A bewildering factor of mass atrocity crimes is the need for so many onlookers to seek to normalize the aftermath.
Six years on from the military campaign against the Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar – where over 700,000 civilians were forced out of northern Rakhine state into squalid camps in Bangladesh, with several thousand murdered and untold numbers of others raped and tortured amid their looted, burned and depopulated villages – it is crucial to memorialize the true extent of the violence unleashed.
To normalize is to sanitize. An estimated one million Rohingya still languish in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar, with reduced rations and rising violence, especially from the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA), whose attacks on this day six years ago served as first spark for the Myanmar military’s campaign of brutality.
The Myanmar military had been poised to violently overreact. As seen throughout its history, war crimes are its default setting.
As so often, anniversaries as opportunities for introspection become platforms for empty platitudes. The inevitable slew of defiant opinion pieces demanding justice in torturously obvious and uninspiring prose are designed to salve the Western liberal conscience, but won’t comfort the Rohingya.
But then modern Myanmar history is littered with mass atrocities that have never faced justice or accountability. Remember the Arakan Rice Riots of 1967, when an estimated 400 civilians were murdered, in the midst of a famine, for merely demanding access to food stocks?
Around the same time, the military rolled out its first “Four Cuts” counter-insurgency campaign against the Karen National Union and the Communist Party of Burma (CPB), a strategy that drew a geographical box and killed anything that moved inside it. It’s been a consistent pattern of military behavior ever since.
Then there were the U Thant disturbances of 1974 and the first Rohingya expulsion of 1978. A repeat occurred in 1991. The 1988 pro-democracy uprising toppled the corrupt Burmese Way to Socialism but at the cost of thousands killed, exiled and imprisoned and a national conscience that has never recovered.
In the early 1990s, the military turned the Irrawaddy Delta into a slaughterhouse, central Shan state became a cauldron of military violence between 1996-1998 and Kachin state a military free-fire zone in 2011.
Since the 2021 coup, places such as Thantlang, Pa Zi Gyi have joined this kill list. With nearly two million internally displaced and an estimated 4,000 civilians killed (likely much higher), the post-putsch murder republic of dictator Senior General Min Aung Hlaing has perpetrated a nationwide repeat of the Rohingya atrocity. The rhythm section of history is repeating itself.
Just months after the Rohingya mass atrocities, the United Nations Fact Finding Mission (FFM) released detailed reporting on the scale of the violence. Yet the West kept cozying up to the military and funding development projects and a failing peace process. Call me old-fashioned, but funding peace talks with an institution being charged with multiple war crimes is bound to come a cropper.
This should have been further underscored as fighting returned to Rakhine state. Conflict between the insurgent Arakan Army (AA) and the military internally displaced an estimated 200,000 civilians and fueled almost identical abuses against the ethnic Arakanese population as had been meted out to the Rohingya.
By the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Rohingya had retreated from the headlines. Their suffering normalized so much that by the 2020 elections foreign assistance included an electoral candidates project, the “mVoter app”, which identified Rohingya candidates as “Bengali” – a racist term in Myanmar’s context.
Funded and supported by the International Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) and the San Francisco-based Asia Foundation, it was as if the previous three years of outraged reporting and calls for justice were simply white noise.
The country directors of both organizations faced no consequences, which tells you all you need to know about elite impunity in the international aid industry, where having no-idea is invariably rewarded.
The prominent rights activist Thinzar Shunlei Yi has been laudably outspoken on the plight of the Rohingya (and leads the epically titled Anti-Sham Election Coordination Committee (ASECC)), but saw it fit to share the stage with IDEA country director Marcus Brand at an expensive elections and democracy event recently held in Bangkok. There’s that normalization effect again.
The Myanmar rights and democracy movement has always been morally fluid. Memorializing Rohingya suffering should include reminiscing on the unconditional and uncritical support given to Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD), including by many prominent international bloviating bleeding hearts who managed to live with the contradictions that you can be horrified by the mass violence against a persecuted minority and at the same time adore the political leader endorsing it.
The ethical calisthenics involved are immense and nearly everyone involved in Myanmar six years ago is complicit in one way or another. The exiled, anti-coup National Unity Government (NUG) has this atrocity albatross firmly around its neck.
The NUG’s Minister for Social Welfare, Relief and Resettlement, as he was under the NLD in 2017, Win Myat Aye will likely be at the eye of the storm of this memory, and rightly so, as he justified the violence of 2017. He may have repented to Rohingya leaders in America recently, but the body language was awkward: almost as if no one wanted to be there.
The civil servant Aung Tun Thet was assigned to lead the Union Enterprise for Humanitarian Relief and Development (UEHRD), essentially to develop the conflict zone, but obviously also to cover up the crimes against the Rohingya. In a grotesque exercise in political corruption, he was also assigned to the Independent Commission of Enquiry (ICOE) to investigate the same crimes he was helping to whitewash.
The ICOE findings were first aired at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in November 2019 by State Counsellor Suu Kyi, who denied charges of genocide, but admitted war crimes and crimes against humanity were perpetrated by security forces in their “clearance operation”, despite just two years earlier denying allegations of the scale of the crimes. This was essentially a process of normalizing mass atrocity crimes.
But focusing on one person, whether it be Suu Kyi or Win Myat Aye, is misleading. The entire NLD is complicit. The NUG has inherited this complicity. Its attempts to apologize for the 2017 violence have been hammy, strained and mostly feigned.
Invective against the NLD is partly driven by frustration that the international community hasn’t done much better. Researching the violence six years ago descended into a conveyer belt of re-traumatization for many Rohingya.
Dozens of reports from international human rights organizations established military complicity beyond doubt. Expensive law firm investigations, the international media scrum, development experts and unhinged do-gooders all descended on Bangladesh in what was a disturbing free-for-all. Many moved on, like carpetbaggers, when the money flows waned.
The ICJ case will simply decide whether there has been a breach of the Genocide Convention. The International Criminal Court (ICC) is investigating the crime of forced deportation, but try arresting the perpetrators.
The Independent Investigative Mechanism on Myanmar (IIMM) has assembled dozens of case files for future prosecution that meet high evidentiary thresholds. But how much have all these expensive measures materially benefited the Rohingya, or anyone else in Myanmar? They haven’t, and likely won’t.
Like everything in Myanmar, the future is unpredictable. Will the one million Rohingya refugees remain indefinitely in Cox’s Bazar? Will near starvation rations force a premature return to Myanmar? It worked in 1978, when Bangladesh’s pressure for repatriation was as brutal as Myanmar’s forced expulsion.
Will the NUG in its shadow government capacity grant the Rohingya full citizenship rights? Symbolic perhaps, but important symbolism? Or at least repeal the 1982 Citizenship Law? There are numerous other stateless minorities and persecuted people’s in Myanmar that deserve equal attention.
And lastly, what of Min Aung Hlaing? Does he fear international justice? Unlikely. Look at the survival of Bashar al-Assad of Syria: a decade ago he was using chemical weapons on civilians, and now he’s been normalized. Myanmar’s military has been mass murdering their hold on power for decades.
At the least, the international community must strike from its aloof imperialist vernacular the vulgar term “atrocity prevention.” If the prolonged misery of the Rohingya teaches us anything, it’s that prevention simply doesn’t work. Bearing witness to suffering in Myanmar is simply a spectator sport.
David Scott Mathieson is an independent analyst working on conflict, humanitarian and human rights issues on Myanmar