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Rohingya and Responsibility to protection
By Aman Ullah, A Rohingya Historian and Lawyer
Along the nearly 1,000-kilometer refugee passage from western Burma to southern Thailand lies a string of mass graves occupied by a single ethnic group — the Rohingya. United to End Genocide
The Burmese successive junta, its armed forces known as the “Tatmadaw,” and other armed groups under government control are committing gross human rights violations against ethnic and religious minorities. Extrajudicial killings, torture, and forced labor are prevalent; rape and sexual abuse by the Tatmadaw are rampant; and shows a complete disregard for the principle of distinction, intentionally targeting civilians with impunity.
All Burmese citizens are subject to government oppression. However, the above crimes appear to be targeted primarily at five ethnic groups: the Karen, Shan and Karenni in eastern Burma, and the Rohingya and Chin in western Burma. While international actors have focused on the repression of the pro-democracy movement by the military government, crimes perpetrated against ethnic minorities for years have received little international attention and show no signs of subsiding.
The Rohingya, an ethnic Muslim minority, are likely the most oppressed minority within Burma with Human Rights Watch recently reporting that, “Even in Burma’s dreadful human rights landscape the ill-treatment of the Rohingya stands out.” Military operations in 1978 and the early 1990s resulted in mass arrests and torture which led hundreds of thousands to flee to Bangladesh.
Since June 2012, Anti-Muslim violence in Burma has been roundly condemned in statements from the UN, international governments, regional bodies, and human rights groups. Undeterred by negative international attention, the Burmese government has not attempted to provide a system of transitional justice for Muslims who have been attacked. On the contrary, government officials have participated in new attacks, tightened restrictions on Muslims, blocked aid from displaced Muslim populations, and segregated the mostly stateless Rohingya and other Muslims from the rest of the population.
Despite the government’s withholding of justice, the international community has failed to take necessary action to protect Muslim victims. Though the United Nations has acknowledged the role of Burmese authorities in “widespread” and “systematic” attacks against Muslims that “may constitute crimes against humanity.”
These violations perpetrated primarily by state actors on a widespread and systematic basis, rise to the level of crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and war crimes – three of the four crimes states committed themselves to protect populations from in endorsing the responsibility to protect (R2P) at the 2005 World Summit.
Humanitarian intervention — The international community in the last decade repeatedly made a mess of handling the many demands that were made for ”humanitarian intervention”: coercive action against a state to protect people within its borders from suffering grave harm. There were no agreed rules for handling cases such as Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Kosovo at the start of the 1990s, and there remain none today. Disagreement continues about whether there is a right of intervention, how and when it should be exercised, and under whose authority.
Since September 11, 2001, policy attention has been captured by a different set of problems: the response to global terrorism and the case for ”hot preemption” against countries believed to be irresponsibly acquiring weapons of mass destruction. These issues, however, are conceptually and practically distinct. There are indeed common questions, especially concerning the precautionary principles that should apply to any military action anywhere. But what is involved in the debates about intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere is the scope and limits of countries’ rights to act in self-defense — not their right, or obligation, to intervene elsewhere to protect peoples other than their own.
Why the Responsibility to Protect, R2P? — The political uprisings in Libya and the Libyan government’s brutal repression are reminders that the world is far from achieving “freedom from fear”, one of the grounding purposes for the establishment of the United Nations in 1945. Often in the twentieth century, crimes against humanity provoked condemnation. The world has said “never again” many times. In reality, however, “again and again” would be a more accurate description. As each subsequent slaughter has occurred, in places like Rwanda and the Balkans, little has been done to prevent or avert mass atrocities.
However, in the past decade the international community has started to develop new terminology to address such atrocities, in the hope that new tools to prevent and respond to them will follow. Most notably, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is a new and evolving concept in international relations that addresses the failure of states — whether unable or unwilling — to protect their populations from mass atrocities. R2P was clarified with the 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS). The ICISS Report made a profound assessment of all previous research and practice of “humanitarian intervention”, a hotly debated topic amongst political scholars and practitioners.
