Massacre in Myanmar
Why hasn’t the Biden administration declared it a genocide?
A little more than four years ago, Myanmar’s military attacked dozens of villages in Rakhine State, home to most of the nation’s Rohingya Muslims. The Rohingya are a long-persecuted ethnic minority in a predominantly Buddhist country. At least 6,700 Rohingya, including about 730 children under age five, were killed in August and September 2017, according to Doctors Without Borders. Amnesty International says the Myanmar military also raped and abused Rohingya women and girls.
Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled to Bangladesh, where many are crowded into refugee camps. The largest camp is on a fragile silt island in the Bay of Bengal.
A New York Times investigation found that members of the Myanmar military posed as fans of pop stars and national heroes on Facebook in a systematic campaign to incite the genocide of the Rohingya. A United Nations report found that Facebook, with as many as 20 million followers in Myanmar, played a "determining role" in stirring up hatred against Rohingya. Mobile phones sold there already have Facebook installed. Facebook later admitted that its platform had been used to incite violence.
The violence was abetted by members of Myanmar’s Buddhist clergy. They have called the Rohingya subhuman invaders despoiling a golden Buddhist land.
The news media in Myanmar promoted violence against the Rohingya. A study in South East Asia Research concluded:
· The Burmese state-run media…depict the Rohingya as a homogenous, active group of perpetrators who are threatening national stability. The Global New Light of Myanmar has likened the Rohingya to ‘detestable human fleas’ and suggested as a solution that, ‘the thorn has to be removed as it pierces.’. The same [phrase] appeared a day earlier in the Burmese-language newspaper Myanma Alinn. Also, Burmese state-run media refrain from criticizing the military actions and Buddhist nationalism, and thus contribute to a deeper anti-Muslim sentiment.
International journalists have been denied access to Rakhine State, faced censorship and even prison sentences. Two Reuters journalists were sentenced to seven years in prison. According to The New York Times, Wa Lone, 32, and Mr. Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, were targeted by the police. The two journalists had found evidence that members of the military and Buddhist civilians killed 10 Rohingya males in the village of Inn Din. Their report, with photographs of the victims tied up and kneeling before their executions, and evidence of the mass grave where they were buried, was published after the reporters’ arrest.
Investigators commissioned by the U.S. government produced a 15,000-page report on the atrocities in Rakhine state. The New York Times reported:
· It was based on evidence compiled by investigators and lawyers with the Public International Law & Policy Group, which the State Department hired in early 2018 to assess the violence in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine State in 2017. After interviewing more than 1,000 Rohingya refugees who had fled to camps in neighboring Bangladesh, the team documented more than 13,000 grave human rights violations, in findings that Daniel Fullerton, who managed the investigation, described as “staggering.”
U.S. allies, including Canada, France and Turkey, have declared the atrocities a genocide but the Trump administration declined to do so. When the Myanmar military took power in a February coup, the United States and other Western nations imposed sanctions on the ruling generals. The United Nations passed a resolution condemning the coup.
The 57-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation filed legal action against Myanmar in 2019, accusing it of violating the U.N.’s Genocide Convention. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi rejected allegations of genocide when she appeared at the International Court of Justice in December 2019. She was arrested and removed from power after the February military coup.
President Biden, the first American president to declare the 1915-16 massacres in Armenia a genocide, has yet to use the same designation for the atrocities in Myanmar. A recent article in Politico notes:
· Some rights activists question whether corporate interests are driving some of the Biden administration’s decision-making on the genocide question…While the coup has led the Biden administration to impose economic sanctions on Myanmar, it has held off on penalizing the country’s oil and gas sector amid discussions about the impact on firms like Chevron… Whether under Democratic or Republican administrations, the United States has a long track record of trying to either sidestep genocide declarations or subjecting them to politicized decision-making. “Politics is what makes the determination on these things, and there’s just not the political appetite for it at the moment,” said Azeem Ibrahim, an academic who has extensively researched the cases of the Uighurs and the Rohingya and believes both are genocide victims. “ ‘It’s the right thing to do’ is always the right answer, but it’s not always the most realistic answer.”
Sources:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0967828X.2020.1850178
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebook.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/09/genocide-biden-myanmar-uyghurs-rohingya-502783
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/08/world/asia/buddhism-militant-rise.html?searchResultPosition=1