The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar's Rohingya

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTIONWhat can we do, Brother, they (the Rohingya) are too many? We can't kill them all. Ex-Brigadier General, formerly stationed in Arakan or Rakhine State, and Ambassador to Brunei, Fall, 2012.1How can it be ethnic cleansing? They are not an ethnic Mr. Win Myaing, the official spokesperson of the Rakhine State Government, May 15, 2013.2We do not have the term 'Rohingya.' Myanmar President Thein Sein, Chatham House, London, July 17, 2013.3There are elements of genocide in Rakhine with respect to Rohingya . . . . The possibility of a genocide needs to be discussed. I myself do not use the term genocide for strategic reasons. Tomas Ojea Quintana, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, London Conference on Decades of State-Sponsored Destruction of Myanmar's Rohingya, April 28, 2014.4Over the past thirty-five years, the State in Myanmar has intentionally formulated, pursued, and executed national and state-level plans aimed at destroying the Rohingya people in Western Myanmar. 5 This destruction has been state-sponsored, legalized, and initiated by a frontal assault on the identity, culture, social foundation, and history of the Rohingya who are a people with a distinct ethnic culture. They are a borderland people whose ancestral roots and cultural ties lie along the post- colonial borders of today's Myanmar, a former British colony until its independence in 1948, and Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, which gained its independence from Pakistan in 1971. Their identity as an ethno- linguistic group was recognized under successive Burmese regimes after independence in 1948 and was systematically erased by the increasingly anti-Muslim military-controlled governments since 1962.6 In Myanmar's state media, official policy documents, and school textbooks, the Rohingya are referred to as Bengali, a racist local reference, and are portrayed as illegal economic migrants from the colonial time, who are a 'threat to national security, a portrayal that the bulk of the Burmese have accepted as a fact over the past five decades. In contrast, the international community continues to recognize the Rohingya as an ethnic group.7 The State and the predominantly Buddhist society have collaborated with the intent to de- indigenize, illegalize, dehumanize, and destroy a people whose ancestral home is in Myanmar. The evidence of the intent to destroy the Rohingya people over the past thirty-five years through assaults on their identity, killings during multiple pogroms, physical and mental harm, deliberate infliction of conditions of life designed to bring about the group's destruction, and measures to prevent births, lead the authors to conclude that Myanmar's Rohingya are the victims of genocide carried out jointly by the central political state and anti-Muslim ultra-nationalists among the Buddhist Rakhine peoples.Rohingya is an ethno-religious term meaning Muslim people whose ancestral home is Arakan or Rakhine in Myanmar.8 To date, the total number of Rohingya in Rakhine State are estimated at over one million, the majority of whom live in three townships of North Rakhine State, and the vast majority of whom are stateless.9 Since the violence of 2012, over 140,000 people remain displaced in seventy-six camps and camp-like settings across Rakhine State, the bulk of which are Rohingya and other Muslim minorities from Rakhine State.10 Roughly 36,000 Rohingya and other Muslims in communities across Rakhine State are considered by the United Nations (UN) to be acutely vulnerable and in need of urgent humanitarian assistance.11Genocide is defined by Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide:[A]ny of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. …

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