Myanmar’s
military has spent decades engineering a genocide
By Austin
Bodetti* | The Diplomat
Despite
taking years to plan, history’s worst crimes against humanity appeared to the
world as clumsy, hasty, and reactive. The Ottoman Empire organized the Armenian
Genocide amid fears of Russian spies during World War I. Nazi Germany raced to
implement the Final Solution, the bloodiest phase of the Holocaust, as the
Soviet Union and the Western Allies punched through its defenses during World
War II.
Newcomers
to genocide studies might see historic recurrence in Myanmar, whose military,
the Tatmadaw, claims that it only started battling the Rohingya, a Muslim
minority, after insurgents fighting under the banner of the Arakan Rohingya
Salvation Army (ARSA) conducted operations against security forces in October 2016and August 2017. However, the Tatmadaw has spent decades
engineering the genocide of the Rohingya, a conspiracy that is now coming to
fruition and that, in the face of the Western world’s growing complacence and
Islamophobia, will likely succeed.
When
the British Empire granted independence to Burma, Myanmar’s predecessor, in
1948, some Rohingya pushed for their own Islamic state separate from the
Buddhist-dominated sovereign state in which they found themselves. They
referred to the territory that would become Rakhine State — named after the
Rakhine, the Buddhist people who live there alongside the Rohingya — as
“Arakan.” The Tatmadaw had other plans though, expelling thousands of those
secessionists to Bangladesh.
Most
often, Rohingya refugees would return from Bangladesh after the Tatmadaw
decided that it had wrought enough destruction, adding to a growing Rohingya
population. The Rakhine feared that the Rohingya might soon outnumber them, so
Burma’s then-military government legislated a solution: the 1982 Citizenship
Law, which required Burmese to prove their ancestry prior to 1823, when Britain
colonized Burma and permitted Muslims from the British Raj to immigrate there. The
Tatmadaw thus rendered the Rohingya stateless, classifying them as illegal
“Bengali” immigrants.
Unlike
the Ottomans or the Nazis, who tried to crush minority religions in just a few
years, the Tatmadaw exercised not only brutality but also patience and
restraint. In the early 1990s, soon after the military government had renamed
the country “Myanmar” to promote its nationalist agenda, 250,000 Rohingya fledrape,
religious persecution, and slavery to Bangladesh. The Tatmadaw nevertheless
allowed many to return, likely appreciating how cruel the instantaneous erasure
of a minority could look to the international community. The Tatmadaw
understood what the Hutus and Serbs failed to.
The
War on Terror presented Myanmar the opportunity to build its anti-Rohingya
narrative: the Tatmadaw was fighting Islamist terrorism, not pursuing an
Islamophobic genocide. When sectarian riots erupted in
Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State, in summer 2012, the Tatmadaw imprisoned tens of thousands of Rohingya in
concentration camps for what it described as their own safety. According to the
Myanmar government, the camps protected the Rohingya from Rakhine rioters while
the Tatmadaw pursued the alleged terrorists of the Rohingya Solidarity
Organization (RSO), a defunct resistance movement.
Choosing
to confine the Rohingya, instead of killing them, allowed the Tatmadaw to
define the story. Even if Human Rights
Watch and the United Nations protested, what happened in 2012
proved ambiguous enough that most observers refrained from labeling the
detentions genocide. The Tatmadaw was pressuring the Rohingya to leave through
oppression rather than making them leave through violence.
In
2016 and 2017, the Tatmadaw has found the opportunity to finish what it started
in 1948. The existence of ARSA, the Rohingya’s reaction to decades of passive
genocide, gave the Tatmadaw the excuse to switch to active genocide. It
combated the insurgents, whom it described as “terrorists” even though they killed no
civilians, by arresting, burning, displacing, executing, raping, and torturing Rohingya civilians. These war crimes fell
under the labels of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism so
popular with Western militaries. The Tatmadaw reproduced what it saw at work in
the Western world.
Nothing
from 1948 to now suggests that the Tatmadaw is reviving the War on Terror with
sincerity. Instead, the military that governs Myanmar to this day while hiding
behind Aung San Suu Kyi, as a figurehead, has likewise used the War on Terror
as cover for the War against Islam. The last two historical attempts at
genocide against Muslims, in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, had to contend
with American humanitarian intervention. Today, however, Americans sound
reluctant to intervene (more) even in Afghanistan and Iraq, the countries that they proved so eager to invade in
the early 2000s.
The
Tatmadaw has gone further than its counterparts in the Philippines and
Thailand, the other two countries in Southeast Asia confronting Islamist
insurgencies. The Filipinos and the Thais, on the one hand, have at least spoken of
conflict resolution and peacebuilding. The Tatmadaw, on the other, refuses to negotiate with ARSA, a revolutionary
movement far worse armed and organized than the Malays in Patani and the Moros
in Mindanao. The Tatmadaw wants to destroy an ethnicity, not end an insurgency.
ARSA and the RSO, resistance movements capable of little real resistance, seem
the perfect excuse.
“The
only resolution to the Rohingya crisis is to send UN troops to Arakan and
create a safe space for our people,” Sham Shu Anwar, one of the few Rohingya to
stay in Myanmar after half a million have escaped, told The Diplomat. “All other efforts to
rescue our people will be in vain.” He recounted the Tatmadaw’s attempts at
ethnic cleansing as “adamant and inhuman.”
The
Rohingya once hoped that Myanmar’s democratization would return to them the
rights that the Tatmadaw had stolen. They praised the National League for Democracy (NLD), Suu
Kyi’s political party, for its potential to bring peace to Myanmar. Now,
neither the NLD nor the international community have met the Rohingya’s
already-wavering expectations of protection and salvation. “The international
community just provides us food,” Anwar observed. “We need protection, not
food.”
One
of the world’s most persecuted minorities has convinced itself of the need for
warfare, whether in the form of humanitarian intervention or rebellion. “There
are two ways to save the Rohingya: one is intervention by the UN Security Council
and the other is arming Rohingya fighters,” Anwar argued, noting that his
compatriots saw few options against the Tatmadaw. “Every moment, we are scared
of the Burmese. Everyone here is scared of them. Yesterday, they set fire to a
village near us.”
ARSA
might have miscalculated in attacking the Tatmadaw, which can now claim to be
acting in self-defense. The longer ARSA resists, the longer soldiers can
slaughter the Rohingya who remain in Myanmar. Anwar told The Diplomat that
he nevertheless refuses to leave Myanmar, his homeland, for Bangladesh: “We
worry about living in refugee camps. If the Burmese kill us, we will die here.”
*Austin
Bodetti is a freelance journalist focusing on conflict in the Muslim world. His
writing has appeared in AskMen, The Daily Beast, The
Daily Dot, Vox, and Wired UK.
Photo:
In this Friday, July 14, 2017 photo, Myanmar Border Guard Police (BGP) officers
walk along a path ahead of journalists in Tin May village, in which Myanmar
government and military claim the existence of Muslim terrorists in Buthidaung,
Rakhine State, Myanmar. | Image Credit: AP Photo/ Esther Htusan
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