- Stars (0)
Rohingya genocide: the world can’t help until Myanmar changes its ways
Ashraful Azad — Assistant professor, International Relations, University of Chittagong, Bangladesh.
After two weeks of extreme violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, where at least 400 people have been killed and 270,000 Rohingyas have fled their homes, the country’s de facto leader, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, finally spoke up to acknowledge the crisis. But to the disappointment of several international human rights agencies, she didn’t oppose the army’s actions – and even described recent events as “a huge iceberg of misinformation” in a phone call with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
This puts her at odds with a growing international consensus on what’s happening. Human Rights Watch has called the ongoing violence against the Rohingyas “ethnic cleansing” and “crimes against humanity”, while studies from Yale Law School and Queen Mary University of London have defined it as a genocide. There has been no sustained peace in Rakhine state for decades. The Rohingyas who live there have faced discrimination on the ground of their ethnicity since the late 1970s, with regular peaks of violence. So why have these conflicts repeatedly erupted despite the pleas of international human rights bodies? What are the realpolitik issues which thwart the peace process?
