By Thanggoulen Kipgen
On August 25, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) launched military attacks against 30 police posts and an army base in Rakhine state killing at least 12 security personnel including several hundred civilians. The ARSA is an ethnic militant group operating in the Muslim-dominated Rakhine state fighting against the Myanmar government who had denied them citizenship, regarding them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. Since independence, successive governments in Myanmar have denied the Rohingya’s historical claims and recognition as one of the country’s 135 ethnic groups.
Myanmar military and border police responded to the attacks by launching “clearance operations” in the following days, leading to escalation of terror and violence in the troubled region till today. It is believed that thousands have lost their lives though the Myanmar authorities claim that 400 lives have been lost. What has captured international attention, both governmental and the media, is the large scale migration of the Rohingya Muslims out of the country. According to UN High Commissioner for Refugees, over 370,000 Rohingya children, women and men have been forced to flee to Bangladesh escaping violence in Myanmar since August 2017.
Clashes between the ethnic Rohingya militants and the Myanmar police have erupted periodically since the late 1970s compelling hundreds of thousands of Muslim Rohingyas to flee their homes in the predominantly Buddhist country. However, since last October, violence has been witnessed frequently leading to several confrontations between the militants and the police and resulting in several deaths on both sides of the camp. This has led to large scale migration of the Rohingya Muslims to cross the border by land or by sea into Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. Among these countries, Bangladesh has witnessed the highest numbers of Rohingya refugees moving into her territory. According to BBC, more than 300,000 undocumented Rohingyas were estimated to be in Bangladesh before this latest influx. Bangladesh says their presence strains local resources, increases crime and deters tourists in the Cox’s Bazar area. This has led to Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to urge Myanmar to take back these Rohingya Muslims who have fled violence in Rakhine state. Malaysia has also already hosted over 100,000 Rohingya refugees from previous crises, but has agreed to take in even more on humanitarian grounds.
There has been mounting global criticism against Myanmar in handling the Rohingya crisis particularly among several Muslim-majority nations. UN human rights chief Zeid Raad al-Hussein responded to the crisis and described it as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing”. In a statement, the White House urged Myanmar’s troops to “respect the rule of law, stop the violence, and end the displacement of civilians from all communities”. ASEAN itself has been silent on the issue largely because of its members’ commitment to the principle of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs, though Malaysia and Indonesia have urged Myanmar to find amicable solution to the crisis without delay. The Myanmar government and the ASEAN has until now considered the issue as an internal matter. Foreign ministers from the ASEAN met in Yangon late last year to discuss Myanmar’s Rohingya crisis amidst reports of brutal killings, rapes and the torching of Rohingya homes in the northern Rakhine state by Myanmar’s army. The meeting failed to offer a pragmatic solution to the crisis.
The United Nations Security Council also held an emergency meeting on the Rohingya crisis on the 13th of September. The meeting condemned the violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state and called for immediate steps to end the violence. Britain’s U.N. Ambassador Matthew Rycroft said “the press statement Wednesday following closed-door consultations was the first statement the U.N.’s most powerful body has made in nine years on the situation in Myanmar.” The UN condemnation is significant in the sense that China and Russia who have been backing Myanmar on the Rohingya issue and longtime Suu Kyi’s friends United States and United Kingdom had unanimously voted for the resolution. This will give added pressure on Myanmar to act and take swift measures to end the violence.
There has been growing pressure on Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, the de facto civilian leader of the country, to act and stop these growing tensions. Her global image and reputation is rapidly disintegrating as she has so far remained silent or failed to take any meaningful steps on the military crackdown on the Rohingya Muslims. She has been so far defending her country’s military attacks in Rakhine and denied that it is ‘ethnic cleansing’ as accused by several states and international organisations. She even said that her government had “already started defending all the people in Rakhine in the best way possible.” Due to this global pressure on her to act fast and even a personal appeal from international figures such as Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, it is very likely that Suu Kyi will break her silence in the days to come. In fact Suu Kyi is in a very calculated state of mind on the Rohingya issue. As Nehginpao Kipgen, Assistant Professor and |Executive Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, OP Jindal Global University, has argued “many around the world tend to ignore or downplay the significance of the Myanmar political system. First, Suu Kyi is prevented from holding the office of the presidency, which is the highest office of the land. Second, her NLD government is in a power-sharing arrangement with the country’s powerful military, which controls, among others, the three most important ministries related to security matters — home, defense and border affairs.” He further argued that “the power-sharing nature of the hybrid system is such that the military can simply choose to ignore or not cooperate with the NLD-led civilian government. The possibility of another military takeover cannot be ruled out in the event there is a real threat to national sovereignty and territorial integrity, regardless of what the constitution says.” The sensitive and complex nature of the political development on the issue has even led her to skip the UN General Assembly to deal with the Rohingya crisis.
What Myanmar should now ensure is to find immediate or short term solutions to end the crisis. State sponsored violence must end; atrocities towards the Rohingyas must be halted and external aid agencies should be allowed to get access to the affected areas on humanitarian grounds. It is likely that the United Nation’s condemnation on the issue may not go down well with the Myanmar government. However, if the crisis continues it has the potential to destabilize the entire region, both South and South East Asia. There are reports that the Rohingya refugees have been recruited by Islamist militants in the neighbouring countries, taking advantage of their vulnerability and helplessness, in a bid to establish bigger foothold in the region. Malaysia’s Defense Minister has even said that “We cannot leave them (the Rohingya) desperate and wanting, because if they are and they turn to these groups, countries in this region would have to pay the price,” Therefore, the sooner the crisis is halted, the better for all concerns. (The author is a scholar at NEHU, Shillong)