state has also deployed another traditional tactic of genocide – using members of the victim community to deny the truth of massacres or blame others for the violence.
Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar, a report issued by the International State Crime Initiative(ISCI) in 2015, concluded with a stark warning:A genocidal process is underway in Myanmar and if it follows the path outlined in this report, it is yet to be completed. It can be stopped but not without confronting the fact that it is, indeed, a genocide.
