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Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims – Whose Responsibility to Protect?
Anamika Gupta — MA Student, European Peace University (Private University), in Stadtschlaining, Austria.
Myanmar is on a long and tedious road to democratic transition. As the country prepares for General Elections in 2015, the struggle to maintain hegemony and legitimacy is becoming even more intense for Thein Sein‘s Union Solidarity and Development party, given the public support enjoyed by the newly revived opposition party National League for Democracy led by pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. This transition and struggle to maintain status quo is coming at a high price for Myanmar, particularly for those belonging to the ethnic minority groups. This paper is particularly concerned with the situation of one such minority group — the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.
The Rohingya Muslims live in the Rakhine state bordering the Bay of Bengal in the west. Despite an estimated 1-2 million Rohingya Muslims living in the region, they are not recognized as ethnic minority group by the Myanmar government but are believed to be Bangladeshi migrants who have settled in the state illegally. This perspective has given birth to all the discriminatory policies and actions against them since beginning of the last century.
In June 2012, sectarian violence broke out between the majority Arakanese Buddhists and the Rohingya Muslims, triggered by the rape of a 28-year old Buddhist woman by three Muslim men. The violence in October was on a larger scale and much more lethal. The ensuing violence since June has reportedly claimed hundreds of lives and caused thousands of Rohingyas to flee their homes. As of July 2013, an estimated 140,000 Rohingya Muslims have been displaced from their homes. An unaccounted number of people are dying almost daily in the open sea as they attempt to flee to neighboring countries on rickety boats, and many more are dying due to systematic blockade of aid, food, water or medicine supply in the Rohingya IDP camps. Several factors clearly indicate that the ongoing violence is much more than sectarian clash.
This paper aims to understand the nature of the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar, its background and what are the mechanisms that fuel such discriminatory treatment of minorities. The paper ties to understand the nature of the persecution by through the framework of atrocity crimes such as Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes against Humanity. Finally, it also attempts to put on table the various actions that can be taken to influence Myanmar to take responsibility for the Rohingyas, who are paying for the vacillation with their life.
The first section attempts to analyze the _who, what, when, where and how‘of the recent conflict in Arakan in order to unravel the complexity of the crisis. It also highlights the situation inside the camps for Internally Displaced Rohingyas and how it violates the United Nations Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement.
Section two aims to understand the role of the 1982 Citizenship Law as the starting point of such blatant discrimination against Rohingyas, and the kind of impact it has had on their lives. Section three uses the theoretical framework of international laws such as the Genocide Convention and the International Criminal Court to probe if the current persecution of Rohingyas can be classified as one of the atrocity crimes. The following section explores the possibilities of international intervention, using the theoretical framework of UN resolutions of Responsibility to Protect and on Human Security, as well as the role of regional associations like ASEAN in assisting Myanmar to effectively deal with the crisis. Section five lists down a set of recommendations for the Myanmar government to focus on immediately. This is followed by the conclusion.
Rohingya Muslims are an ethnic, religious and linguistic minority group living in Myanmar‘s Rakhine state, on the west coast, which shares border with Bangladesh. Their physical appearance bears similarities with natives of Bangladesh‘s Chittagong region as does their Bengali dialect. Perhaps, this is the reason why they are widely referred to as _Bengali‘ and not as Rohingya Muslims, as they themselves prefer to be called. In June 2012, violent sectarian clash erupted between Arakanese Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Maungdaw, Sittwe and surrounding areas in Myanmar‘s Arakan state, triggered by the rape of a Buddhist woman by three Muslims men on 28 May 2013 in Ramri Township and the subsequent retaliatory killing of 10 Muslim men in Toungop Township. Official figures claim that 78 people were killed, and almost 100,000 Rohingyas were displaced in the ensuing violence that lasted for weeks. (Human Rights Watch, Aug 2012) Violence resurfaced four months later, on 23 October 2012, when thousands of Arakanese men armed with machetes, swords, homemade guns, Molotov cocktails, and other weapons attacked Muslim villages in Kyauk Phyu, Kyauktaw, Minbya, Mrauk U, Myebon, Pauktaw, Ramreeand Rathedaung townships in Arakan.
It was marked by large scale killings, arson, destruction of homes, mosques, Muslim shops and other properties. Several Rohingya villages were targeted concurrently and it is suspected that the perpetrators could have been from other townships. Several news reports and reports by rights groups suggests great amount of planning by local Arakanese political party officials and public vilification by senior Buddhist monks portraying Rohingyas as a threat to Arakan State. HRW reports the existence of at least 4 mass graves in Arakan state, where bodies of men, women and children were dumped unceremoniously in the presence of the army and/or the police. Precisely how many bodies can be accounted for in these mass graves or mass cremations will remain a mystery for a long time. Official estimate of the number of Rohingyas killed in this second wave of violence is 70, but, there is a high probability that these figures are grossly under-reported.
In its ground-breaking report on Burma ―All you can do is Pray‖ published in April 2013, Human Rights Watch classifies the crime against Rohingyas during 2012 violence as ―Crimes against humanity carried out as part of a campaign of ethnic cleansing‖. However, keeping this intellectual din aside, how does this classification matter to the Rohingyas? What difference does it make to their life, their present and the future of Myanmar? The responsibility to protect (R2P or RtoP) is a new international security and human rights norm to address the international community‘s failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. This commitment was made by the world leaders at the United Nations (UN) 2005 World Summit. In our case, the responsibility to protect the Rohingya Muslims lies with the state of Myanmar, which as evidences suggest, is complicit in the crime. Given the situation, what recourse do they have? Indeed, Myanmar is the golden goose and none would dare to throttle it, despite its existing social and sectarian problems.
