Al Jazeera has put together a remarkable investigation into the Burmese government’s complicity in the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, a genocide that a report from the International State Crime Initiative at Queen Mary University of London says is entering its “final stages,” with the Rohingya on the verge of “mass annihilation.” The network put together a documentary, Genocide Agenda, based on its findings, which you can see here:
As part of their investigation, and as you see in the documentary, Al Jazeera took its findings to the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Law Clinic at the Yale Law School, which concluded that there is “strong evidence” of a genocide against the Rohingya organized by the government.
It’s difficult to get people in the West to care about what’s happening to the Rohingya, partly because Myanmar is just about as far from the mind of a typical Westerner as any place on earth, but mostly because the Rohingya are guilty of an irredeemable sin in the eyes of most people in the West: they’re Muslims (seriously, search “Rohingya” on Twitter and read some of the responses from people who are apparently Americans, who literally know nothing about the Rohingya apart from the fact that they’re Muslim). The Buddhist majority in Rakhine and the Burmese government have used international Islamophobia and xenophobia quite effectively to defend what they’ve been doing, characterizing the dehumanization and slaughter of the Rohingya as a defense of Myanmar’s Buddhist culture against “invasion” by foreign Muslims. They insist that the Rohingya are “illegal immigrants” despite the fact that a) the evidence supporting that contention is scarce if it exists at all and b) even if it were true it wouldn’t justify a campaign designed to eradicate the entire community, and they invent inflammatory accusations against individual Rohingya in order to whip up mob violence that targets the entire community.
The Obama administration periodically gives the Rohingya a brief mention or acknowledgement, but you get the strong sense that it believes that doing any more than that will upset Myanmar’s transition from military rule to democracy. Of course, that transition is marred by the fact that Burmese Muslims, and not just the Rohingya, are being systematically shut out of the political process, while the champion of Burmese democracy, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, is participating fully in this disenfranchisement and has had absolutely nothing to say about the Rohingya genocide. At the very least, maybe President Obama could stop embracing Suu Kyi so tightly.
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