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The Rohingya Predicament. Why Myanmar’s Army Gets Away with Ethnic Cleansing
By Zoltan Barany — He is the Frank C. Erwin Jr. Centennial Professor of Government at the University of Texas, USA.
The atrocities against and the privations of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar are well documented. Much less awareness exists about the reasons why Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, has been able to get away with ethnic cleansing in an ostensibly democratising Buddhist state. The military has used the attacks of an insurgent group, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, as a pretext for carrying out a brutal campaign of eviction, repressions and executions. This anti-Rohingya campaign is fairly popular among Myanmar’s population, which further explains why the civilian government de facto led by Aung San Suu Kyi has no control over the Tatmadaw. Actually, at present there is no state or international organisation that can realistically rein in Myanmar’s military. China and India have contentious relations with their own Muslim minorities and strategic and economic interests in Myanmar. They will support its regime. Neighbouring states have only modest influence over Burmese politics, as do international organisations. Yet the latter still represent whatever hope there is of holding the regime and its generals accountable.
On the morning of 25 August 2017, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) launched coordinated attacks on more than two dozen small security installations in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State. ARSA militants were lightly armed but they killed twelve uniformed personnel and escaped with some weapons from the armouries of the security outposts. According to an ARSA spokesman, the goal of the attack was to attract international attention to the plight of the Rohingya Muslim minority, money from benefactors in the Gulf – especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – and young men to join ARSA’s ranks.
The response by the Tatmadaw, Myanmar’s armed forces, was immediate and massively disproportionate. The army’s tactics included mass murder, torture, gang-raping of women and girls, and burning down entire villages. By the beginning of December 2017, more than 688,000 Rohingya were forced to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh and 392 villages were partially or totally destroyed – before-and-after satellite images show that the villages simply vanished. The death toll was conservatively estimated at 10,000. According to Médecins sans Frontières, nearly 70 per cent of the victims died of gunshot wounds and 9 per cent were burned to death in their homes. The persecution did not stop. By August 2018, altogether 723,000 Rohingya had left their home state of Rakhine. An average of 1,733 escaped to Bangladesh on a monthly basis. Evidence shows that the Tatmadaw’s operation was premeditated and ARSA’s attack was merely a convenient excuse to set off the army’s campaign of ethnic cleansing or, according to some, genocide.
The privations of the Rohingya and the crusade to drive them out of Myanmar have received wide attention in the recent past from activists, historians and social scientists. Their predicament is impossible to properly understand, however, without the larger domestic and foreign political context that has allowed this tragedy to unfold while the world has looked on. Most critical is the question: Why has the Tatmadaw got away with ethnic cleansing?
