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“IF NOT NOW, WHEN?”: The Responsibility to Protect
the Fate of the Rohingya and the Future of Human Rights — Dr. Simon Adams
By Dr. Simon Adams — is Executive Director of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect ( R2P ).
In Paris during December 1948, in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the fledgling United Nations adopted two aspirational documents – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention. In this paper Dr. Simon Adams tests the resilience of the international community’s commitment to defending human rights and upholding its Responsibility to Protect (R2P) populations from genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The paper highlights the failure to respond to patterns of discrimination that eventually led to a genocide in Myanmar (Burma) during 2017.
The Failure to Protect the Rohingya — Between 25 August and 31 December 2017 hundreds of thousands of desperate ethnic Rohingya civilians crossed the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh, flooding refugee camps with 711,984 new registered arrivals. The Rohingya were fleeing so-called “clearance operations” carried out by Myanmar’s security forces in Rakhine State, including widespread killings, rape, and the systematic burning of more than 350 villages.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, initially called these attacks “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” and later described them as potential “acts of genocide” that should be referred to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for investigation. The UN Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Adama Dieng, concurred, describing how the intent of the perpetrators appeared to be to destroy the Rohingya as a people, “which, if proven, would constitute the crime of genocide.” The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs conveyed the unimaginable horror of the crisis from the point of view of those providing emergency assistance to Rohingya refugees:
Not only has the pace of arrivals since 25 August made this the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world, the concentration of refugees in Cox’s Bazar is amongst the densest in the world. Refugees arriving in Bangladesh – mostly women and children – are traumatized, and some have arrived with injuries caused by gunshots, shrapnel, fire and landmines. Entire villages were burned to the ground, families were separated and killed, and women and girls were gang raped. Most of the people who escaped are now severely traumatized after witnessing unspeakable atrocities.
But while the scale and ferocity of the post-25 August violence was shocking; it was not surprising. The Rohingya, a distinct Muslim ethnic minority group, have been persecuted for decades with tensions and violence dating back to disputes between Burmese nationalists and colonial loyalists about which side to support during World War Two, Britain or Japan. Independence from the British Empire in 1948 and an awkward post-colonial transition was followed by the imposition of military rule in Burma in 1962. The core of the military dictatorship was organized around the Bamar Buddhist majority, with other significant ethnic and religious minorities largely marginalized from political and economic life.
These divisions resulted in decades of armed conflict between the military junta and various ethnic armed groups, including those fighting on behalf of the Karen, Kachin and Shan peoples in different parts of the country. Meanwhile the country’s 1982 Citizenship Law did not recognize the estimated one million Rohingya – who were concentrated in Rakhine State, bordering Bangladesh – as one of the country’s 135 “national races,” rendering most of them stateless. Despite a gradual move away from military rule after 2011, anti-Muslim sentiment and the persecution of the Rohingya intensified. Hate speech derided the Rohingya as “Bengalis” – illegal interlopers from Bangladesh – despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Rohingya were born in Myanmar and know no other home. Discriminatory laws restricted their freedom of movement and access to employment and education, with more than 120,000 Rohingya confined to displacement camps in Rakhine State following inter-communal violence in 2012. In 2014 the Rohingya were prohibited from self-identifying on the national census, the first to take place in the country since 1983. The so-called Protection of Race and Religion laws, which were passed in 2015 and place harsh restrictions on women and non-Buddhists, further constrained the fundamental religious freedoms of the Rohingya, as well as their reproductive and marital rights. In short, the conditions under which the Rohingya minority were forced to live in Myanmar constituted a uniquely Southeast Asian form of apartheid.
“ Widespread atrocities committed by Myanmar’s security forces against the Rohingya population after 25 August clearly constituted crimes against humanity under international law and also appeared to be genocidal in intent.”
Following an attack by Rohingya militants on several border posts in October 2016, a four-month “counter-insurgency campaign by Myanmar’s security forces led to reports of mass arrests, torture, sexual violence, extrajudicial killings and the widespread destruction of Rohingya homes and mosques. At least 73,000 Rohingya fled to refugee camps in Bangladesh. In many respects, the four-month campaign between October 2016 and February 2017 was a prelude to the expanded and deadlier offensive later that year.
The military’s August 2017 operations began as collective punishment for a coordinated attack on police and army barracks by Rohingya militants armed mainly with knives. The attacks on 25 August resulted in twelve members of the security forces being killed along with more than fifty of the attackers, who were members of the self-styled “Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army.” Two of Myanmar’s light infantry divisions, the 33rd and 99th, had already been deployed to Rakhine State and were then unleashed in coordinated operations against at least twenty-two Rohingya villages. One week later the Commander of Myanmar’s military, General Min Aung Hlaing, described the “Bengali problem” as an “unfinished job” left over from World War Two. On 1 Sept. the General’s official Facebook page declared that there was “no Rohingya race” in Myanmar. Under General Min Aung Hlaing’s overall command, widespread atrocities committed by Myanmar’s security forces against the Rohingya population after 25 August 2017 clearly constituted crimes against humanity under international law and also appeared to be genocidal in intent.
No one knew precisely how many civilians were dead or displaced inside Myanmar, but according to research by Medecins Sans Frontieres, at least 6,700 Rohingya were killed in Rakhine State between 25 August and 24 September alone. With burning villages and the desperate exodus of tens of thousands of Rohingya dominating the international media, attention turned to the UN Security Council. The Council discussed Myanmar under “any other business” on 30 August,13 September and 26 Sept. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also briefed the Security Council about the crisis on 28 September, noting that the UN had received “bone chilling accounts” regarding “excessive violence and serious violations of human rights” in Rakhine State.
As early as 8 September, fifteen days after “clearance operations” began, diplomats representing the majority of the Security Council also attended a private briefing (chaired by the author) where three civil society representatives provided satellite evidence and eyewitness reports. There was no question, therefore, that given the multiple sources of intelligence available to them, the entire Council was aware of the scale and intensity of the atrocities underway in Rakhine State. Despite the Security Council’s inertia, the flow of Rohingya refugees eventually ebbed. This was not because atrocities were halted, but because an estimated 80 percent of the Rohingya population had fled by the end of the year with the total number of Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh eventually reaching around 890,000 people. Another report by the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights, based upon findings by the Bangladesh government, calculated that the approximate death toll during the so-called “clearance operations” included 43,000 Rohingya adults. Meanwhile the authorities in Myanmar began a campaign of bulldozing and clearing the remains of burned and abandoned Rohingya villages. Instead it had the reverse effect, encouraging those generals who desired a “final solution” in Rakhine State and wanted to test the limits of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi’s moral authority. However, democracy in Myanmar cannot be built on the bones of the Rohingya.
