Opinion

Myanmar: Defending the indefensible

October 22, 2017
A Rohingya refugee carries supplies through Palong Khali refugees camp near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, Sunday. — Reuters
A Rohingya refugee carries supplies through Palong Khali refugees camp near Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, Sunday. — Reuters

THE army crackdown on Rohingya in Myanmar has created one of the biggest refugee exoduses since World War II.

But how many people know that almost 60 percent of nearly 600,000 Rohingya who have arrived in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar since the end of August are children? The UN Children’s Fund warns that more than 340,000 children are living in desperate conditions in squalid makeshift settlements in Bangladesh. At one time, up to 12,000 children a week were fleeing to Bangladesh to escape violence and persecution in Myanmar. Some 1,200 have fled without any other family members.

Painfully thin, malnourished and hungry, they are at risk of diseases and vulnerable to exploitation by traffickers. They are reduced to drinking dirty water and having to scrounge for whatever food might be available.

Even though the latest exodus began on Aug. 25 after Rohingya Arsa militants attacked more than 30 police posts, Rohingya have been migrating across the region in significant numbers since the 1970s. In the last few years, thousands were making perilous journeys out of Myanmar to escape attacks by ethnic Buddhists who form the majority in Myanmar or abuses by the security forces. Before August, there were already around 307,500 Rohingya refugees living in camps, makeshift settlements and with host communities, according to the UNHCR.

When the troops unleashed a campaign of terror against the Rohingya, burning their villages and attacking and killing civilians, in response to the Aug. 25 attack on police posts, they were backed by local Buddhist mobs. At least 288 villages were partially or totally destroyed by fire in northern Rakhine state where the Rohingya are concentrated. The satellite imagery by Human Rights Watch shows many areas where Rohingya villages were reduced to smoldering rubble, while nearby ethnic Rakhine villages were left intact.

Painful as these are, the most heart-breaking is the indifference of the country’s de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi to this human suffering. It took months for Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace laureate, to break her silence. And when she did finally open her mouth last month, it was to deliver a speech denounced as a “mix of untruths and victim-blaming” by Amnesty International.

Yes, she did blame the Rohingya for all the ordeal they are going through just as she told the Turkish president in a phone call earlier that “terrorists” were behind an “iceberg of misinformation” about the situation. To maintain the fiction that Rohingya are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, she avoided the term Rohingya except once when she has to criticize the armed militant group the “Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army.”

Of course, Suu Kyi said Myanmar was ready “at any time” to take back refugees. But this is subject to a verification process. As most Rohingya are not treated as citizens, this is an empty gesture.

All this is unbecoming of the leader of a country, especially one who won worldwide admiration for her long fight for human rights. But Suu Kyi’s Western backers, in an effort to ensure that the halo never slips from her head, are coming up with strange explanations for her inaction or complicity.

According to this theory, best expounded by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, what we have in Myanmar after the celebrated election of 2016 is “a hybrid government” in which the military still has wide powers in the security domain and in Rakhine state. So the military leadership is accountable for what's happening in Myanmar.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Patrick Murphy wants us to know that she had only limited control over the security forces due to Myanmar’s “flawed constitution.” Both want us to realize that if Suu Kyi moves so strongly against the military, she will lose whatever power she enjoys now. The question is what is political power worth if one can’t do the things one wants done and prevent the things one does not want.


October 22, 2017
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