Aug. 25 marks the one-year anniversary of the start of the Myanmar (also known as Burma) military’s “clearance operations” against the Rohingya population in Rakhine State. While many experts, international organizations operating on the ground, and states have categorized the atrocities that followed as genocide, others have been hesitant to use the term, including the United States. In fact, a recent article in Politico citing internal State Department documents disclosed that the Trump Administration was still hesitating to qualify the atrocities and concomitant mass exodus of over 700,000 Rohingya to neighboring Bangladesh as genocide, probably because of the type of response such a designation of a crime would demand. Following is an analysis of why Jewish World Watch (JWW) believes the Myanmar military has likely committed genocide against the Rohingya Muslim minority group.
The following is a legal analysis of the crime of genocide under international law.
Ultimately, JWW aims to engage our constituents and congressional representatives to apply pressure on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the State Department to acknowledge the genocide and accept the stronger call to action this categorization triggers, including sanctions targeting the highest echelons of the military’s power structure. JWW also calls upon the UN Security Council to refer the Rohingya crisis to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for investigation.
The gross violations perpetrated against the Rohingya are widely known, to the point of having received significant coverage in myriad mainstream media, from National Public Radio to Rolling Stone magazine. Beginning in August of last year, the Myanmar security forces committed widespread and systematic attacks against the Rohingya, among them unlawful killing of civilians, including of infants; torture; sexual violence; arson attacks and destruction of more than 350 villages. During the first month of operations alone, an estimated 6,700 Rohingya, including at least 730 children, were murdered. Between August and December, more than 720,000 ethnic Rohingya civilians were forced to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.
The crime of genocide is codified in international law in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, and is universally binding on all states as well as non-state actors. What distinguishes genocide from other mass atrocity crimes is the requisite intent: the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” Intent is the hardest element of the crime to prove, although it doesn’t have to be proven directly from statements or orders; it can be inferred from a systematic pattern of coordinated acts.
Genocidal acts need not result in death of members of a group. When committed as part of a policy to destroy a group’s existence, the following acts become genocidal:
- Killing members of the group, including direct killings and actions causing death
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm, including inflicting trauma on group members through widespread torture, rape, sexual violence, forced or coerced drug use, and mutilation
- Deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy a group, including the deliberate deprivation of resources needed for the group’s physical survival (i.e., clean water, food, clothing, shelter, and medical services). Deprivation of the means to sustain life can be imposed through confiscation of harvests, blockade of foodstuffs, detention in camps, and forcible relocation
- Prevention of births, including involuntary sterilization, forced abortion, prohibition of marriage, and long-term separation of men and women intended to prevent procreation.
- Forcible transfer of children
It has been well-documented by media, experts, and international organizations like the UN that the atrocities perpetrated against the Rohingya fall within some, if not all of the above categories. The outstanding question is whether there was a clear objective of annihilation underlying these egregious acts.
The crucial ingredient for actions to meet the high threshold of genocide—rather than other violations of international law, like crimes against humanity or war crimes—is the intent to eradicate members of a group because they are members of said group. Since overt expressions of a desire to exterminate all or part of the Rohingya population have not been discovered yet, certain types of evidence, when viewed in the aggregate, can help to establish genocidal intent. Evidence of premeditation and planning; large-scale public propaganda campaigns; cover-ups and destruction of evidence; and denial all serve as indicators that something beyond run-of-the-mill killing, burning, and expelling is going on.
Rohingya refugees who have crossed the border to Bangladesh. Photo by UNICEF/Brown
In a landmark report, Fortify Rights—a Bangkok-based legal and advocacy organization with unmatched expertise in Myanmar issues—found that in the weeks and months before hundreds of thousands of Rohingya fled Myanmar to Bangladesh, authorities had made “extensive and systematic preparations” for attacks on the Muslim minority.
Planning is a clear indication of intent, especially when the crimes at issue are so systematic, varied, coordinated, and brutal. “Genocide doesn’t happen spontaneously,” noted Matthew Smith, CEO of Fortify Rights. It requires planning and the planting of seeds of hate. The report implicated 22 Myanmar army and police officials in the chain of command.
Myanmar army officials and even the country’s elected civilian leader, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, say that Myanmar’s brutal campaign of rape, extrajudicial killing, and forced displacement was a counter-insurgency response to an attack by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on security forces on Aug. 25, 2017. Fortify Rights found this narrative to be untrue. Evidence suggests that since ARSA’s first attack on the Myanmar military, security forces have been lying in wait for another attack so that they could unleash full-blown violence and expulsion that would be apocalyptic for the Rohingya minority.
Systematic preparations detailed in the report include: the collection of sharp or blunt objects from Rohingya civilians so as to ensure they were unarmed and unable to defend themselves during the crackdown; spreading anti-Rohingya propaganda; training and arming local non-Rohingya communities; tearing down fencing and other structures around Rohingya homes; deliberately depriving Rohingya of food and crucial life-saving aid to weaken them prior to attack; and deploying unnecessarily high numbers of state security forces to northern Rakhine state.
A long history of deep discrimination of the Rohingya as well as widespread hatred towards the minority group by a large swath of the Myanmar population speak to a long-percolating intent to destroy. Atrocities committed against the Rohingya are the culmination of decades of institutionalized discrimination of this distinct Muslim ethnic population comprised of over 1 million people. This includes: denial of citizenship as a result of discriminatory laws; involuntary ghettoization and confinement to displacement camps; and severe restrictions on their freedom of movement, marriage and reproductive rights as well as access to employment and education.
The history of the Rohingya as a distinct ethnic group stretches back for generations. They speak a Bengali dialect and tend to look distinct from most of Myanmar’s other ethnic groups. Although many Rohingya were considered citizens when Myanmar became independent in 1948, after its junta in 1962, the military began stripping them of their rights. Most Rohingya became legally stateless after a restrictive citizenship law was introduced in 1982. Even the name Rohingya has been taken from them; the Myanmar government refers to them as Bengalis, or much, much worse.
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Framed as dangerous interlopers and terrorists from neighboring Bangladesh, their very identity has been denied by the Buddhist majority, including civilian leader Ang San Suu Kyi. “There is no such thing as Rohingya,” U Kyaw San Hla, an officer in Rakhine’s state security ministry was quoted in the New York Times. “It is fake news.” The Myanmar military has been slowly erasing the Rohingya for quite some time, fanning the flames of hate and dehumanization through multiple channels to engage the majority of Myanmar citizens in their mission. Now government officials, opposition politicians, religious leaders and even local human-rights activists are unified under the same narrative that the Rohingya must be gotten rid of, whether expelled or eradicated, because they are not citizens of Myanmar and do not belong. Buddhist Monks, considered moral authorities in a pious land, have been at the forefront of campaigns to strip the Rohingya of their humanity, often referring to them as “snakes,” “pigs,” and “worse than dogs.”
The vitriolic hate speech of Myanmar’s citizens, religious leaders, and officials unleashed on Facebook speaks of clear genocidal intent. For years leading up to last year’s attacks, the military used media to amplify Rohingya otherness, to dehumanize them and fan the flames of hatred so as to get the majority of the population on board with what was to come. Although widespread access in Myanmar to cellphones only started a few years ago, already about 90 percent of the population has phones, and, for many people, Facebook is their only source of news, the only site they use on the internet. Reuters found more than 1,000 examples of posts, comments, and pornographic images attacking the Rohingya on Myanmar Facebook.
Some examples reported by Reuters are especially shocking: “We must fight them the way Hitler did the Jews, damn kalars!” Kalar is a derogatory word for Muslim. Another post showed a news article from an army-controlled publication, which said, “These non-human kalar dogs, the Bengalis, are killing and destroying our land, our water, and our ethnic people….We need to destroy their race.” In reference to a picture of a boatload of Rohingya refugees, another user said, “pour fuel and set fire so that they can meet Allah faster.” “The poisonous posts call the Rohingya or other Muslims dogs, maggots and rapists, suggest they be fed to pigs, and urge they be shot or exterminated,” said Reuters. If this is what the average person in Myanmar believed leading up to last year’s atrocities, so naturally and deeply that they felt comfortable posting for all to see, it’s not hard to imagine what the architects of the genocide had in mind.
It wasn’t the brutal acts that followed these preparations as much as the aftermath that helps to establish genocidal intent. The military and security forces vehemently denied any wrongdoing, tried to wipe out any evidence of the Rohingya’s presence in Myanmar, and attempted to destroy all evidence. In a report released in October 2017, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said that Myanmar’s security forces had worked to “effectively erase all signs of memorable landmarks in the geography of the Rohingya landscape and memory in such a way that a return to their lands would yield nothing but a desolate and unrecognizable terrain.”
The crackdown in Rakhine also targeted “teachers, the cultural and religious leadership, and other people of influence in the Rohingya community in an effort to diminish Rohingya history, culture and knowledge.” It seems that the military just wanted to wipe it all away. Security forces burned and bulldozed the villages to leave no trace; they buried the dead in mass graves; they put the area on lockdown, prohibiting any aid groups, human rights organizations, fact-finding missions or journalists from entering. According to accounts by Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, security forces “came to the slaughter armed not only with rifles, knives, rocket launchers and grenades, but also with shovels to dig pits and acid to burn away faces and hands so that the bodies could not be identified.” Villagers said that two days before the onslaught, they saw soldiers buying vats of acid in a nearby village.
Rohingya refugees are resorting to increasingly desperate measures such as makeshift rafts to cross the Naf River to Bangladesh. Photo by Andrew McConnell/UNHCR
After the genocidal acts came the blanket denials: “There’s no case of military killing Muslim civilians,” said Dr. Win Myat Aye, the country’s social welfare minister and the governing National League for Democracy party’s point person on Rakhine. “Muslim people killed their own Muslim people.” Of course, these denials cannot be taken seriously in the face of overwhelming evidence of planned and systematic efforts to annihilate the Rohingya and remove them from their lands. But the act of denial itself, by both the military and civilian government, especially when it places blame on the victims, is a telltale indicator of genocidal intent.
When the actions before, during, and after the crackdown are brought together to create a clear pattern and plan, one could certainly make the case that the requisite intent to destroy runs through all of it. Jewish World Watch believes that the Rohingya crisis is most likely genocide, and we are advocating for a response proportionate to such a crime.
These atrocities cannot be overlooked or minimized. Despite extensive reporting on the plight of the Rohingya, who continue to suffer terribly in the overcrowded, decrepit camps of Cox’s Bazar, international institutions and governments haven’t done enough to stop the military from targeting other minority groups in Myanmar, with impunity. Most recently, it has turned its campaign of violence against the Christian minority of Kachin State.
The world cannot stand idly by and watch another genocide unfold. Jewish World Watch has been working through our partners on the ground in Bangladesh to build resilient structures and to help provide much-needed medical aid to the refugees who fled their home for an overcrowded refugee camp that is now subject to furious monsoons. No matter how much we and other like-minded organizations do for the survivors of this genocide, they will continue to be at risk, and abused unless the international community stands up on their behalf and targets the architects of these heinous crimes.
The United States recently issued sanctions against 4 members of the Myanmar military. While this is a positive first step, we must do more. First and foremost, the sanctions should be broader, reaching the highest in the chain of command, including Commander-in-Chief General Min Aung Hlaing. The U.S. should also suspend all cooperation with Myanmar’s armed forces and scrupulously review any trade and development programs in Rakhine State to ensure that they do not reinforce discriminatory structures. The State Department should also acknowledge this for what it is, a likely genocide. While the blockade against non-governmental organizations, reporters, and experts has made a definitive finding of genocide more complicated than it would be in an open state, satellite footage, testimonials of survivors, and, of course, posts on social media undeniably point to something beyond crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing.
To ensure that the culture of impunity the Myanmar military has enjoyed for far too long is stopped, once and for all, Jewish World Watch also asks the UN Security Council to refer the Rohingya crisis to the International Criminal Court for investigation and possible prosecution as well as to impose sanctions on the military regime.
Together, we will continue monitoring the developments, pushing for an appropriate response by the United States, and fighting on behalf of those who cannot fight for themselves … until they finally can.
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