The Rohingya Crisis

A Moral, Ethnographic, and Policy Assessment

Norman K. Swazo, Sk. Tawfique M. Haque, Md. Mahbubul Haque, Tasmia Nower

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367341336
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000208122
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides a history of the ethnic persecution of the Rohingyas in Myanmar and their disputed ethnic and national identity. It focuses on how the crisis has morphed into a geopolitical encounter among Bangladesh, China, India, and Myanmar. It further explores the moral, ethnographic, and public policy issues in the humanitarian response to the crisis of the Rohingya people.

The volume analyzes the question of citizenship for the Rohingyas by analyzing historical documents and interviews which chronicle the status and identity of the community and their past involvement in the government and politics of Myanmar. The authors focus specifically on the changing geopolitical context of state formation in South Asia and the tense relationships between Myanmar and its neighbours – Bangladesh, China, and India. The book examines the alliances and disputes in the South and Southeast Asia region, which are predicated on economic and strategic gains, and their impact on the Rohingya crisis. It also looks at the failure of bilateral and multilateral negotiations among these countries to adequately address or alleviate the plight of the stateless Rohingyas.

This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of international studies, peace, human rights and conflict studies, sociology, ethnic studies, border studies, migration and diaspora studies, discrimination and exclusion studies, public policy, and Asian Studies. It will also be useful for professionals working in the media, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), think tanks, and policy makers, as well as general readers interested in the history of the persecution of the Rohingya people.

1 The Rohingya crisis

A moral-philosophical assessment

Norman K. Swazo

It is a lamentable fact that the dire situation of “stateless” refugees has been exacerbated in the current century consequent to armed conflict and religious violence, even as it is clear responses to the refugee crisis internationally have their philosophical impetus in differing conceptions of moral duty, for example, communitarianism and liberalism (Papazoglou, 2019). Alexis Papazoglou describes the difference in conception of political responsibility thus:

communitarianism … sees people’s identities and value as intrinsically linked to their political community, political justice therefore rooted in and confined to that specific community, and liberalism, which recognizes universal human rights, and sees our political responsibilities extending beyond our narrow ethnic or political group to all human beings.

How to respond to the violence refugees experience clearly is grounded in these two conceptions of political responsibility and their associated moral presuppositions. Hence, what is deemed feasibly efficacious political intervention is unclear and, more often than not, relative to the context of the philosophical ground appropriated. Yet, the reality is that whatever the political concepts, the refugee finds himself and herself in a no-man’s land of continuing uncertainty that no citizen ever appreciates fully – especially given the refugees’ manifestations in the faces of desperate women, children, and the elderly. We can be instructed in this situation by political scientist Michael Dillon, who argued before the turn of the century that:

• • The refugee is a scandal for philosophy in that the refugee recalls the radical instability of meaning and the incalculability of the human.
• • The refugee is a scandal for politics also, however, in that the advent of the refugee is always a reproach to the formation of the political order or subjectivity which necessarily gives rise to the refugee.
• • The scandal is intensified for any politics of identity which presupposes that the goal of politics is the realization of sovereign identity.

(Dillon, 1998)

Dillon offers here three propositions troubling for moral philosophers, political scientists, and policy makers who have to consider the practical options that sovereign states face when confronted with a refugee crisis. This is so for contemporary Myanmar, evident in the plight of the self-identifying Rohingya people, over 1 million of whom have fled their former “home” in the northern Rakhine state in the west of Myanmar in 1978, 1991, 1992, 2012, 2017–2018, and continuing into early 2019, only to suffer as stateless refugees in the neighboring country of Bangladesh and elsewhere in South Asia despite international calls for repatriation and guarantees of security of person and property.¹ There is no doubt that the Rohingya are refugees according to the definition given in the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, that is, “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion” (UNHCR, 2010). There is no doubt, further, that they are a stigmatized people within Myanmar. As such, it is important to remember that “[a]lthough stigma is conceptualized as a personal mark or attribute … it is a social product, the fruit of structural conditions and power relationships established in societies” (UNHCR, 2010)² – which is the case for Rohingya both internal and external to Myanmar’s Rakhine state, the locus of ongoing ethnic hostilities. The fact is that the structural conditions and power relationships related to ethnic identity and citizenship in Myanmar produce the stigmatization that officially excludes this ethnic group from the basic rights and fundamental freedoms of recognized citizens. From the perspective of refugee rights, it is troubling that the stigma is inevitably exported as host countries likewise remain unclear as to the moral legitimacy of the Rohingya ethnic identity. Such governmental doubt thereby adds unwittingly to sustained discrimination and diminution of their human dignity and the respect for persons the Rohingya should enjoy irrespective of the “imaginary geography”³ of historically inconstant nation-state borders in South Asia. For the Burmese Buddhist majority, the Rohingya are “Bengalis”, whereas for the Bangladesh government the Rohingya are “Myanmar nationals”, although international law protects refugees from being rendered stateless whether by the country of origin or the host country. The Rohingya are in this case in a particularly ambiguous and precarious situation of loss of political, civil, social, economic, and cultural rights that the international community recognizes as inviolable fundamental human rights (i.e., in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights).

According to estimates, more than 3,000 hectares of land in southeast Bangladesh (Cox’s Bazar) have been converted to temporary shelter and emergency humanitarian modalities for more than 900,000 refugees, creating environmental, disaster preparedness, and management problems for the Bangladesh government and international aid agencies. As of March 2019, some 1.3 million people were targeted for health assistance, including large-scale vaccinations and disease surveillance, with varicella and acute watery diarrhea prominent morbidity concerns.⁴ Of major import in this population displacement is the prospect of the spread of drug-resistant malaria, consequential for both the refugees and the Bangladeshi population in general (ICDDRB, 2018). Such is the pressing humanitarian concern for the Rohingya currently in Bangladesh, consistent with expectations deriving from liberal and universalist principles. But, there is also the linked moral obligation to “future generations” of present refugees, including those born in the camps who may be castigated and refused nationality and citizenship. The Rohingya have no realistic sense of homeland past, present, or future so long as the Government of Myanmar sustains its communitarian perspective, interpreted as being responsive to its own national duty and loyalty to Burma’s traditional Buddhist majority. As in other cases of refugee flight, the Rohingya can all too easily become another group of “forgotten refugees” on the world stage of global migration (one need recall here only the long-standing dispute between Morocco and the Polisario Front over the status of the Western Sahara and the right of the Saharawi people to national liberation) (UNESCO, 2017; Swazo, 2007).

The Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural) of the UN General Assembly, acting on November 16, 2018, approved a draft resolution introduced by Turkey on behalf of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) condemning all rights violations in Myanmar and expressing concern for “the gravest crimes under international law” (UNGA, 2018).⁵ More recently, at its meeting in Abu Dhabi, the OIC adopted a resolution championed by Gambia to involve the International Court of Justice in arbitrating the dispute with a view to settling the question of the legal rights of the Rohingya (OIC Okays Legal Action Against Myanmar, 2019).⁶ Rejecting the resolution of November 2018 as “one-sided, biased, and hopelessly unconstructive”, the Government of Myanmar decried the lack of attention to “the threat of terrorism” with the dubious claim that the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) is linked to ISIL/Da’esh (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). The representative of Bangladesh spoke to the need for Myanmar to guarantee “a pathway to citizenship and land ownership” for the Rohingya. Yet, the fact is that the history of refugees does not bode well for secure repatriation, which poses an ethical dilemma for host countries and international governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as Mollie Gerver has reported (Gerver, 2018a; 2018b).⁷

The Government of Myanmar seeks to justify its security operations as a “counterinsurgency” action, although international observers dispute this to be a mere rationalization for persecution (“by law, by practice, and by policy”) that amounts to ethnic cleansing and genocide (Berkley Forum, 2017).⁸ In a statement issued on May 15, 2018, from the President’s Office of the Government of Myanmar, Myanmar’s UN ambassador was cited for remarks made at the UN Security Council briefing held on May 14, 2018 (President’s Office, 2018). In that statement, Ambassador Hau Do Suan summarized the government’s position on the Myanmar issue. He stated that “no violations of human rights will be condoned” but that the government requires any and all allegations to be “supported by evidence” in contrast to narratives (to warrant investigation and lawful remedy) and supports a “safe, dignified and voluntary return of the displaced persons”, including repatriation “to their villages” in Rakhine state. But, he added, this must be “in accordance with the bilateral agreements” concluded with Bangladesh that assure proper verification procedures (including appropriate government forms, signatures, fingerprints, photographs, and assurance of consent to return, thus documentation to assure they were previously resident in Rakhine state). The mounting evidence, however, is that whatever repatriation is to occur will not be to former villages in Rakhine but instead to Rohingya “camps” segregated from Buddhist nationals, with many Buddhists being allowed relocation to Rakhine state to prevent the return of the Rohingya to their village homes, and that mitigates against any militant Rohingya intention to seek political autonomy in Rakhine (McPherson, Lewis, Aung, Naing, & Siddiqui, 2018).

The ambassador also claimed, “The root cause of the latest crisis and the brutal killings and atrocity committed by the terrorists on innocent ethnic Hindu, Rakhine Buddhists and other minority tribes had been ignored by the western media” in favor of “incessant sensational argument of Muslim victimhood narratives”. Hence, the Government of Myanmar expects that Islamic terrorists “must also be held accountable for atrocities committed against civilian population in Rakhine”. At the same time, government authorities have expressed their motivations, for example, Myanmar’s Minister for Religious Affairs and Culture, Thura Aung Ko, expressing fear of a demographic transition as the Muslim birth rate exceeds that of the current Buddhist majority and thereby threatens the Buddhist-centric political culture of the country (Sumon, 2018).

Accordingly, in his statement of October 24, 2018, before the UN Security Council, Ambassador Suan reiterated that Myanmar “categorically rejects inference of ‘genocidal intent’ on the legitimate counter terrorist actions by the security forces in Rakhine”, especially inasmuch as the allegation of such intent “is made on unverified circumstantial evidences which [have] no sound legal proof” (Government of Myanmar, 2018). As part of the government’s efforts to respond to counterinsurgency, approximately 240,000 Rohingya remain in Rakhine with their movement restricted by military/security forces with some 130,000 located in government “camps” set up in 2012 (Wright & Rivers, 2018). The Rohingya situation is also being com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of photos
• Foreword
• 1 The Rohingya crisis: a moral-philosophical assessment
• 2 The Rohingya crisis and geopolitics: a public policy conundrum
• 3 A future for the Rohingya in Myanmar
• Index