Tag: Rohingya

Is it genocide in Myanmar?

Maung Zarni, right, with a 67-year-old Rohingya man from Maungdaw, who had been a leader at a township level in former prime minister Ne Win’s early days, when Rohingyas were recognized as an ethnic community with full citizenship rights. (photo from Maung Zarni)

Calls are mounting to recognize Myanmar’s violent campaign against the Rohingya as genocide. At the United Nations’ Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 12, Yanghee Lee, special rapporteur on the human rights situation in Myanmar, said she is “becoming more and more convinced that the crimes committed … bear the hallmarks of genocide and call[s] in the strongest terms for accountability.”

Nearly 800,000 Rohingya have fled state-sanctioned and -organized violence in Myanmar (Burma) since August 2017, after the government – blaming an alleged attack on Myanmar’s security forces by Rohingya militants – initiated a brutal campaign of arson, murder and systematic rape and torture against the civilian Rohingya population in Rakhine state. The violence follows decades of oppressive measures against the Rohingya, which, in recent years, have included restrictions on education and medical care, deliberate starvation, state-imposed birth control, property seizure, and removal of citizenship and civil rights.

“These human rights violations constitute nothing less than a slow-burning genocide,” human rights activist Maung Zarni, founder of the Free Burma Coalition, told the Jewish Independent.

With respect to the situation in Myanmar, for months terms like “atrocities,” “military crackdown” or “state-sanctioned violence” have been used to describe it, instead of using the word “genocide.” The UN has previously called what is happening in Myanmar, a majority Buddhist country, whose dominant ethnic group is Bamar, “ethnic cleansing.”

There have been some exceptions to the hesitancy to call the government’s actions genocide. For example, French President Emmanuel Macron called it that last September. And independent tribunals and experts like the International State Crime Initiative and the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal have also called it genocide. But the media and other international organizations have generally not been using the word.

photo - A young girl in a displaced person’s camp shows how her hands were tied behind her while she was raped; one of her finger tips was cut off for resisting
A young girl in a displaced person’s camp shows how her hands were tied behind her while she was raped; one of her finger tips was cut off for resisting. (photo from Maung Zarni)

“There is a high barrier for the use of the term genocide, and I think this is correct,” said Rainer Schulze, professor of modern European history at the University of Essex and founder of The Holocaust in History and Memory journal, speaking at the Berlin Conference on Myanmar Genocide Feb. 26, which the Jewish Independent attended. “We should not use the term genocide lightly. Not every human rights violation, ethnic cleansing or forced resettlement is a genocide. The Genocide Convention gives us a very clear definition, but, with regards to the Rohingya, it is appropriate and must be used.”

Gianni Tognoni, general secretary of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal in Rome, agreed. “The UN has been playing with names,” he said at the conference. “To declare something as genocide is to declare it as something intolerable for the international community. Instead, this is delayed.”

“Governments, in general, are very reluctant to use the term genocide for fear that it could damage diplomatic initiatives to secure peace or damage bilateral relationships,” Kyle Matthews, executive director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University, said in conversation with the Independent. “In some cases, governments have refused to label atrocity crimes as a genocide for fear it would force them to take a stronger response, such as intervening militarily.”

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted by the UN in 1948 obliges signatories to take concrete steps to respond to genocide. As of December 2017, 149 states had ratified or acceded to the treaty, including Canada. In 2005, all member states of the UN endorsed the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine, a doctrine Canada was instrumental in promoting. The Canadian government continues to avoid the term genocide, however – although it has taken some steps towards addressing the situation.

“I would say the Canadian government has been one of the most responsible and thoughtful governments in trying to find a solution to protect the Rohingya minority in Myanmar and in neighbouring countries,” said Matthews. “Ottawa has appointed Bob Rae as special envoy to the prime minister to help identify different policy options and strategies for engaging the government of Myanmar. Ottawa also recently imposed economic sanctions on leading figures in Myanmar’s military.”

On Feb. 16, the federal government imposed sanctions, under Canada’s new foreign human rights legislation, against Maung Maung Soe, a high-ranking member of the Myanmar military. “What has been done to the Rohingya is ethnic cleansing,” Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland told CBC in a statement that did not use the word genocide. “This is a crime against humanity.”

The sanctions impose a “dealings prohibition,” which freezes an individual’s assets in Canada and renders them inadmissible to enter Canada under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.

Matthews said there is much more that we could be doing. Speaking at the Berlin conference, he said, “Broader economic sanctions have to be done immediately. We should look at travel restrictions. We need to demand humanitarian access to Rakhine state [where the remaining Rohingya live, access that is currently denied by Myanmar]. We need to do more economic naming and shaming of who is associating with the regime. Myanmar embassies around the world should be protested.” The government should issue a travel advisory, he said, warning “you are going to a state that is now committing genocide.”

Matthew Gindin is a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He writes regularly for the Forward and All That Is Interesting, and has been published in Religion Dispatches, Situate Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.

Holiday of freedom

As Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman writes (in this week’s issue), the Exodus story is not one in which humankind is the protagonist. It is the hand of God that creates the circumstances that permit the Hebrew people to escape bondage and, after a time, find freedom.

Still, this did not abrogate the need for human action. The people needed to recognize the successive messages being sent to them and, then, take the opportunity to escape – take that first step into the roiling Red Sea, for example, even before God parted it. A jailer may leave the key within reach of the unjustly imprisoned, but the inmate still needs to reach out and unlock the cell door.

Central to Judaism is the concept that God left the world unfinished and imperfect. It is the work of humankind to complete the work. Bringing about that ideal is the purpose of our existence.

Often, lately, it seems that the global trajectory is moving in the wrong direction. The reelection of Vladimir Putin – by an entirely anticipated landslide, assisted by his control of media and the murder of his opponents – moves Russia further away from the nascent democracy that emerged in the late 20th century. Across the former Eastern Bloc, tyrants and hyper-nationalists are rising. Even in Slovakia, one of the finest examples of democracy emerging from the communist past, people are rising up – this is an encouraging reality – as their government appears to be moving away from its promise.

The fate of the Rohingya people (addressed by Independent writer Matthew Gindin in this issue) is a flashpoint of inhumanity and yet we continue to argue over nomenclature. Is it genocide? Words matter. But, for heaven’s sake, let us take action.

Sadly, almost anywhere one looks in the world, including, of course, in Canada and in Israel, there are injustices, inhumanities and tragedies. The uncertainty facing African refugees in Israel, and still-unaddressed issues of the most basic human rights for First Nations communities – like the right to clean water, education and opportunity – remain scars on Canada’s conscience. To our south, angry rhetoric and divisive leadership sow discontent, distrust and falsehoods in pursuit of political and social advantage. There are literal or figurative slaves needing redemption on every continent.

Jewish tradition emphatically calls us to pursue justice, but perhaps never so ardently as at Pesach. Through our enjoyment of the holiday and the reminders of our bitter history and the components of the seder, the order of our remembrance, may our resolve be strengthened to pursue justice in this year and in the decades to come.

May we strive to not be disheartened by the magnitude and breadth of the work to be done, but inspired by the inestimable number of examples we have before us, locally and elsewhere.

So many in our own community are pursuing justice in their unique ways, from the day school kids who assembled and delivered hundreds of mishloach manot recently to those in need, or Rose’s Angels, who made Valentine’s Day special for hundreds more, or for the hundreds of individuals in our community whose every day is devoted to making the world better for seniors, students, people with special needs or those who just need a comforting companion.

We can be overwhelmed by the ferocity with which news comes at us, and it can seem that whatever we do could provide only a tiny drop in the required ocean of goodness to make this world a better place. But what is an ocean but billions and billions of tiny drops?

This is our mission. We do not repair the world by despairing. We redeem it by our actions. It is, perhaps, up to Canadians who are, by any measure, among the most fortunate people in the world, to rededicate ourselves during this season of remembering and reliving our time in bondage, release and redemption, to finding ways to play our small but irreplaceable part in the enormous work to be done.

Chag Pesach sameach!