Soon the world is to witness a remarkable sight: A beloved Nobel Peace Prize winner presiding over 21st century concentration camps.
Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi, one of the world’s genuine heroes, won democracy for her nation, culminating in historic elections in November last year that her party won in a landslide. As the winner, Aung San Suu Kyi is also inheriting the worst ethnic cleansing you have never heard of, Myanmar’s destruction of a Muslim minority, the Rohingya.
A recent Yale study suggested that the abuse of the more than 1 million Rohingya could amount to genocide; at the least, a confidential report to the UN Security Council said it might constitute “crimes against humanity under international criminal law.”
Illustration: Mountain People
Yet, Aung San Suu Kyi seems to be planning to continue this Myanmar version of apartheid. She is now a politician and oppressing a minority like the Rohingya is popular with mostly Buddhist voters.
Another Nobel Peace Prize winner, US President Barack Obama, who has tremendous influence on Myanmar (and who has visited twice since his re-election in 2012), is not showing much interest either. Obama and former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton helped lure Myanmar to democracy and a pro-Western orbit — significant achievements — and it might spoil the parade to fuss too much over 67 quasi-concentration camps in which many Rohingya are confined.
What all this means in practical terms is that Muhammad Karim is dead at 14.
Muhammad lived in a giant concentration camp with tens of thousands of Rohingya. The government has taken away citizenship and statehood from the Rohingya over the years and they are deprived of free movement. Muhammad wanted to sneak away by boat, paying human traffickers to join a tide of desperate Rohingya boat people seeking passage to Malaysia.
“We wouldn’t let him, because it was too dangerous,” his mother, Sara Hatu, said.
Then Muhammad suffered a scratch on his heel. Nobody thought much about it, but soon he had trouble opening his jaw.
He apparently had caught tetanus. Like most of the children in the concentration camp, he was not able to get vaccinations, including a simple tetanus shot.
After he got sick, the local medical assistants and the on-and-off clinic could not help him. Finally his mother got special permission for him to leave the camp to be hospitalized, but by then it was too late.
“After two days, he came back as a corpse,” his mother said.
Just meters from Muhammad’s hut another family is also mourning. Bildar Begum, a 20-year-old woman, contracted hepatitis A, neighbors said. Hepatitis A is normally not life-threatening, but she also could not get the medical help she needed and she died late last year, leaving a two-year-old son, Hirol.
“If she was not Rohingya, she would surely still be alive, I can say that 100 percent,” said Enus Monir, a community leader.
Now Hirol is starving — at 28 months, he weighs just 8.6kg. On the WHO weight-to-age sheets, he is off the charts. The minimum on the charts is the third percentile and Hirol is far below that.
Some of the families in the camp have substantial savings in the banks in Sittwe a few kilometers away, but because they have been locked up since 2012 they cannot access their own bank accounts to feed their families.
The international response has been pathetic. Partly that is because Myanmar makes it difficult for aid groups and journalists to see the Rohingya, so they are largely invisible.
The UN has been dysfunctional in Myanmar. Another internal UN document (provided by a critic of UN passivity on the issue) warns that UN staff members in Myanmar are feuding with one another and it raises “the question of possible complicity of the UN in potential crimes against humanity.”
Bravo to advocacy groups such as Human Rights Watch, Fortify Rights and United to End Genocide that have spotlighted the continuing brutality against the Rohingya. Kudos to humanitarian groups that ease the suffering where the government allows them to — on one large island Medecins Sans Frontiere and Save the Children were providing lifelines of healthcare and education.
Yet aid groups have been barred from many areas and the systematic destruction of the Rohingya remains one of the 21st century’s most neglected human rights catastrophes.
The Burmese government is not only oppressing individuals, it is also trying to eradicate the Rohingya as an ethnic group, by claiming that it does not exist. Authorities do not use the word Rohingya and claim that these are just illegal immigrants from Bangladesh — this is preposterous; historical documents refer to the Rohingya.
In November last year, the government arrested five men simply for printing a calendar for this year making references to the Rohingya as an ethnic group.
Aung San Suu Kyi avoids even saying “Rohingya.” The US embassy in Myanmar likewise seems to sidestep the word in its official statements, a cringeworthy capitulation.
“The Obama administration definitely could be doing a lot more,” said Matthew Smith of Fortify Rights, a human rights group focused on Myanmar.
That includes backing an international investigation and pushing Myanmar publicly and privately to take steps to restore citizenship and free movement to the Rohingya, as well as ensuring that aid groups are allowed to help them. Other politicians have also been mostly quiet — the issue has barely surfaced at all on the US presidential campaign trail.
An enormous amount has gone right in Myanmar in recent years, especially the rise of democracy. However, that same rise of democracy has also empowered racist and xenophobic demagoguery, making the problems of the Rohingya harder to solve. In the recent elections, Aung San Suu Kyi’s party refused to nominate a single Muslim candidate.
Aung San Suu Kyi is regarded by many Burmese as too conciliatory toward the Rohingya, because she remains silent rather than denouncing them at every turn, but for those of us who have deeply admired her for years, her willingness to sacrifice principle for political expedience is wrenching to watch.
Defenders of Myanmar and of Aung San Suu Kyi note that the nation has many problems — they see the Rohingya as one misfortune in a nation with a vast swath of misfortunes. The priorities, as they see them, are economic development, democracy and an end to the nation’s many local conflicts, and they protest that it is myopic to focus on the problems of one ethnic group in a nation so full of challenges.
Yet there is something particularly horrifying about a government deliberately targeting an ethnic group for destruction, locking its members in concentration camps and denying them livelihood, education and healthcare. When kids are dying in concentration camps, after being confined there because of their ethnicity, that is not just one more problem of international poverty. It is a crime against humanity and addressing it is the responsibility of all humanity.
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