Can we punish the hate provocateurs for the genocide of the Rohingya?
By Habib Siddiqui
The Merriam-Webster
dictionary defines Xenophobia as – fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners
or of anything that is strange or foreign. Thus, one need not necessarily be a
foreigner or newcomer to a territory to be a target or an object of this crime.
Even an indigenous people who are a minority that look or behave differently
than the majority can be victims of xenophobia.
In recent years,
xenophobia has become a powerful political factor in many parts of our world,
especially in Europe, emboldening the far right, extremist and fascist forces. In
India, despite their existence for more than a thousand years, Muslim and
Christian minorities are viewed as intruders, outsiders or foreigners. Under
the fascist Hindutvadi BJP government scores of Muslim-sounding names of towns,
cities and places are being replaced with Hindu-sounding names to revise
history and delink Muslims from those places as if they don’t belong there any
longer in Modi’s India. Under the pretext of saving cows (Gau-rakhsha), Muslims
are lynched to death. Mosques and churches are also routinely attacked and
demolished to make ways for building Hindu temples or other development
projects.
But nowhere is this
intolerance more acute than in Burma (officially
called the Republic of the Union of Myanmar), a country in
Southeast Asia that borders India and Bangladesh to its west, Thailand and Laos
to its east and China to its north and northeast.
The Rakhine state
(formerly called Arakan) is Burma’s western most state. Historically, the
Arakan littoral of the Bay of Bengal, sandwiched between the Muslim-majority
Bengal and the Buddhist-majority Burma, was an independent state. It had a
typical frontier culture where Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus lived together.
The territory was annexed by Bodaw Paya, a Burmese king in 1784 C.E. His savage
forces massacred many of the conquered people of Arakan and forced hundreds of
thousands of survivors to flee and take refuge inside East Bengal (today’s
Bangladesh), which was then administered by the East India Company (of Great
Britain). In 1824, Arakan was conquered by the East India Company, thus, putting
an end to the brutal occupation by the Burman race, and encouraging
resettlement of the refugee families.
For the most of its
independent years since 1948 when Burma gained independence from the Great
Britain, contrary to the aspirations of the non-Burman people living along the
frontier states that make up most of the religious and ethnic/racial
minorities, the country has been ruled (irrespective of whether the government
was military or civil) solely by people from the dominant Burman race. Their power is essentially rooted in Buddhist religio-racism
that has permeated Burmese society for centuries. This racism is not limited to
the racial supremacy complex alone, but also plays the card of ethnic racism of
one against the other. Thus, we see the racism of the Burmans against the Karen
and the Shan, the Karen against the Burmans, the Shan against the Wa, the Wa
against the Shan, the Rakhine against the Rohingyas, the Mon against the
Burmans, the Burmans against the Chinese, the Christians against the Buddhists,
the Buddhists against the Muslims, etc. This list is by no means a
comprehensive one, but the bottom line is: the ruling power has always
exploited this ‘divide-and-rule’ policy to turn people against each other and
thereby increase its hold onto power in this artificially glued country of many
races, ethnicities and religions.
For decades, the military
regime’s propaganda, therefore, encouraged a blind racist nationalism that was
full of references to ‘protecting the race’ - meaning that if Burmans do not
oppress other nationalities then they will themselves be oppressed, ‘national
reconsolidation’ - meaning assimilation, and preventing ‘disintegration of the
Union’ - meaning that if the Army falls then some kind of ethnic chaos would
engulf the divided nation. Sadly, that toxic strategy to justify violence
against ‘others’ that are considered racially and/or religiously different has
not changed an iota under the new civil administration of Suu Kyi.
Race, religion and
ethnicity have been exploited to justify the genocidal crimes, brutal
oppression and subjugation of non-Buddhists inside Burma. As a result, the
country has been engrossed in rampant ethnic and religious strife, and its
myriad ethnic groups have been involved in one of the world's longest-running
ongoing guerilla wars to restore their fundamental rights that were snatched
away from them.
In 2011, the military
junta, which had ruled the country for half a century since 1962, was
officially dissolved following a 2010 general election, and a quasi-civilian
government was installed under an ex-general Thein Sein. Aung San
Suu Kyi (daughter of country’s founding father Aung San), then touted –
rather falsely – as a democracy icon, and some political prisoners were
released ushering hope of a new beginning and improved human rights record and
foreign relations for the country that had hitherto been looked down as a pariah
state. The transition led to the easing of trade and other economic sanctions. In the landmark 2015 election, Suu Kyi's party
won a majority in both houses of the parliament. However, the Burmese military (Tatmadaw)
remains a powerful force in politics.
Of all the minorities,
the worst sufferers have been the Rohingya people who live in the Arakan state.
They are vilified, maligned and persecuted. Denied citizenship and every one of
the thirty rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they
became the target of elimination
in a highly sinister national project that enjoys wide support from all
sections of the Buddhist society inside Myanmar. The rationale behind such heinous
crimes is the fearmongering myth that if Muslims are not eliminated, Myanmar
will become a Muslim country. Consider, for instance, the remarks of Maung
Thway Chun, the editor of a newsweekly for hardline Buddhist ultra-nationalists.
He told Joe Freeman, a journalist based in Rangoon: “[W]e don’t want Muslims to swallow our country … Then this country will
be a Muslim country. It is such a shame for us that the land we inherited from
our former generations will be lost in our time.”
For most westerners,
it is difficult, if not incredible, to imagine this dreadful side of Buddhist
fascism – known as Myanmarism
– that has defined the country in recent decades. Myanmarism is a toxic apartheid
ideology in which race and religion, much like Nazism, defines identity and
legitimacy to Myanmar. The non-Buddhists who are viewed as outsiders or
intruders by the Buddhist majority have no place or legitimacy; they are made the
targets of elimination inside Burma to make the land pure for the Buddhists and
free of the non-Buddhists.
Myanmar’s 2014 census counted the population to be
51 million people. As of 2018, the population is about 55 million. Rohingyas were
not counted in that census and were not allowed to field their candidates in
the 2015 election. Based on the estimates from international NGOs and rights
group, it is, however, believed that Rohingyas numbered at least two million,
thus, making up at least 4 percent of the total population inside Myanmar or about
40 percent of population
in the Rakhine state. More than three million Rohingyas are now settled or
forced to live as legal or illegal refugees
outside their ancestral home in Arakan.
Since the so-called democratic
transition that began in 2011, thousands of Muslims, esp. Rohingyas living in
the Rakhine state, have been killed in targeted pogroms by both the government
security forces and armed Rakhine Buddhist vigilantes. Thousands of Rohingya
females were raped
by Buddhists as a weapon of war to terrorize this most persecuted community of
our time. The latest of such criminal activities in 2016 and 2017 have been
recognized by the world community, including the UN, as a genocide that has
forced the exodus of nearly a million to Bangladesh. Before the latest crisis
hit them, some 140,000 Rohingyas were already internally displaced and living
in concentration camps inside Arakan. Since 2017, tens of thousands are living
along the no-man’s land, bordering Bangladesh. Since August 2017 Doctors
Without Borders have treated thousands of Rohingya refugee females for sexual
assault (i.e., rape).
Genocidal crimes don’t
happen in a vacuum and require hate provocateurs to prepare the ground for such
a ‘final solution’ of the targeted group. In the context of Myanmar, this evil
task was jointly carried out by the various propaganda outlets (including the Facebook)
at the disposal of the central and local (Rakhine) state governments, Buddhist
monks (e.g., Wirathu and his fascist 969 Movement), ultra-nationalist
politicians and intellectuals (esp. Rakhine) like Aye Chan, Aye Kyaw, Khin Maung Saw
and others. Thanks to their willful distortion,
the Rohingyas whose origin to the Arakan littoral predates those of the Rakhine
Buddhist community were portrayed as outsiders or infiltrators to Arakan and as
a virus that needed to be eradicated.
There is no doubt that
xenophobia against the
Muslims, esp. the Rohingyas, provided the necessary backdrop for their “Final
Solution” (genocide) in 2016-17. Without those hate provocateurs we may have
been spared of this latest human tragedy. As we have seen with the Nazi hate
provocateur Julius Streicher preparing and mobilizing the Germans to bring
about the Jewish Holocaust in Germany so is the case with evil Buddhist fascist
ideologues like Aye Kyaw, Khin Maung Saw and Aye Chan (author of xenophobic
works like the “Who are the Rohingyas?”, “The Development of Muslim Enclave
in Arakan” and “The Influx Viruses”) among the Rakhaings (the majority Buddhist
race inside the Rakhine state, also called the Rakhine), steering the wheel of
xenophobia against the Rohingyas of Burma.
Xenophobia in Arakan has also
been abused by powerful Buddhists for political and economic gains. In their
victimization of Rohingyas today, the Rakhaings see and find themselves as
benefactors the same way the Nazi Germans saw and found themselves in their
xenophobia against the German Jews. They possess what once belonged to the
‘other’ race.
Can xenophobia be defeated or
tackled? I like to believe that with proper upbringing, education, and
enactment and strict enforcement of laws, it can surely be tackled to minimize
its harmful effects. However, xenophobia cannot be defeated easily without
understanding its underlying causes, the roles the society, politics and
economics play. The second step will involve challenging the ultra-nationalist
views concerning xenophobia. The third step will involve accepting xenophobia
as a crime against humanity and thereby stopping it at any cost both at local
and international level. Harsh punishments must be meted out to the preachers
and practitioners of xenophobia. Lastly, the latter groups must learn from
history that xenophobia has not benefited any nation and will surely not
benefit theirs either. Hopefully, a greater dissemination of knowledge right
from childhood and deeper appreciation of human diversity will spur us to stop
xenophobia once and for all time.
It is worth mentioning here
that on May 23, 1945, two weeks after Germany’s surrender, Julius Streicher was
captured by the Americans. Chief Justice Jackson, chief counsel for the
prosecution, spoke to the tribunal and said that the prosecution did not wish to
incriminate the whole German race for the crimes they committed, but only the
planners and designers of those crimes, the inciters and leaders without whose
evil architecture the world would not have been for so long scourged with the
violence and lawlessness of this terrible war.
Julius Streicher was included
in that short list. He was found guilty of crimes against humanity at the
Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and sentenced to death on October 1, 1946.
What is important here to
stress is that Julius Streicher was not a member of the military. He was not a
typical person prosecuted for international war crimes, given his civilian
profession. He was not part of planning the Holocaust, the invasion of Poland,
or the Soviet invasion. Yet his role in inciting the extermination of Jews was
significant enough, in the prosecutors’ judgment, to include him in the
indictment.
I earnestly hope that one day
the Buddhist hate provocateurs like Wirathu, Aye Chan and Khin Maung Saw and
others would be tried in the International Criminal Court for inciting genocide
against the Rohingyas of Myanmar. Surely, they know and understand what they
are doing and the consequences thereof.
I hope that world community
will demand not only the restoration of the ethnic and citizenship rights of
the Rohingya community in Myanmar by repealing discriminatory xenophobic laws
that are at odds with international and UN laws but also demand for protective
status for them as an endangered community in the northern Arakan, their
ancestral homeland. Anything short of these remedial measures will simply make
them an extinct community.
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