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The Rohingya crisis in Myanmar’s Rakhine state: the final deathblow to the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ principle?
By Cas van Mulken, Utrecht University, Netherlands, Date: May 28, 2018
The Rohingya, a muslim minority population from Myanmar’s Rakhine province, is often being called ‘the world’s most persecuted minority’ or the largest stateless community in the world. Since August 2017, more than 671.000 Rohingya refugees fled to neighboring Bangladesh after widespread violence ensued against their community. International media and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly portraying the government of Myanmar, its military and its security apparatus as being too passive in preventing further escalation or even of instigating the current prejudice, violence, rape, torture and expulsion of the Rohingya community themselves.
Even the United Nations (UN), which is generally conservative in using strong terms, is implicitly and explicitly referring to the events in Rakhine as ‘ethnic cleansing’ or even ‘genocide’. For example, Zeid Ra‘ad al-Hussein, the UN Human Rights Chief, said in September 2017 that “the situation seems a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. By December 2017, he asked the question: “Can anyone rule out that elements of genocide may be present?” He added that “ultimately, this is a legal determination only a competent court can make”. Furthermore, António Guterres, the UN Secretary-General, called the situation in Myanmar “a humanitarian and human rights nightmare”.
The purpose of this thesis is to research and explain why, despite international condemnation for the humanitarian crisis in Rakhine, the UN adopted principle of Responsibility to Protect (R2P) is not being implemented in the Rakhine case. This approach implies that, because of the existing conditions in Rakhine, there are at least some valid grounds on which the applicability of R2P to this case could be discussed or considered. To justify the methodology of this approach, the introduction will first provide a brief history of key events relating to the Rohingya and the origin of the current crisis. After that, the core principles and criteria of R2P will be discussed. Having provided this introduction, a literature review will be given which aims to account for the sources used in this thesis. The aim of chapter I is to identify the main arguments used by normative opponents of R2P. Chapter II focuses on the arguments of (perceived) normative proponents of the R2P principle.
These two chapters are thus intended to analyse the general historiographical debate about R2P, while the third chapter will specifically focus on Myanmar’s Rakhine case. The aim of the final chapter is to analyse the contextual dilemmas that normative proponents of R2P face, which obstructs the effective implementation of R2P in Myanmar. These three dilemmas are formulated in the international, domestic and judicial context. The general aim of this thesis is not to provide concrete solutions for the humanitarian crisis in Rakhine, but rather to provide understanding and clarification for the challenges which are generally undermining the effective implementation of R2P, by using the example of the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar.
The Rohingya in Myanmar have faced political, economical and judicial discrimination for decades. After Myanmar’s independence from the United Kingdom in 1948, the new country enjoyed a brief period of civilian government. In this period, the Rohingya were still able to receive citizenship and identification cards from the government. However, in 1962 general Ne Win staged a coup and turned the country into an authoritarian military dictatorship. The result was that citizenship grants and receiving passports became much more difficult for Rohingya.
In 1982 Ne Win announced a new discriminatory citizenship law which effectively banned Rohingya from obtaining the Myanmar nationality. Both during and after the military rule from 1962 to 2011, there have been countless cases of Rohingya being forced to work, displaced, trafficked to neighboring countries, religiously persecuted or their marriage opportunities being restricted. In recent years, the marginalization of Rohingya within Myanmar society led to new waves of violence between the Muslim Rohingya minority and the Buddhist Rakhine majority. In 2012, a Rakhine Buddhist woman was allegedly raped and murdered by a Rohingya man, sparking massive mob violence which displaced tens of thousands of people.
And in October 2016, insurgents from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army attacked three police border outposts, killing nine policemen and four soldiers. This led to a military crackdown campaign of Rohingyas in Rakhine state, sparking an even larger wave of people fleeing the country or becoming internally displaced. Between October 2016 and July 2017, more than 87.000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh. On August 25th 2017, a second incident in which Rohingya insurgents killed security officers, led to an unprecedented military crackdown on Rohingyas. Mass killings, torture, mass-rape of Rohingya women and the burning of villages have been commonplace since August 25th. More than 350 Rohingya villages have been partially or completely destroyed. According to Doctors Without Borders, more than 6700 Rohingyas have been killed between August and October 2017 alone.
Having explained the core of the humanitarian crisis in Rakhine, the UN endorsement of R2P will now be described. In 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) published a report about their findings on the conceptualization of the R2P principle. In 2005, most core principles formulated in this report were endorsed at the UN 60th Anniversary World Summit in September 2005. The written formulation of the R2P core principles can be traced to paragraph 138 and 139. Paragraph 138 states that “each individual State has the Responsibility to Protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”.
