Janine Jackson interviewed Azeem Ibrahim about the Rohungya ethnic cleansing for the October 13, 2017, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
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Rohingya refugees fleeing to Bangladesh (cc photo: Jordi Bernabeu Farrús)
Janine Jackson: Rohingya continue to arrive in Bangladesh, part of a wave of those fleeing repressive violence in neighboring Myanmar, where decades of persecution of the religious and linguistic minority by the country’s military leadership have escalated to a campaign human rights groups are using terms like “ethnic cleansing” and “crimes against humanity” to describe. Indeed, there are reportedly more Rohingya in Bangladesh now than in Myanmar, after what the government of Nobel Peace Prize-recipient Aung San Suu Kyi called “clearance operations,” which she said were aimed solely at uprooting Rohingya militants. She also contends the exodus is lightening, and that Rohingya who return will have their needs met.
Meanwhile, the international community seems poised to intervene. But what would a helpful response look like, and how are we to understand the roots of the current crisis? Azeem Ibrahim is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Policy, and author of The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. He joins us now by phone from Chicago. Welcome to CounterSpin, Azeem Ibrahim.
Azeem Ibrahim: Thank you so much for having me.
JJ: Many news reports peg the beginning of the current crisis as August 25, when, in Reuters’ words, “attacks by Rohingya militants on security posts in Rakhine State sparked a ferocious military response.” That sets the clock a certain way, in terms of who is acting and who is reacting, however disproportionately. But this latest wave of violence and desperate flight was preceded by years of violence and flight, at least back to 2012, and then in some ways, the stage was set decades before. What is some of the deeper historical context that we should understand as lying in back of this crisis that we’re seeing right now?
AI: The Rohingya have been named by the United Nations as the most persecuted minority in the world. They have faced wave after wave of violence over the last half century. The most recent wave that we’re seeing on our TV screens, which started on the 25th of August, as you mentioned, is probably the worst that we have seen. But the persecution can actually be dated back to the Second World War, when the Japanese invaded what was at that time British Burma. The majority Buddhist population sided with the Japanese invaders, believing that this would lead to swifter independence after the Japanese were victorious, but the minority Rohingya population stayed loyal to the British colonial masters.
So after the war ended and the British were victorious, there was bad blood between the two people. But despite that, there was relative calm up until 1962, when there was a military coup by a general called Ne Win, and he essentially tried to implement what he called “the Burmese road to socialism,” which was a Communist manifesto, and this was a complete economic disaster. So he did what a lot of dictators do in that situation, is that they try to find scapegoats; they tried to find people or groups to blame all the ills of society on, and the Rohingya minority, who were already seen with suspicion, were the minority of choice for this.
He also became much more overtly Buddhist in his outlook. He started funding monasteries, he started supporting extreme Buddhist clergy and so on, til eventually he began to say that only Buddhists can be loyal citizens of this country. And he passed a number of laws, which then culminated in the 1982 Citizenship Act, which stripped all the Rohingya of their nationality, making them stateless. A recent Harvard study, before the current crisis, indicated that one in seven stateless people around the globe are of Rohingya origin. The persecution can be traced back a long way, and the most recent wave is just the worst that we’ve seen.
Aung San Suu Kyi refused to even say the word “Rohingya” in a BBC interview (4/5/17).
JJ: Beyond the denial of legal citizenship, Aung San Suu Kyi says, don’t even use the term Rohingya. And a representative of Suu Kyi’s party told the Voice of America, “In our history, there is no Rohingya.” It’s really an attempt, it seems, at a cultural erasure as well.
AI: Absolutely. And this is the crux of the problem, is that the Myanmar authorities do not believe that Rohingya is a genuine term. So if you listen to any of the addresses, including Aung San Suu Kyi’s, they’ll never use the term “Rohingya.” They’ll refer to them as “Muslim in Rakhine,” or they’ll refer to them as “Bengalis.” In fact, Aung San Suu Kyi was pressed by the BBC’s Fergal Keane to say the word, to just say the word “Rohingya,” a number of times, but she refuses to say it.
And this is one the things I’ve tried to examine in my book, is the veracity of the claims behind what the Myanmar authorities and extreme Buddhist clergy say, that this term Rohingya was actually manufactured in 1942, and before that time this term did not exist, and these people are all illegal immigrants from Bangladesh.
So one of the things I did was I actually dug up documents from the Hindi National Archive in New Delhi, India, from the time when the British ruled Burma. They did extensive surveys and extensive research into the makeup of that region, and it’s very clearly documented, dating back to 1824, under a civil servant called Charles Patton from the British Colonial Office. It states very clearly that one in three souls in that region, in the Arakan region, was of Rohingya origin. And some historians trace back their origin up to eight centuries. So this idea that they’re all illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, who made up this name Rohingya, is patently false, and does not stand up to historical scrutiny.
JJ: You had written before August 25, “The worry now is what happens if there’s some kind of trigger.” Obviously, this situation had been going on for a long time, but you were concerned about something that would push it into a new realm. So you’re suggesting, then, that although it is of a piece, in a way, with what’s gone before, this latest crisis is indeed something new?
Newsweek (12/13/16)
AI: Yeah. As you said, I wrote a number of pieces in—even last year, I wrote a piece in Newsweek, warning that the military is on maneuvers now, they’re gearing up for a massive offensive of ethnic cleansing, to get rid of what they call “the Rohingya problem” once and for all, and all it needed was a trigger. So the military now claim that they were reacting to a militant attack on the 25th of August, but the reality is that they have been preparing for this for a long time. And Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the commander in chief of the Burmese armed forces, was actually on a spending spree to buy military equipment, to Germany and Austria.
And I wrote a letter to both of their ambassadors—which is now in the public domain; I published it online in May, before the current crisis—warning that the military chief is actually purchasing armaments to gear up for a massive offensive, and this is precisely what happened. So a lot of Myanmar watchers, a lot of Burma watchers, knew exactly what was going on. And, in fact, Gen. Min Aung Hlaing said, days into the crisis, that what he is doing is unfinished business from 1942, to get rid of illegal Bengalis from his country.
JJ: Refugees arriving in Bangladesh, and to a lesser extent in Thailand, are reporting entire villages burned, people being shot indiscriminately. It’s very clear why they would leave. But we need to recognize, don’t we, that arrival at a camp, for example in Bangladesh, certainly does not imply safety.
AI: Absolutely not. And I have visited the camps, both in Burma and on the Bangladeshi side, and I can tell you that the camps on both sides are absolutely horrific in terms of their facilities and in terms of just catering for human beings. The difficulty now is that over the last month or so, we had—the latest figure is 516,000 people cross over the border. This brings the total to over 800,000, just in Bangladesh. And a country like Bangladesh, which is already overpopulated, is quite poor, simply cannot absorb those kinds of numbers. And now we have starvation and malnutrition setting in, along with disease, such as cholera and diarrhea. So out of those 516,000, we know that the figures are up to 260,000 are children, and amongst those, at the very least we know that 9,000 are children without any parents, so they don’t have any guardians, the parents have been killed or they’re lost. So we have starvation and malnutrition setting in. So this is quite accurately described as one of the worst humanitarian crises of our time.
JJ: We have seen some harrowing reporting coming from the camps, which I have appreciated for sort of showing its seams. We’re hearing reporters describe the difficulties of getting access. A reporter, Erin Kilbride, talked about refugee stories, and noted that “the types of injuries showing up in Bangladesh border camps corroborate stories of civilians shot from behind as they fled,” which is very important when folks are getting conflicting reports.
Washington Post (10/2/17)
And the Washington Post’s Max Bearak was able to counter Suu Kyi’s claim that the exodus had “quieted down,” and that people were “carrying on as normal” in Rakhine State, by listening to refugee cell phone calls to the area from the camps in Bangladesh, which he describes very poignantly. And he adds that there are only three spots where you can actually get cell phone service, and that Rohingya refugees who’ve been at the camps for decades “have shown the new arrivals exactly where to stand to make calls.” That’s the kind of detail that really crushes.
But if field reporters can vividly convey the crisis, where and how we direct our focus matters very much. And here I want to cite a Washington Post editorial which vehemently condemns Myanmar’s military for their “entirely disproportionate” response—“inflicting such misery on a whole population is intolerable”—and they demand the Rohingya must be allowed to return immediately. It’s hard not to notice that these are not principles that the paper applies universally. But in this case, the Post and other US media are very much in “do something” mode, and the narrative helps determine what folks think makes sense to do, and what they’ll support. I wonder if you could talk about what narrative is important to carry forward. I mean, partly it has to do with reimagining who Aung San Suu Kyi is.
AI: Yes. This has been one of the difficulties, is that the Western press and leaders are completely baffled by the behavior of Aung San Suu Kyi. You know, at the very outset of this crisis, she not only remained silent, but she actually and overtly supported the military. She’s essentially become a shield for the military in giving them tacit support verbally.
Very recently, she gave a speech to an international audience after attending the General Assembly at the UN, and the speech was given in English, so it was aimed at the global community. And it was quite bizarre from a number of perspectives.
First of all, she claimed that she had no idea why the Rohingya were leaving, and that she invites international partners to come to Myanmar and join her to try to find out. I think most people found this quite bizarre, because we can see the villages burning from Bangladesh, you know. And this is burning on an industrial scale; Human Rights Watch has obtained satellite images showing entire villages completely burnt, and the next day after they’re burnt, then the militias and the security forces come back to burn the remaining villages that are left.
So it’s quite evident why the people are actually leaving. But the interesting thing was that she invited the international community to come and investigate with her, and she said this very explicitly. And this is after earlier this year, in March of this year, the United Nations passed a resolution for a full-scale humanitarian human rights commission inquiry. And it was Aung San Suu Kyi herself that said, and I quote here, that this will not be very helpful. And as the foreign minister of that country, she’s blocked the United Nations from coming; she’s refused to give them visas. And even after the speech, when she invited the international community to come and join her, she refused to let the UN in.
Azeem Ibrahim: “They know exactly what they’re doing; they want to ensure that the ethnic cleansing of the entire Rohingya population is complete before anybody finds out.” (image: YouTube)
So she says one thing in the public domain, but privately she’s essentially undertaking a policy to ensure that there’s no access whatsoever for the international media. And one commentator actually told me, when I was in Washington recently, it was actually a congressman, he said the reason why they’re not letting international observers in is very simple; it’s because they’ll end up in The Hague. They know exactly what they’re doing; they want to ensure that the ethnic cleansing of the entire Rohingya population is complete before anybody finds out. And they have a systematic and organized campaign to ethnically cleanse the entire Rohingya population, burn down their villages, to make sure that they don’t ever come back.
JJ: You have written about previous supposed investigations into violence taken by the Myanmar government, one of which concluded both sides are to blame, which is going to sound very familiar to Americans right at this moment. But you’ve said that external players really have to play a role here. There’s a tendency sometimes to say this is a sovereign country and, you know, folks who are critical of outside intervention—and I know the EU Foreign Ministers Council is set to discuss Myanmar on October 16. What do you see as appropriate interventions, or appropriate roles for the external players?
AI: I think there has to be some sort of penalty and some sort of sanction on Myanmar for ignoring the United Nations in this kind of fashion, particularly when they engage in industrial-scale ethnic cleansing, and what many people would call genocide. The difficulty is that a lot of Western leaders are unwilling to put too much pressure on Myanmar, because they believe that this country has emerged from a brutal military dictatorship, and it’s now become much more democratic. And they don’t want to put too much pressure on Aung San Suu Kyi, because they don’t want the country to go back to being a military dictatorship; they don’t want a military coup.
But this is actually a myth that’s been perpetuated by Aung San Suu Kyi’s friends and supporters. The reality is that there’s almost no chance of a military coup happening in Myanmar. The military is actually in a very, very good position right now. They created the political system as it stands; they still wield considerable influence, they still control the Media Ministry, they still control a quarter of the seats in Parliament. Aung San Suu Kyi is not the president, she’s the State Counselor, a position that they created to ensure that she doesn’t have complete power.
And at the same time, the military was very, very unpopular, and they were forced to hold elections, elections that Aung San Suu Kyi won with 80 percent. So 80 percent of the people are behind her, and now they can engage in ethnic cleansing without any kind of international scrutiny and pressure, whilst Aung San Suu Kyi becomes a lightening rod that defends them and attracts the international criticism. So they’re in a very good situation. The last thing they want to do is upset that balance and attract international criticism. So the chances of a military coup are very, very slim.
But we in the international community have refused to undertake very simple kinds of action that we could do to actually put more pressure on the Myanmar authorities. One thing, for example, we could do is that President Obama was a little bit premature when he lifted all unilateral sanctions against Myanmar, and he did that by executive order. It’s my understanding that that can be reversed relatively easily. And this would hurt the military quite considerably, because the military in Myanmar is not just a fighting military; it’s actually a massive business enterprise which is profiting immensely from the lifting of sanctions.
JJ: It reminds me also of a piece I saw by sociologist Saskia Sassen, in which she noted that land grabs are also accompanying forced displacement, and that she’s referred to “military-economic interests.”
We always have to remember there are many factors in play, and a October 8 Reuters piece reminded me of that, speaking of the US administration:
The administration wanted to send a strong message to Myanmar’s military, but was concerned that too drastic action could allow China to expand its growing diplomatic and economic influence in the country.
To me, that’s just another reminder that as human beings, our understanding of human rights can’t be entirely determined by the definitions or actions of political leaders.
President Barack Obama meets with Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon (photo: State Department/William Ng)
AI: Yeah, absolutely right. This is one of the largest geopolitical calculations going on behind the scenes. When President Obama visited Myanmar in 2012, for any country to get a visit from the president of the United States is quite a big deal for that country. President Obama visited, and Aung San Suu Kyi then came to United Nations to give a speech, and then she visited Obama at the White House and Obama lifted all sanctions on Myanmar. And one of the reasons they did that is, as Myanmar becomes more open, emerges from a military dictatorship, the US is deeply concerned that it’s falling under the sphere of influence of China.
The whole of Southeast Asia has been reconfigured to meet one purpose, and that’s to meet China’s insatiable demand for resources. China’s the biggest investor in many of those countries. In Pakistan, for example, China is investing over $56 billion. And if you go to Pakistan you see roads, highways, ports and bridges, everything being built by Chinese money. And it’s a similar situation in Myanmar, that China is the biggest investor there as well. And as it opens up, the US is deeply concerned that this will give access to China to the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, thus they’re able to surround India, which is another nuclear power that’s in rivalry with China over control of that region. This will change the strategic calculus of that region dramatically. So when you have geopolitical machinations going on such as this behind the scenes, then you insert the persecution of this unknown group called the Rohingya, it simply doesn’t fit into that calculation.
JJ: We know that folks are very much thinking of the hardships happening today, the images that are coming out, such as they are, from Bangladesh camps, and it’s clear that Bangladesh does not want to be seen as the solution. The PBS NewsHour reported a local official in Bangladesh saying:
The Rohingyas aren’t developed, their character is uncivilized, we’re different from them. If they continue coming like this, it will lead to destruction.
Clearly, this is not a tenable situation. Just on the immediate human rights nightmare front, what do you see happening, or what could happen, in that regard?
AI: It definitely is a new challenge that we have literally 800,000 refugees in camps in Bangladesh, and the Bangladeshi government has been very generous in terms of allowing them in. Since the 1990s, they’ve had a policy of not allowing any Rohingya refugees in, simply because it encourages more of them to come. And this is precisely what the Myanmar authorities actually want; they’ve actually stated that we want all Rohingya to leave, and some third country should just take them in. And Bangladeshi government was right not to encourage it. At the same time, they have opened their doors to allow those refugees in.
The difficulty is that they are now confined to these massive camps in the hope that they someday will go back to Myanmar, and they don’t allow them to leave the camps, so they’re not given refugee status. And the difficulty is the probability of them going back to Myanmar is very, very slim. So we have a situation in which the Rohingya will be persecuted in Myanmar, and now that they’ve crossed over the border, they may have escaped direct violence, but they’re now confined to these concentration camps in Bangladesh, from which they’re not permitted to leave either. So they had no future in Myanmar and it seems that they and their children will have no future in Bangladesh either, by the looks of it.
JJ: I was struck, I don’t know what to make of it, I was struck by a little thread I was seeing in reporting that now Suu Kyi’s office is saying, well, internally displaced Bengalis (of course), they can return home, and the government will provide their needs to build and reconstruct their homes. It almost sounds like a setup, to say that those who did return, well, then they aren’t really refugees. I don’t quite understand what the gambit is there, by pretending that the Myanmar government will provide food and security for Rohingyas that return.
AI: Yeah. You have to look at the criteria by which they allow the Rohingyas to return. So I’ve looked at it. Aung San Suu Kyi said in her famous speech that the Rohingya will be permitted to return if they can prove that they’re from Myanmar. But the kind of criteria they have to meet, not even the Buddhists or anybody, not a single citizen in Myanmar could probably meet that criteria. Just to give you an example, they have to produce birth certificates of their grandfather. At that time, birth certificates were never issued. They have to produce paperwork from the village that they’re residents from, and they’ve not been residents since 1982, they’ve been noncitizens. Then they have to produce paperwork of where they crossed the border in Bangladesh, so basically passports with passport stamps. So nobody can meet that kind of criteria. That is just designed to obfuscate and confuse the international community, to say that look, we’re doing what we can to allow the Rohingya back in, they’re all welcome to come back. But to meet that criteria is just impossible.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Azeem Ibrahim, senior fellow at the Center for Global Policy. His book is The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide. Thank you, Azeem Ibrahim, for joining us today on CounterSpin.
AI: Thanks for having me.
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This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.