The Ongoing Genocidal Crisis of the Rohingya Minority in Myanmar

The Ongoing Genocidal Crisis of the Rohingya Minority in Myanmar

John P. J. Dussich  is Professor Emeritus, Department of Criminology, California State University, Fresno, California, USA.

The serious plight of the Rohingya ethnic group’s extreme victimization in Myanmar has finally emerged on the international stage. They are mostly a stateless Muslim minority from the state of Rakhine which, over recent decades, have been abused by severe and repeated multiple human rights violations.

There are now approximately 850,000 displaced Rohingya refugees mostly in Bangladesh and surrounding countries with thousands more waiting in peril between Myanmar and Bangladesh. The saga of the Rohingya dilemma has been fraught with complex ethno-religious conflicts between Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu factions exacerbated by the scale of people involved, rapidity of events, recency of occurrences, abject poverty, racial hatred, linguistic differences, confused ancestral rights, severe humanitarian violations, genocidal policies, surrounded by nations themselves struggling with few resources. The present day conflicted leadership in Myanmar between the military and the democratically elected leader of her government, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been severely criticized for their brutal continued ethnic cleansing.

A genocide begins with the killing of one man—not for what he has done, but because of who he is. A campaign of ‘ethnic cleansing’ begins with one neighbour turning on another. Poverty begins when even one child is denied his or her fundamental right to education. What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life, all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations.  —  Kofi Annan, Nobel lecture (2001)

Genocide  — The definition of genocide used throughout this article is ‘the use of deliberate systematic measures (as killing, bodily or mental injury, unlivable conditions, prevention of births) calculated to bring about the extermination of a racial, political, or cultural group or to destroy the language, religion or culture of a group’ (p. 947). The criteria for using the word genocide in this text are imbedded in the aforementioned definition and especially in the Genocide Convention (refer for more details under the following section Human Rights Issues below). It is the conviction of this author and competent legal international scholars that there is ‘strong evidence that genocide is being committed against the Rohingya people’ (p. 1) and thus this is an appropriate term to use in the case of the ongoing victimizations of the Rohingya minority from Myanmar.

The awareness of the Rohingya’s plight is just recently emerging on the international stage. It is these grievous human rights violations which clearly justify the use of the term genocide.5 Recently, within a 3-month period since 25th of August 2017, between 500,000–600,000 Rohingya have escaped en-masse from their homeland in the northern part of the state of Rakhine in Myanmar to Bangladesh. This recent surge of escaping refugees was in response to the military crack-down on the Rakhine State after a small group of Rohingya militants attacked some police posts in retaliation to the extreme oppression they were enduring at the hands of their government. During the last week in August 2017 at the Myanmar/Bangladesh boarder in no-man’s land along the Naf River, 20 Rohingya bodies were retrieved, 12 were children. The United Nations observers estimated that about 50,000 crossed in that same area in about one weeks’ time.8 Many more thousands are still stranded trying to flee from the extreme violence now ongoing. Those that have arrived in Bangladesh are mostly women and children traumatized by their experiences, many with wounds from bullets, shrapnel, fire and landmines.

This is a humanitarian emergency of major proportions requiring a significant international response to prevent further loss of life. To date there are approximately 850,000 displaced Rohingya in Bangladesh with thousands more waiting in peril in the isolated space along the Naf River between Myanmar and Bangladesh. This situation ‘has triggered the largest and fastest flow of destitute people across a border since the 1994 Rwandan genocide’ (p. 1). The BBC reports that the UN iscalling this the ‘world’s fastest growing refugee crisis’.