FRIDAY, March 29, 2024
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Ending the genocide ‘is not profitable’

Ending the genocide ‘is not profitable’

Dr Maung Zarni, a UK-based Burmese genocide scholar, says the international community has declined to take effective action to end state-directed persecution of the Rohingya spanning 40 years

How did you become an advocate for Rohingya rights?
First, I have been a human rights and political activist for the last 29 years. I can’t call myself a human rights defender and turn my back on my own country’s genocide, like most human rights defenders in Myanmar are doing today.
Second, my own late great uncle was the deputy commander-in-charge of Arakan in the late 1950s when Rohingya were considered both an ethnic group of the Union of Burma and full citizens. Since my own relative was directly involved in this issue at a time when the army treated them well, I felt that I needed to get involved when the army is treating them so brutally.
Third, I am a Buddhist. And I cannot keep quiet when I see genocide, the most anti-Buddha dharma, being committed by the military, aided and abetted by the Buddhist society at large, including monks. Every time [Aung San] Suu Kyi denies and dismisses genocide allegations she too is guilty. For denial is part of genocide.

You said genocide has been going on for a long time. How did it manage to evade international attention?
They [the international community] have known this for a long, long time. But they did not take the persecution of Rohingya seriously enough to see the genocidal nature of the persecution, much less take any effective policy measures to end it.
Bangladeshi governments since the 1970s have known what has been happening because refugees were flowing into Bangladesh by the hundreds of thousands. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees has been aware of this issue since 1978 because it was brought in to help with the first refugee crisis in mid-1978. So if UNHCR knew, it means the UN knew. Countries like the US and UK and key UN agencies have known this for the last 39 years. In 1978, Senator Ted Kennedy came to Bangladesh and the US Congress donated about $150,000 to manage the refugee crisis.
Recently, Amnesty International published a report saying dehumanising “apartheid” is ongoing in Myanmar. Well, the word “apartheid” was used as early as July 1978 in a magazine article in the Far Eastern Economic Review. “Burma’s brand of apartheid” was the title! It seems the world’s oldest human rights watchdog was asleep throughout these decades. For Amnesty International to characterise a full, institutionalised genocide in slow motion as “apartheid” is utterly unconscionable. It is just infinitely pathetic!
The UN has passed resolution every year for the last 25 years with the exception of last year. We have had at least six special rapporteurs since 1993 investigating the persecution of Rohingyas.
UNHCR has a huge operation in Myanmar. To my deep dismay, it has even issued orders to its staff in Myanmar telling them not to say the word “Rohingya” in any writing but to call them “Muslims from Rakhine” in clear violation of the group’s fundamental right to self-identify. The UN Resident Coordinator in Myanmar and World Food Programme were concealing information about the genocide!
So the world did not just “discover” this – that’s a lie. Those in international politics and the humanitarian world are not even lifting a finger because helping the Rohingya is not profitable. Ending genocide is not profitable. Working with the killers is profitable. Because the killers have monopoly over natural gas, strategic coastlines, deep sea ports, visas, etc. So it’s not the lack of knowledge. It’s self-interest and the pretence of not knowing that are in play.
The UN has not gone so far as calling it genocide. Your comments?
Legal scholars, genocide scholars and even practitioners of international law from Yale Law School and Queen Mary U Law, from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to the Permanent People’s Tribunal on Myanmar, have all called it genocide.
Because there is no political will to use force to end the genocide, the UN, US and UK play what philosopher Wittgenstein called “language games”. But some of us including renowned genocide scholars such as Greg Stanton and Daniel Fierstein refuse to use the word “ethnic cleansing”: it is a euphemism that was originally released into mass media by Milosevic, the Serbian genocidal leader.
We now have a new doctrine called “Responsibility to Protect” or R2P, post-Rwanda and Srebrenica. And if a UN member state fails to protect people, not just citizens, who live within its territory, the neighbours and the entire UN system have a responsibility to go in and protect that community and to punish the perpetrating regime such as Myanmar. And that principle can be invoked if four crimes take place; one of them is ethnic cleansing which has no legal basis in international law. My Rwandan friends are outraged that UN is letting another genocide unfold.
So yes, the UN should call it genocide. But even if it is not prepared to call it genocide, ethnic cleansing is enough of an inhuman deed for the international community to intervene. Nato bombed Milosevic’s palace, and the genocidal bully was forced to accept a deal to stop the genocide.
 
Dr Maung Zarni is co-author with Natalie Brinham of the study “The Slow Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas”.

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