Myanmar (Burma)
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This name thing is confusing. In 1989, the military government changed the name of the country from Burma to Myanmar. Although most of the global community recognized the name change, the United States, United Kingdom, and several other countries continued to use the name Burma. America’s official answer for not accepting the name change is that the change was made without the consent of the people.
What the world has allowed to happen – and continue to happen – in Myanmar is an absolute abomination. In Myanmar’s Rakhine State, hostilities between Buddhist and Rohingya Muslims, an ethnic minority population, boiled over in 2017. After the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) – a group of Rohingya Muslim militants – led a series of attacks against Myanmar’s military and police stations, Myanmar’s security forces retaliated with a ruthless campaign of murder, arson, human burnings and beatings, gang rape and other mass brutalities. These actions by Myanmar amounted to ethnic cleansing by genocide, plain and simple. The vicious conflict forced over 740,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee Myanmar into Bangladesh, causing a massive humanitarian crisis as hundreds of thousands of people, at least half of them children, now lived in ill-equipped and tattered refugee camps along the border. Today, seven years later, deadly attacks against the Rohingya people are again on the rise as Rohingya civilians are once again caught in the middle of intensifying conflict in Rakhine State between the Arakan Army and the Myanmar military – looking eerily like the atrocities that happened in 2017.
This is even more unacceptable because the crimes of carnage inflected upon the Rohingya refugees was heard by the International Court of Justice in The Hague (ICJ) in January 2020. The ICJ ruled that Myanmar had to implement emergency measures to protect these refugees against violence, prevent any future egregious acts as outlined by the Genocide Convention, and preserve any evidence of potential genocide.
Ironically, Myanmar’s leader at the time, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi – who is also the daughter of General Aung San, the country’s independence hero who was assassinated when his daughter was two years old – personally presented her country’s case in The Hague, arguing that while “it cannot be ruled out that dis-proportionate force” had been used against the Rohingya, calling the behavior genocide was an “incomplete and misleading factual picture.” This from a woman who, in 2010, was freed from fifteen years of house arrest after a military junta imprisoned her two separate times since 1989. In 1991, she won a Nobel Peace Prize for “her nonviolent struggle for democracy and human rights.”
Upon her release, she was welcomed by thousands of supporters as a pro-democracy leader who promised to release all political prisoners and end the ethnic tensions that haunted the country. Instead, she made a sharp turn toward the very military that once imprisoned her and strongly denied any government misconduct in regard to the Rohingya Muslims. Her political party, the National League for Democracy, won an election in November 2020 that kept them in power for another five years.
In February 2021, Myanmar’s military, the Tatmadaw, declared a state of emergency and took control of the country, in what amounted to a military coup (the military claimed there was voter fraud in the previous election). The country’s election commission insisted there was no evidence to support this claim. The military detained Aung San Suu Kyi and other leaders of the National League for Democracy, who had been reelected in November in only the second democratically held election since the country moved to a democracy from almost fifty years of military rule. The military announced that power would be transferred to the commander in chief, Min Aung Hlaing, then handed to Myint Swe, the military-backed vice president. However, Min Aung Hlaing is still in power, murdering dissenting voices in the street.
For decades, the United States has been a champion of democracy in Myanmar but things on the human rights front have gone dramatically downhill and will not likely change without outside intervention. The junta has propelled Myanmar further into a human rights and humanitarian disaster. At least 55 townships are under martial law and arbitrary arrests, torture, extrajudicial killings, and indiscriminate attacks on civilians amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Amnesty International reports that “unfair trials of pro-democracy activists and others regarded as opponents of the military authorities continue and more than 1,600 people have been sentenced to prison, hard labor or death. More than half a million people have been displaced by internal armed conflicts. Tens of thousands of ethnic Rohingya people forcibly displaced over a decade ago remain in squalid displacement camps in Rakhine State. Rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly remained severely curtailed and journalists were among those imprisoned for their legitimate work.”
It is disgraceful that the world not only let things get so catastrophic back in 2017, but that we are letting it happen again.
In June 2019, the United Nations released a damning report – written by an independent investigator but commissioned by the UN Secretary-General António Guterres – detailing the UN’s immense failures in Myanmar:
Since 2012, and especially since August of 2017, the world has witnessed a wrenching spectacle of human rights violations on a massive scale. The statelessness and extreme deprivation of some 1.4 million Rohingya people, not to mention the grave abuses wrought on them and other Muslim minorities in Myanmar, are totally unacceptable and nothing less than an offence to humanity. Clearly, the main responsibility for this belongs to the Government of that country; sadly, in this it seems to count with the solid support of most of its population. Further, the human rights abuses are undermining an otherwise positive albeit imperfect political process of gradual democratization and (paradoxically) reconciliation. The United Nations System, despite the advocacy efforts from the Secretary-General’s personal involvement, as well as that of the most senior officials down to members of the country team, has been relatively impotent to effectively work with the authorities of Myanmar to reverse the negative trends in the area of human rights and consolidate the positive trends in other areas. Given the increasingly ominous events taking place in the first arena, especially in Rakhine State (but also in Kachin and Northern Shan), progress in Myanmar in other areas seems to have essentially bogged down at the time of writing. The root causes of those events persist and probably have even been aggravated up to the time of writing this review. By any metrics utilized, the treatment accorded to Muslim minorities in Myanmar is incompatible with the political and peace processes launched under the Constitution adopted in 2010.
There simply is no way to reconcile the extreme limitations imposed on the Rohingya community with international humanitarian and human rights norms and legislation. Those grave limitations include state-lessness, arbitrary and discriminatory restrictions on freedom of movement, discriminatory treatment in access to services and the means to a dignified livelihood, and now the vexing situation of repatriation and relocation of up to one million desperate people. These problems will not go away and pose huge challenges to Myanmar, its immediate neighbors and the United Nations. Indeed, not only Myanmar and Bangladesh are faced with the excruciating question of how to deal with so many refugees concentrated in the Cox’s Bazar’s district; it is a question faced by the international community in general.
Now, Myanmar has been struck by a powerful 7.7-magnitude earthquake that has decimated infrastructure, crushed homes and buildings, and destroyed century-old religious monuments. The death toll is expected to be unthinkable. The United States must get off the sidelines or Myanmar’s crimes against humanity will only get worse. At a minimum, we must target banks that support the junta and make sure that an international tribunal is convened to hold the junta accountable for these atrocities. We can’t let things like this happen to human beings. Period.